A Neuroscientist's Guide to Managing Our Emotions  🔗 **Source:** [A Neuroscientist's Guide to Managing Our Emotions](https://share.snipd.com/episode/b4b62431-082a-43fe-b140-3e9b6ea834e1) ## Highlights - **Mom Uses Practice Then Distraction To Regain Control** - Louisa, a mother on a plane, used practiced rehearsal to calmly administer an EpiPen when her child went into allergic shock. - Afterward she spiraled with counterfactuals until distracting, immersive activity with her daughter proved emotion-regulating and rebuilt her confidence. Transcript: Ethan Kross Yeah. She's this mom. She's taking a flight home with her young child. They were 35,000 feet. It's a pleasant flight. And all of a sudden she sees her kid begin to stir a little bit. And then she looks down and sees that her kid took a bite of this granola bar. And in the ingredient list, she sees peanuts. And so her child had a pretty severe peanut allergy and immediately begins to go into this allergic shock reaction. Thing she does is reach for her bag. She does what she had practiced in her mind countless times before. She reaches for the EpiPen that she carried with her and jams the EpiPen into her daughter's thigh. And after a few minutes pass, her daughter begins to recover. Everything was fine after that scenario. Her daughter walked off the plane. She felt totally fine. But Louisa did not feel fine because she kept on thinking after this incident about what we call counterfactuals. What might have happened? What if she didn't have the EpiPen? And then she also started projecting herself into the future and finding additional ways to worry about her experience. What if her daughter goes to a birthday party and the parent serves cake that was prepared in a facility that had peanuts? What if her daughter's at school and another kid gives her a taste of a snack that has peanuts in it. And these thoughts begin to really consume her. All true, right? Manoush Zomorodi I mean, those things could happen. Ethan Kross Manoush, our minds are unbelievable hypothesis generating machines. We can generate all sorts of hypotheses. Many of them are actually quite feasible and not outlandish. We are also sophisticated at generating the outlandish variety of possibilities for things that might occur too. But yes, these are all possibilities that begin to consume her. And as a result, she begins to lead a life that is not the kind of life that she wants to lead because she finds herself continually overcome with anxiety. To the point where she begins to question whether she can actually control her emotions at all. Manoush Zomorodi Right. That is the big question. And I think, you know, we assume that some people are more prone to negativity. And if you are a person who's always struggled with that, you think, well, that's just the way it is. This is who I am. But is there research into what we can do or if that can change? Ethan Kross So there was this remarkable study that was performed in Dunedin, New Zealand, back in the early 1970s. It began, and it's actually still going to this day. What happened in this study is the researchers started tracking about a thousand kids right around the time that they were born. And they measured these kids periodically over the course of their lives. Every few years they assessed the kids ability to control themselves which also includes how we control our emotions and they looked at how does a kid's ability to exert control when They're young predict different outcomes later on in life and what they found is that kids who are really good at self-control they progressed further in their careers, they saved More money, they planned more conscientiously for retirement, and they were physically healthier. So one's ability to manage themselves has implications for lots of really important things in our lives. The other thing that we learned from the study that was so interesting was as time progressed, some kids got better at self-control and some kids got worse just quite naturally. And the kids who improved in self-control, their progress on all these different outcomes also improved. The kids whose self-control success went down over time, they started faring more poorly. And so the reason I like to mention that last finding is because what it really demonstrates is that how we manage our emotions is malleable. It can change. If you're not good at it at one point in life, whether you're a child or an adult, that doesn't mean you're destined to always be bad at it. We have the capacity to get better or worse. And that's where I think understanding how self-control works, familiarizing ourselves with the tools that are out there. That's why that's such an incredibly important thing for all of us to do. And so back to Louisa, it wasn't until an experience she had with her daughter that really helped break her out of her funk, she realized that when she was stuck in one of these doom loops, Her daughter came in just rushing into the room, you know, had a problem she wanted to talk to her about. And then they did a behavior together, an activity. And after the activity was over, Louisa realized that she wasn't stressed anymore. And so she had the epiphany there that if she distracts herself by engaging in something that is really immersive and a positive experience, that turned the volume down on the intensity Of her anxiety. And that ended up really renewing this belief that she had that she actually could manage her emotions. ([Time 0:07:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8e910c21-dab1-44e9-9c6a-789819bd0e50)) - **Use Your Name To Talk Yourself Into Perspective** - Distanced self-talk (using your name or 'you') reduces negative emotion quickly and with low effort. - Neuroimaging shows amplitude of emotional responses falls within seconds without extra regulatory effort when people use this tactic. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi One of those tools, he says, is language. In particular, the way we speak to ourselves. One person who's very good at this, he says, is Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. Here's Ethan Cross on the TED stage. Ethan Kross Right before Malala Yousafzai became the youngest person to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize for advocating for the rights of young girls to receive an education, she was invited onto The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to talk about her experience. At one point during the interview, she begins to explain what went through her when she first discovered that the Taliban were plotting to kill her. Manoush Zomorodi And I used to think that the Taliban would come and he would just kill me. Ethan Kross She's talking to herself in the first person the way we typically think about our lives. But the moment she gets to this part of the experience, right, the Taliban, they're on my doorstep. Once she gets to that part, she does something kind of strange. Manoush Zomorodi But then I said, if he comes, what would you do, Malala? Then I would reply myself that, Malala, just take a shoe and hit him. But then I said, if you hit a Taliban with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Taliban. You must not treat others that much with cruelty and that much harshly. You must fight others but through peace and through dialogue. Ethan Kross So she starts off in the first person, but then she switches. She's coaching herself. She's giving herself advice like she would someone else, using her name and the word you. In this instance, what Malala is doing, she's using a tool that we have studied. It is called distanced self-talk. And it is useful because we human beings are much, much better at giving advice to other people than we are taking our own advice. There's even a name for this phenomenon. It's called Solomon's Paradox, named after the Bible's King Solomon, who was famous for being able to give great advice to other people. But when it came to his own affairs, he stumbled mightily. Using your own name and you shifts your perspective. It gets you to relate to yourself like you were giving advice to someone else. And that makes it much, much easier for us to wisely work through our problems. Manoush Zomorodi It's funny, though, because, like, I was talking to my producer, Rachel, about this, and she said that she often refers to herself in her head as young lady when she really needs a talking To. Young lady, get it together. And you actually did a study that showed that people who did this referred to themselves with this distance self-talked. They experienced less negative emotion within seconds of doing that. And she said, well, that makes sense. It really works for me. Yeah. Ethan Kross The reason this is one of the first tools that I use is it's a remarkably simple tool. We've done some neuroimaging studies to demonstrate that when you tell people to use this tool in the context of an experiment, you see reductions in the amplitude of their emotional Responses that occur within seconds. And you don't see any concomitant increase in signs that people are really exerting a lot of effort to rein their emotions in. And that's noteworthy because oftentimes the tools we use to manage our emotions do feel really effortful. And I should say there's nothing wrong with that. Effortful things can be really good for us as anyone who ever goes to the gym knows. Like sometimes physical exercise takes a lot of effort to see gains. Some of the tools that are out there require more effort than others. What I like about the low effort tools is the easier something is to do, the more likely one is to do it. And that's because we're all lazy to some degree. And yeah, that's all of us. That's human beings. We're always trying to conserve our resources. So you know, the low effort stuff is often my first line of defense. ([Time 0:15:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/577a957a-e2c5-4df1-88cf-c7790114adef)) - **Use Sensory Triggers Like Music And Awe Strategically** - Use the senses deliberately—music, scent, touch, vision—to shift emotions because they're low-effort and powerful. - Kross keeps playlists that reliably lift or calm him and cites studies linking awe experiences to PTSD reductions. Transcript: Ethan Kross Yeah. So I find the senses as a tool for shifting our emotions, both really powerful and just super interesting, right? Like sight, sound, touch, smell. We've had those experiences since before we were born. Touch develops in the womb. Think about what is the first thing we do with babies that are born into this world screaming their head off. We engage in skin-to contact to soothe them. And yet, I think we often overlook the potential of the senses to help us manage our emotions when we're struggling. And maybe I'll start with the personal experience, actually. I've been listening to music my entire life, and it has always been a fundamentally emotional experience. And yet, if you ever asked me, like, when I was struggling with a problem, anxious or angry or sad or needed to be lifted up, did I strategically put on music to shift my emotions? No, the answer would be to that question. This is true of people more generally. So if you ask people in the context of studies, why do you listen to music? Close to 100% will report they like the way it makes them feel. If you then do studies where you ask people, hey, the last time you were anxious or angry or sad, what did you do? Between only 10% 30% report using music to shift their emotions. And so that's just an example of low, low hanging fruit for pushing our emotions around. And now that I know how this works, on my phone, I have a playlist. It has songs in that playlist that consistently shift my emotions, my positive or negative emotions, up or down. And I use it when I need to. And music and sound is just one example. Scent is another. You know, think about perfumes and cologne. Think about the sense that hotels pipe through their ventilation system to make you feel a particular way. Vision, think about art, think about beauty. These are all shifters. And if you think about them with that lens on, it gives you the possibility to start incorporating them into your lives more strategically. ([Time 0:20:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/29d01287-9148-448f-8852-ce1f63c0a9c0)) - **Self‑Experiment With A Three To Four Tool Combo** - Build a personal toolbox and experiment with combinations of 3–4 emotion-regulation strategies each day. - In a COVID study people who layered multiple tools (music, nature, journaling, touch, etc.) saw day-to-day anxiety declines, but combinations varied by person. Transcript: Ethan Kross So in short, what we did is we ran these studies during the COVID pandemic. And the question we were interested in was really simple. Lots of research up until this point, or up until relatively recently, has looked at how individual tools work. What we've begun to do as a field more recently is begun to look at how different kinds of tools work together. And so what we wanted to do in this study is we wanted to see what, if anything, were people doing each day to manage their COVID anxiety? And importantly, did any of the tools that they used actually move the needle on their anxiety from one day to the next? So did it make a difference? And so we tracked people for several days, a couple of weeks, and each day we gave them a checklist at the end of the day, Which of the following, I believe it was 18 tools did you use to manage Your COVID anxiety? And we had them rate how anxious they felt each day. Manoush Zomorodi So let's go through. We are Swiss Army Knives. What are these tools? That's a big toolbox. Ethan Kross Yeah. So we asked about talking to other people and going out in nature, journaling, positively reinterpreting things, thinking about that this won't last forever. We looked at some harmful tools too, like substance abuse. We asked people whether they were suppressing their emotions. We looked at whether people exercised, spend time outside, whether they interacted with someone, sought out physical touch and comfort from another person. So we looked at a very broad collection of strategies, and the strategies also varied in terms of how, quote-unquote, healthy or unhealthy they were, according to a group of experts In this area. Now, what we found that was really interesting was, number one, most people used multiple tools each day to manage their emotions between three and four. Number two, and this is really the finding that hits home for me, there were many combinations of tools that made a real difference in terms of how anxious people felt. When people used these three or four tools, they ended up experiencing a decline in their anxiety from one moment to the next. But there was tremendous variability in terms of the combinations of tools that worked for different people. The way I like to think about this is that it's not unlike going to the gym and exercising. We all have our unique ways of physically exercising to meet our health goals. And what I take away from this study is that the same is true for people who participate in our studies. Each person had their own unique way of managing their COVID anxiety. There are no one size fits all solutions when it comes to managing our emotional lives. I wish I could tell a person who comes to me with a particular problem what three or five or seven tools they should specifically use to manage that problem. I cannot make that type of prescription. What we can do in the absence of that data is give people individual tools, invite them to learn about what these tools are, and then encourage them to start self-experimenting with Those tools. Try a tool out. If it works for you, great. Keep using it. Layer on another one. See if a combination helps. If it doesn't work for you, move on to something else. ([Time 0:24:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/40cc1cd0-0c8e-4df5-a5d3-7da282d349c1)) - **Audit Your Emotional Advisory Board** - Create an emotional advisory board by listing who you talk to about personal and work problems, then circle those who both empathize and help broaden your perspective. - Remove (or don't rely on) advisors who only let you vent and don't help problem-solve. Transcript: Ethan Kross Let's do it. We're going to do an emotional advisor audit, and we're going to do this exercise to help you build your emotional advisory board, which I think is a critically important asset in all Of our lives. So here's how it goes. I'd love for you and everyone who's listening to take out a piece of paper and draw a table with two columns. Manoush Zomorodi All right, I'm doing it now. Ethan Kross I want you to label the first column personal stuff, use a technical term, and the other column work or school stuff, problems. Then what I want you to do is I want you to take a minute to list all the names of people that you go to to talk about the problems you experience in those two important domains of your life. Now, some of you may have the same names in both columns. So you talk to the same people about problems, regardless of where they come from. Others may have totally different names in each column. Still others may have no names. There is no right or wrong way to complete this exercise. Okay, so now what I want you to do is I want you to circle the names of the people who do two things for you when you come to them with a problem. First, they let you express your emotions. They listen. They empathize with you. They validate what you're going through. They normalize it. But then after they do that, they start working with you to broaden your perspective. They help you work it through. They help you problem solve. They help you reach closure. Circle the names of the people who do both of those things in that order. Speaker 3 Okay. Ethan Kross So do you have any names on your list that you did not circle? Manoush Zomorodi Yes. Okay. Ethan Kross Get out your thickest red Sharpie and make a, you know, cathartically put an X through their names. And what I mean by that is they're not on your advisory board. This doesn't mean you need to sever your connections with these people. There are many people in my life who I'm exceptionally close to. I don't talk to them about the problems I experienced in those domains. I talk to them about lots of other things, but they don't help me work through my problems. They don't follow those two steps and that's totally fine. And improvement is absolutely possible. I am an example of that. Prior to me knowing about how this all worked, prior to me knowing about the science, I remember distinctly when people would come to me with really big problems, like they'd lose a loved One or something really bad would happen at work. And they'd call to talk to me or they'd come over and I just wouldn't know what to say. Intuitively, I would try to empathize. I'm so sorry. Oh, it sounds terrible. I can understand. But beyond that, I had no compass to steer the conversation. What the science does here is it gives me a compass to steer those conversations that I have with people who come to me for support. And it also helps me identify who I should talk to. ([Time 0:29:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d46aa8e9-86a6-42b0-8cbf-f56eec3f73b3)) - **Inner Voice Is A Superpower And A Saboteur** - Our inner voice is a superpower that lets us rehearse, plan, and make sense of life, but it also jams into chatter that impairs thinking. - We spend one‑third to one‑half of waking hours mind-wandering and engaging that inner voice, which can create rumination loops. Transcript: Ethan Kross Key to managing one's emotions effectively involves understanding how to harness this mysterious force called the voices inside our head. Here's a scientific fact that I absolutely love. We spend between one half and one third of our waking hours not focused on the present. Between one half and one third of the time, our minds, they are drifting away. We are thinking about other things. Some of you are doing that right now. Please stop. Once we find ourselves drifting away, one of the things that we're doing is talking to ourselves and listening to what we say. Now, when scientists like myself use the term inner voice, what we're talking about is our ability to silently use language to reflect on our lives. And it turns out this is one of your superpowers. Because your inner voice lets you keep information active in your head for short periods of time, like when you go to the grocery store. And if you're like me, 15 seconds into the expedition, you forget what you're supposed to buy. You repeat that list in your head. Apples, cheese, Pepto-Bismol, TMI. We also use our inner voice to simulate and plan, like when we silently rehearse what we're going to say before an important presentation or an interview. Perhaps most magically, we use our inner voice to make sense of this messy world that we often live in. When we experience challenges, we turn our attention inward. We try to work through them. And our inner voice helps us create those stories that shape our sense of self, stories that really craft our identity. So your inner voice, this is a remarkable tool. The problem is it is a tool that often jams up on us when we need it most. We don't come up with clear solutions to our problems. We get stuck in negative thought loops instead. We worry. We ruminate. We experience what I call the dark side of our inner voice, chatter. How do you know if you're experiencing chatter? If you ever find yourself trying to work through a problem but not making any progress, or if you find yourself berating yourself incessantly, I'm an idiot, such an idiot. Those are two telltale signs. One thing that chatter does, it makes it really hard for us to think and perform. ([Time 0:38:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6f17311b-2be8-4fb5-82f7-9a2776973352)) - **Avoid Forced Reframing When You're In A Worry Loop** - Don't force positive reappraisal when worry makes it effortful; it can backfire and increase distress. - EEG studies showed high worriers expend more effort and often feel worse attempting to reframe negative images. Transcript: Ethan Kross We did do a study on this. And what we wanted to do was we wanted to understand do people who tend to really struggle with reframing things, i.e. People who are worrying, what's really going on when they're trying to reframe things. And what we did is we brought in a group of women and we profiled them on the degree to which they tended to dispositionally worry about things. And during the actual procedure, we put on essentially this skull cap that had electrodes hooked up to it. It's an EEG cap, electroencephalogram, and it's a technique that we used. If you really want to geek out with me here, we use this technique called event-related potentials. And what it allows us to do is see just how quickly different types of psychological processes or experiences, like becoming emotional or exerting effort, this technique allows us To see how quickly those different processes activate in your brain. And so in the study, we presented these participants with images that were selected to arouse a negative emotional response. And we gave the participants the instruction to try to positively reframe these experiences, find the silver lining, if you will. And so what we found in the study, which was really, really interesting, was that the more prone participants were to worrying, number one, the more effortful it was to try to positively Reframe what they were seeing. But then number two, in many cases, it often backfired. The attempts to reframe actually weren't successful. So they actually start feeling worse when they're trying to do this. ([Time 0:40:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b685d1ff-4c5e-4677-b44a-92f33289b163)) - **Flexible Avoidance Can Be A Healthy Strategy** - Flexible toggling between approach and avoidance can be adaptive; you don't have to always confront or always suppress traumatic memories. - Kross's grandmother avoided revisiting Holocaust trauma most of the year but processed it intensely on remembrance days, which worked for her. Transcript: Ethan Kross Right. We tend to talk about avoidance as a universal harm. It's toxic. It's true that chronically avoiding things is linked with negative outcomes across the board. But what's often lost when we talk about avoidance as toxic and approach as useful, and by approach I mean confronting our negative experiences to work through them, is that you don't Actually have to choose between those two states. You can actually go back and forth flexibly between them. You can approach things for a while, take some time off, avoid them, and then come back. And lots of research demonstrate that that can often be really useful for people. This was true of my grandmother. So my grandmother had this really extraordinary set of circumstances befall her. She's growing up in Eastern Europe, in Poland, around the time of World War II. She, in many ways, has an idyllic childhood. Then the Nazis come in. She witnesses her family be slaughtered for the most part. She flees and goes from ghetto to ghetto, living in the woods with partisans, freezing woods. She's almost killed several times over. She ultimately makes it out. And when she gets to the States with nothing, she and my grandfather begin a new life and they ultimately thrive. And they have kids and their kids have kids. And I was one of them. And I spent almost every day after school in elementary school at my grandmother's. She was watching me while my parents worked. And I remember constantly asking her to tell me about her experience, but she would never do it. She would talk to me about lots of other things, and she was an exceptionally expressive and warm grandmother, but she didn't like to revisit those traumatic times, understandably, Except for one day a year when there'd be this remembrance day that she and some of her fellow survivors organized where I'd go to this synagogue and for a full day I'd listen to all of the People who survived the war, including my grandmother and grandfather, in tears. They would scream and cry as they recounted the atrocities. And what I didn't realize at the time was she would dose thinking about her experiences during the Holocaust. And that was a strategy that really worked well for her. It wasn't that she would chronically avoid it. She would deliberately not think about it for long stretches of time. But then during the Remembrance Day event, she'd allow herself to really get in there. If she happened to see another survivor, they would talk about it. And that ability to be flexible is a skill that works for some people. There are no, again, one size fits all solutions. And this is true for dealing with trauma and grieving as well. There are different trajectories and different kinds of tools that people can benefit from. This lesson that we learned from my grandmother is not just relevant to dealing with the extraordinarily disturbing circumstances that befall some of us during our lives. It's also relevant to the more minor blips that we sometimes encounter. I was raised to always approach my emotions. The moment something happens, you should deal with it right then and there. What I've since learned based on the data that I've encountered, but also just experiences I've had, is that sometimes forcing myself to take some time away from a problem, whether It be a few hours or days, and then coming back to that problem with some more psychological distance, if you will, can be quite useful. Because when I come back to the problem later on, the intensity is often diminished, and I can often view it in a different light. That is a case of being strategic with how I divert my attention. It's being strategic with avoidance, if you will. So the real take-home lesson here for me is you don't have to choose between approaching and avoiding. ([Time 0:46:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/19ed57ba-3657-43d0-9321-64eeac442604)) - **We Replaced Brutal Procedures With Practical Tools** - Humanity's historical emotion interventions ranged from trepanation to lobotomy, highlighting how crude past methods were. - Modern science offers far better, noninvasive tools for emotion regulation that we need to learn and share more widely. Transcript: Ethan Kross And every time I do, it fills me with both dread and I find it inspiring. Between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago, our ancestors invented the first surgical technique. Its name was trepanation, and what it involved doing was drilling holes in people's skulls. One of the reasons why this technique was believed to be used was to help people manage their emotions. Big, dysregulated emotional responses. Let the evil spirits out. Fast forward to 1949. A Portuguese physician wins the Nobel Prize for another emotion regulation intervention. This one's name, the frontal lobotomy. We have come a long way, thankfully, from carving holes in people's heads and sticking ice picks in our frontal cortices to provide people with emotional relief. Our toolbox of science-based skills is vastly improved. What we need to do a better job doing is using these tools in our lives and sharing them with other people. ([Time 0:51:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/651e33fe-8d46-4e2b-9a10-0eafbc6f44ed))