March 3, 2025 • 33 mins
Psychologist Ethan Kross wants us to stop thinking about our emotions as either good or bad. Emotions carry valuable information, he says, and they are signals that can help us change our behavior. As an expert in the science of emotions, Ethan shares strategies we can use to reign in our negative emotions when they become more harmful than helpful. And he debunks a popular myth that the only healthy way to move past your negative emotions is to persistently engage with them.
Sign up for Maya’s newsletter here.
Listen to our first conversation with Ethan Kross: The Science of Our Inner Voice.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin hay Slight Changers Maya. Here an exciting update before
we begin. I've just launched a newsletter and the first
edition is out today. You can sign up using the
link in the show notes. I'm really looking forward to
having another place to connect with you all. I'll be
(00:36):
sharing personal updates, links to what I'm reading or watching lately,
exciting new science about change, and my top takeaways, and
some behind the scenes from my conversations on the show.
The newsletter is totally free, and I'd love it if
you can sign up. I also want to know what
kind of content you're craving so I can integrate these
ideas into my future posts. Feel free to leave a
(00:59):
comment underneath the first one. Okay, I hope you enjoyed
the episode.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Emotions are tools that are useful, all of them, even
the negative ones. So many of us, I think, strive
to live lives free of all negative emotion. I think
this is both impossible and also undesirable.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Ethan Cross is a professor of psychology at the University
of Michigan. He says we shouldn't see emotions as good
or bad. They're valuable signals, but when they become too
intense and start to take over our lives. We can
learn to turn down the volume.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
I think it's so easy for us to look at
someone as a kid or an adult and say things like, oh,
you're terrible at self control, you have no self control.
But evidence suggests that this is malleable. This can change.
If you're not good at managing your emotions, now you
can actually get better.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
On today's show, how to Escape an Emotional Spiral, I'm
Maya Schunker, a scientist who studies human behavior, and this
is a slight change of plans, a show about who
we are and who we become in the face of
a big change. Last time Ethan was on the show,
(02:38):
we talked about our inner voice and how to manage
it when it gets a bit too critical. Today, he
joins me for an in depth conversation about our emotions.
Ethan says, emotions are information. We may not like feeling envy,
but it can push us to work harder or signal
to us what we really want in life. Sadness can
(02:59):
slow us down and invite support from others. Regret can
help us learn from our mistakes. All of these emotions
are useful, but sometimes the emotions can overwhelm. Us Ethan's
new book is a guide for managing that overwhelm. It's
called Shift, Managing your emotions so they don't manage you.
(03:20):
He explores what we can do when emotions become more
harmful than helpful. We started off our conversation by talking
about how we can learn to tell the difference.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
When your emotions are interfering with your ability to live
the life you want to live. Right, they're getting in
the way of you achieving your goals rather than actually
helping you achieve your goals. That's an indication that some
regulation is needed. Let's be concrete about this. So when
(03:51):
anxiety is getting me to work hard on something that
is coming up, and then like actually putting in the work,
my anxiety goes down, that's anxiety working really well. Anxiety
not working well is when the anxiety is so high
that I can't actually even sit down to get the
work done, or even when I do start doing the
(04:12):
work to prepare, the anxiety sticks with me in ways
that are interfering with my sleep and putting me on edge.
That's a kind of miscalibration. The emotional response is out
of sync with the situation.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
That I'm in Yeah, I'm thinking of another example, which is,
you know, when we feel just indignation at injustice for example, right,
we might ask ourselves, is that indignation and anger motivating
us to do something about it? Or are we feeling
so oppressed by that negativity that we are we're stuck
in bed right, like we're unable to act. So that's
(04:46):
another context where that would be relevant.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
It's a perfect example.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Well, the good news is that in those instances where
our emotions are overwhelming us, when they're counterproductive, when they're
eroding our well being, we do have this ability for regulation.
So let's start with what you mean by emotion regulation.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
So emotion regulation quite simply is the capacity to turn
the volume up or down on the emotions we're experiencing,
lengthen or shorten their duration, and in some cases, switch
from one emotional response to an entirely different one. I
use the term that you know, the title of my
book is shift. It's about shifting up or down, long
(05:29):
or shorter, or to a different response altogether. And I
find it kind of beautiful that on the one hand,
we evolve to experience all of these different emotions, but
also this remarkable set of capabilities to rain them in.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
So what is the research show, I mean, other than
like intuitively feeling like it would be a very good
thing to better regulate our emotions, what does the research
show about the well being outcomes associated with better emotion regulation?
Speaker 3 (05:59):
So you have goals?
Speaker 2 (06:01):
What are your goals in life? Are they to think
and perform well, to have good relationships, to be healthy.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
If you can.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Manage your emotions, they're going to help you achieve all
of those goals. And that's what the research supports. So
people who are better at managing their emotions, they tend
to do better at school. They can delay gratification longer,
which is often important when you're studying for things.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
They have improved.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Relationships with other people because they can manage their emotions,
which are often triggered by others, more effectively, and so
they don't end up having as much friction in their relationships.
So really, this is a kind of master aptitude that
should benefit people across the board.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
There's this one study that you reference in your book
Ethan from the nineteen seventies, and I'm wondering if you
can talk about it a bit. It looked at emotion
regulation in people over a long period of time.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
So basically a cohort of newborns were followed over the
course of their lives and every few years with their
ability to manage their emotions. Their self control capacity was
assess by putting them through a series of tasks and
having other people rap their capacity. And then the researchers
(07:15):
patiently waited and just every few years they kept on
checking in on this group of participants to see how
they were doing across the board, from their health to
their achievement levels at school.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
And in life.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
And what they found that was notable were a couple
of things. Number One, the ability to manage one's emotions
early on in life predicted a lot about how the
kids fared once they got older.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
So kids who were adept at.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Managing their emotions earlier on they advanced further in their careers.
They saved more money, they planned more for retirement, they
were physically healthier, and perhaps for me most mind blowingly, yes,
that is a phrase. They're like. Brain scans showed that
their brains and other full body scans and their organs
(08:06):
actually aged more slowly, so across the board, this capacity
to manage one's emotions is predicting really positive outcomes.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Later on in life.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
But the other really important finding in that study was
that it wasn't the case that if you were a
young kid and you were bad at self control, you
were consistently bad at And the reason I love that
finding is because I think it's so easy for us
to look at someone as a kid or an adult
and say things like, oh, you're terrible at self control,
(08:39):
you have no self control? Oh, absolutely right, and we
make these blanket judgments about how people fare. But what
the finding suggests, along with a slew of other evidence,
is that this is malleable. This can change. If you're
not good at managing your emotions, now you can actually
get better. How do you get better, I would argue
(09:00):
it's by familiarizing yourself with the tools that are out
there and then start practicing them in your lives.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
It's such a hopeful message embedded in this study, right,
which is that for those who struggle with emotion regulation,
or for those parents who see their kids struggling with
emotion regulation, there's hope for us all. So that's very exciting.
There is this notion out there and is quite prevalent
that it is very important, actually crucial for us to
(09:28):
quote feel our feelings right, to sit in them and
marinate in them, and if we avoid them, we're actually
doing a disservice because those negative emotions will rear their
ugly head in the future with even more forcefulness, like
with the vengeance. Right for the sake of everyone listening,
please please please tell us what the science says.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Well, there's this widespread assumption, and I bought into this
hook line and sinker for a very long time that
when you're experiencing something bad, you should just deal with
it right then and there, approach it, work through your feelings.
That was a message that was taught to me growing
up in my family. That was a common message that
(10:09):
was delivered. And then when I got to grad school,
there's lots of research which showed that chronically avoiding things
is bad. And the research on chronic avoidance is rock solid.
So if your coping tactic is to across the board,
just avoid thinking about any kind of negative thing that
happens to you and just distract endlessly and sometimes even
(10:31):
do it with illicit substances or other unhealthy behaviors. That
doesn't predict good things. But what is missing from the
way we often talk about this concept of avoidance is
you don't have to pick between only approaching or only avoiding.
You can actually be flexible and strategic and shift back
(10:53):
and forth with whether you focus on something that's bothering
you and whether you take some time away. And it
turns out research shows that being flexible in that manner
can be very helpful. So sometimes strategically avoiding a problem
for a certain period of time can be useful. And
I'll give you a couple of examples of how that
might work. So, first of all, sometimes when we get
(11:16):
triggered by an emotion, it feels so amazingly big and
we just want to dive in. But if we take
some time away from it and then you come back
to the problem several hours later or even a day later,
time has taken the steam out of the emotional response.
And this is a well known finding that as time
goes on, the intensity of our emotions fade. That's true
(11:37):
of most of our emotional responses. They get triggered, they
jack up in their intensity, and then as time goes on,
the intensity goes down. So if you take some time
away by avoiding strategically and then return you're coming back
to the problem and it's not as intense and it's
a lot easier to work with as a result. One
of my favorite studies that demonstrates how being strategic in
(12:01):
this way, being able to both approach and avoid emotions
can be useful, was done by a psychologist named George
Bonano who who was working at Teachers College at Columbia
right around the time that the nine to eleven attacks occurred.
And what he did is, in the immediate aftermath of
those attacks, he was really curious about what are the
(12:22):
factors that allow people to be resilient in the face
of a collective tragedy. And so what he did is
he brought participants into the lab who were living in
New York City, and he had them engage in a
task where on some trials they were explicitly told to
express their emotions powerfully, so really immerse yourself in them
(12:43):
in a certain sense and just show them to someone else.
And on other trials they were told to suppress their emotions,
so really conceal these things, try to push them away
to the point that no one else can even see
that you're experiencing these things, and then he tracked those
participants over time to see how they fared emotionally. And
what he found is that the participants who fared best,
(13:06):
the participants who showed the most resilience in the face
of the attacks, where the participants who were able to
both express their emotions when they were asked to do
so and suppress their emotions when they were asked to
do so. So it was being really good at both
of these skills that predicted the most success.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Yeah, and one of the things I've read in Banano's
research is he says, you know, it's not strictly necessary
for every person to have to quote work through their grief.
For example. Right, there are studies showing that those who
show more positive emotions following a traumatic experience actually show
better long term outcomes. And I like this research overall
(13:48):
because there's this broader lesson that emerges from it, which
is there is no one size fits all approach to
emotional well being or to processing difficult situations. And I
do feel like there is so much judgment of ourselves
and of others in terms of how they process challenging events. Right.
(14:08):
I've I've been in situations where someone did seem very avoidant,
and it was like you're a little alarmed. You're like,
oh no, what's going to happen. This is going to
be terrible. They actually turned out fine.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
I cannot reinforce enough the message that you just articulated, Maya,
there are no one sized solutions when it comes to
managing your emotional lives. Forget avoidance. Let's take something even
more innocuous. Let's take like mindfulness or meditation. Lots of
people advocate that as a solution as a panacea to
our emotional distress, and it helps tons of people. And
(14:42):
if that's you, great, keep meditating, be mindful. This is fantastic.
But I've also come across lots of people who say
this doesn't work for me, and they actually feel bad, like, well,
what's wrong with me that this isn't helping me. There's
nothing wrong with you again, there's everything right with you.
You're a human being. There are reasons we don't quite
(15:03):
understand yet why some people acclimate to some tools more
than others.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Yeah, no, I really this is very freeing. We're so
often met by prescriptions around you know, how to do
grief the right way, or how to process anger. The
right way. And I love what you said about mindfulness
and meditation. Like I've spent a total of ten minutes
during my time on planet Earth meditating and like that
(15:29):
is my max. Like I don't think I'll ever be
able to do it or commit to it. It just
doesn't work for me. A quick walk outside has always
been a better antidote, you know, for whatever distress I'm feeling.
So I think that's a wonderful message.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
We did this these two large studies.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
This is research that just came out where we track
people during the COVID nineteen pandemic, and each day we
measured people's COVID anxiety and we also asked them which
of eighteen different tools did you use to manage your emotions?
And some of them were healthy tools and others were
less healthy, like alcohol usage, things like that. What we
(16:06):
found was Number One, on average, people use between three
and four tools each day to manage your emotion, so
it was seldom the case that people just did one thing.
Number Two, there was remarkable diversity in the combinations of
tools that people.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
Used to manage their circumstances.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
When I say remarkable, that is an understatement. We were
floored there are no one size fits all solutions when
it comes to managing your emotional life. Just embrace that,
and I think you'll naturally look for the tools and
combinations of tools that work best for you.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
After the break, Ethan shares some of these tools and
explains why your favorite perfume might be one of them.
We'll be back in a moment with a slight change
of plans. We've been talking about how there's no one
(17:11):
size fits all approach, but there are tools that we
can be experimental with, right that everyone who's listening can
try out and see how well they work in any
given context. So let's start by digging into some techniques
that we can use to strategically shift our attention away
from our negative emotions. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
So, I think it's helpful to have a few different
categories of tools so that you can know on the
fly where to look when you're struggling with an emotion
and want to ring them in.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
And so in the book, I.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Provide three categories of tools that are things you can
do on your own inside you. Those are internal shifters,
and then there are things outside of us that I
call external shifters. For internal shifters, one category, or what
I call sensory shifters. Our senses are remarkably efficient tools
for pushing our emotions around.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
And we all know.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
This intuitively because we've experienced some triggered in response to
sensory experiences throughout our lives. But we often fail to
activate these sensory shifters strategically when we need them. So
let me zoom in on one of my favorite sensory shifters.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Music.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
In one study, participants were asked, why do you listen
to music? Almost everyone in the study ninety six or
ninety seven percent of participants. So, I like to listen
to music because I like the way it makes me feel.
It's an emotional experience. But then, we've done studies where
we ask people to think about the last time they
were angry, anxious, or sad, and you said, what did
(18:45):
you do when you had those emotions and you tried
to rain them in? Only between ten and thirty percent
of participants report going to music to push their emotions
in a particular direction.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
You mean being proactive about it, proactive and strategic, and like,
I've listened to music my entire life.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
MC hammer, you can't touch this. This is like my
first cassette followed by Madonna The Immacuate Collection. Let the
judgment of my music tastes begin now.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
I was just going to say, I'm really enjoying this.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Yes, yes, it gets worse, Yeah, don't worry. But I've
loved music. I've listened to it throughout my life. And
yet have I been strategic about putting on certain songs
to push my emotions in different directions when I've struggled
with things Until recently, The answer to that question is no.
But now that I'm aware of this, it's on my radar,
(19:34):
I'm incredibly strategic about it. I have a playlist designed
to amplify emotional responses like get me revved up when
I want to feel that way. I also have songs
that I go to that calm me down and take
the edge off. Music is such a powerful to One
more example of this is sent We are spritsing ourselves
(19:55):
with these chemicals to manipulate the way other people feel
about us and the way we feel about ourselves all
the time. I was just in an airport yesterday, I
was traveling internationally, and I walk through the duty free shop.
That's not a duty free shop. That's an emotion regulation store. Right,
there's like perfumes and colognes all over the place. Why
(20:16):
are we wearing those? Why is it that some hotels,
when you walk in there, they smell so unbelievably good
you never want to leave. It's because they are harnessing
what we know about senses and emotion regulation. They're piping
certain sense through their ventilation system to make the place
(20:38):
smell great. So once you're aware of this stuff, now
you've got access to tools to push your emotions around
right in the heat of the moment, and they work really,
really fast.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
I also love music, and it's occurring to me in
this moment that I too, have never strategically turned music
on to shift my emotions. What are your thoughts on
finding music that is congruent with our emotional state versus
music that's incongruate. So if I'm feeling like, really really sad,
don't I just want to play adele.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Yeah, commiseration and someone understands me. And so whether that's
good or bad depends on your goals. So if we
stick with sadness, I'm a proponent of the idea that
sadness is functional in the right dosage. Right, my worldview
is challenged. I can't really fix what's going on. I
just lost my job or I just lost someone I love.
(21:32):
I've got to now reframe how I think about myself
in this world so I can get back out there
and persevere. And so sadness helps me do that hard
cognitive work. And if the music is going to facilitate that,
keep that emotion active to help me do that rethinking
and reframing, that could well be a good thing. Here's
(21:54):
where that becomes a problem. If you're feeling sad and
you don't want to feel sad anymore, but you find
yourself listening to the music, then the music is going
to be counter to your goals. And that's where you
want to resist the temptation to go to Adele and
if it's me, you go to Journey insteads although it
depends on the Journey song.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
But right, right, do you mind talking a bit about
the neuroscience behind the senses and why this is such
a powerful tool for us to leverage.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Yeah, So your sensory apparatus is linked to your capacity
to experience emotions in the brain. In some cases the
networks are overlapping actually, and What that means for our
everyday lives is different sensory experiences can trigger emotions automatically.
(22:46):
They can trigger those emotional experiences super super fast. The
reason why that's so important is sometimes emotion regulation feels
like it's really really hard to do, and it sometimes
is hard to do. When we try to, for example,
reframe how we're thinking about things. Sometimes that can be challenging,
like take a lot of effort. Sure, the sensory ways
(23:09):
of pushing our emotions around don't have the same effortfulness.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
There.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
In fact, effort list to some degree, and that's in
part where their power resides.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
It's so funny that you talk about the sensory stuff,
though I don't know if you know this. So during
my postdoc and cognitive neuroscience, we actually we took an
old factometer, which is this machine that delivers sense to people,
and we installed it in the fMRI machine, so into
the brain scanner, and as people lay there and we're
faced with decisions and expressions of risk preferences and whatnot,
(23:41):
we fed them different sense, right, like calming sense and
nostalgic sense and comfy cozy sense like cookies or whatever.
And we looked at how that sensory information affected, often
outside of awareness, right, their willingness to take risks, or
their willingness to delay rewards and things like that. So anyway,
this is such a fascinating topic.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
I think we just don't appreciate it enough. I mean,
and there are simple things you could do, think in sense.
I mean, it's just once you are alert to this
link between sensory experience and emotions, it will change the
way you view the world. Like awareness of this gives
you agency to push it around.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
So we talked about one internal shifter, right, which is
our senses. Any other internal shifters that we should keep
in mind.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Attention is another one. And this is what attention refers to.
Is you've got this spotlight in your mind. It's where
are you focusing it. Sometimes you want to focus on
the thing that's bugging you because you want to work
through it. Sometimes you want to point it elsewhere, you
want to get a break. You have a distraction, then
come back to it. If it's a positive experience, sometimes
focusing on the source of positivity can help you amplify
(24:48):
that state. So the key is you want to be
flexible in how you wield that attentional spotlight. And then
the final internal shifter is what I call a perspective shifter.
The idea is, sometimes you can't afford to look away
from something. You have to stare right at it, and
so we can also reframe it, think differently about it.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
And one key to doing that is.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
This ability to step back and look at the bigger picture,
get some distance from the problem. And once you get
some distance, it's often a lot easier to reframe how
we're thinking about things. It can be hard to reframe
when you're standing right in the middle of the fire,
so to speak. So there are lots of different ways
you could shift your perspective.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
One of my favorites.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Not to say this is for everyone, that would violate
what I genuinely believe no one size fits all solutions.
But one tool that works for me is called distance
self talk. It's trying to work through a problem, but
using my own name to try to think it through
rather than the first person. I so, all right, Ethan,
how are you going to manage the situation? That gives
me some mental space. It helps me think about myself
(25:55):
like I'm someone else, which makes it easier for me
to think more objectively about the circumstance. Temporal distancing is
another tool that is immediately accessible in my toolbag. So
another way to talk about this mental time travel. If
I'm struggling with a problem it feels really big, I
could jump into this time travel machine and ask myself,
(26:17):
how am I going to feel about this five days
from now, five weeks from now, five years from now.
I know from a lifetime of experience is that I
experience lots of big emotions all the time, but as
time goes on, they wane in their intensity. I forget
about that when I'm in the midst of something. So
those are the three internal shifters, sensation, attention, and perspective.
(26:40):
The key is that these are like simple shifts that
we can engage, and they're like psychological jiu jitsu moves
that can alter the trajectory of our emotional responses ever
so slightly. But that ever so slightness, I would argue,
is sometimes all you need to get back on track.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
I love that. Okay, So we talked about these internal shifters.
What about external shifters? So situations in which we actually
are capable of changing aspects of our environment.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
So other people can shift our emotions. And when we
find the right people to talk to you about our emotions,
people who are skilled at both letting us express our
emotions if we want to, but also helping us work through.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
Them as well.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
That's a really powerful asset that we possess. One of
my favorite findings in social psychology is a great way
to make yourself feel better when you're not feeling so
good is to do something good for someone else.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Helping others know my favorite insight, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
Yeah, helps ourselves.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
That's another way that other people can shift us. You
mentioned going.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Outside for a walk.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
That's great, but there's some other powerful space shifters out
there that I don't think we always have top of mind.
We often get attached to places. I'm attached to the
tea house where I wrote my first book in ann Arbor.
Every time I go into that teahouse, I'm filled with
a sense of warmth and comfort. The arboretum is another
(28:05):
source of warmth and comfort for me, and so whenever
I visit those places if I'm not feeling great, they
make me feel better. When my kids were young and
they get upset for any reason, I remember them often
saying and at the time. It was just so curious
to me. They just wanted to go home. They wanted
to go to their rooms. That was a place that
they were safely and securely attached to. And so think
(28:28):
about the spaces in your environment that provide you with
a source of resilience. We all have those safe places,
but what are they and do you actually strategically visit
them when you're struggling.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
We've been talking about how helpful emotion regulation can be
and how it's correlated with all sorts of positive health
benefits and better outcomes for society. Even and I say
this as someone who with a very practical orientation, sometimes
I feel like our emotional reactions need not be evaluated
(29:03):
based on whether they have utility, right, like whether they
lead to some productive ends. Like sometimes we just want
to feel things for the sake of feeling them, because
it's vindicating, it's therapeutic, there's some catharsis in it. I'm
thinking about the awful atrocities that we've witnessed all over
the world in the last year. And you know, Ethan,
(29:25):
sometimes I just want to feel like really insert expletive
mad like and you know, I just want to feel
that and So what do you say to people like
me in those circumstances where we might feel powerless to
change something, and where having that strong negative reaction feels
necessary because it is just like the most human response
(29:47):
to have in the face of that information.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
One thing I think that is important is to not
overthink things too much when it comes to our emotional
lives and the way you just describe that, I just
want to be angry for a while. If that's your
goal and you're capable of achieving it, embrace it. If
it ain't broke, don't fix it. But if you want
to feel differently, you should also know that there's tremendous
(30:15):
potential for you to do that. There are lots of
tools available for you to rain those responses in or
amplify them if you so choose.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Yeah, it's almost like I'm seeding in that moment, like
this is not the most productive response and it's actually
serving no one to feel this way. But I just
given to that impulse, because again, there's something cathartic about
having just embracing human empathy, right Like when you feel
outraged on behalf of someone else, you know that's just
(30:43):
a rich part of the human experience.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
I would say that's probably for you.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
There's a you're in the functional zone for a while.
Experiencing those emotions give yourself the permission to feel those emotions,
and that's a gift to yourself. Emotions, all of them
serve a function. You know, if you experience negative emotions,
welcome to the human condition. This is a good thing.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
Hopefully listeners find that libera.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Hey, thanks so much for listening. And just a reminder,
I'm starting a newsletter. I'm so excited to have another
place to connect with all of you, and I'll be
sharing personal updates and links to things that I'm interested
in and exciting new science, also takeaways from conversations on
this show. It's totally free and you can sign up
using the link in our show notes. Next week on
(31:56):
the show, why It's so hard to stand up for
what you believe in.
Speaker 4 (32:02):
We have been so trained in compliance from a young age,
and we've become so socialized to comply onto obey that
we don't have the skill set for defines. We don't
know how to do it, and so is that training
that's missing from all lives.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Psychologist Sunita Saw walks us through the art and Science
of Saying No, That's next week on A Slight Change
of Plans See Again. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written,
and executive produced by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change
Family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate
(32:37):
Parkinson Morgan, our producers Britney Cronin and Megan Luvin, and
our sound engineer Erica Huang. Louis Scara wrote our delightful
theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A
Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries,
so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a
very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A
(32:59):
Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker,
See you next week.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
The do
Pushkin hay Slight Changers Maya. Here an exciting update before
we begin. I've just launched a newsletter and the first
edition is out today. You can sign up using the
link in the show notes. I'm really looking forward to
having another place to connect with you all. I'll be
(00:36):
sharing personal updates, links to what I'm reading or watching lately,
exciting new science about change, and my top takeaways, and
some behind the scenes from my conversations on the show.
The newsletter is totally free, and I'd love it if
you can sign up. I also want to know what
kind of content you're craving so I can integrate these
ideas into my future posts. Feel free to leave a
(00:59):
comment underneath the first one. Okay, I hope you enjoyed
the episode.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Emotions are tools that are useful, all of them, even
the negative ones. So many of us, I think, strive
to live lives free of all negative emotion. I think
this is both impossible and also undesirable.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Ethan Cross is a professor of psychology at the University
of Michigan. He says we shouldn't see emotions as good
or bad. They're valuable signals, but when they become too
intense and start to take over our lives. We can
learn to turn down the volume.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
I think it's so easy for us to look at
someone as a kid or an adult and say things like, oh,
you're terrible at self control, you have no self control.
But evidence suggests that this is malleable. This can change.
If you're not good at managing your emotions, now you
can actually get better.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
On today's show, how to Escape an Emotional Spiral, I'm
Maya Schunker, a scientist who studies human behavior, and this
is a slight change of plans, a show about who
we are and who we become in the face of
a big change. Last time Ethan was on the show,
(02:38):
we talked about our inner voice and how to manage
it when it gets a bit too critical. Today, he
joins me for an in depth conversation about our emotions.
Ethan says, emotions are information. We may not like feeling envy,
but it can push us to work harder or signal
to us what we really want in life. Sadness can
(02:59):
slow us down and invite support from others. Regret can
help us learn from our mistakes. All of these emotions
are useful, but sometimes the emotions can overwhelm. Us Ethan's
new book is a guide for managing that overwhelm. It's
called Shift, Managing your emotions so they don't manage you.
(03:20):
He explores what we can do when emotions become more
harmful than helpful. We started off our conversation by talking
about how we can learn to tell the difference.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
When your emotions are interfering with your ability to live
the life you want to live. Right, they're getting in
the way of you achieving your goals rather than actually
helping you achieve your goals. That's an indication that some
regulation is needed. Let's be concrete about this. So when
(03:51):
anxiety is getting me to work hard on something that
is coming up, and then like actually putting in the work,
my anxiety goes down, that's anxiety working really well. Anxiety
not working well is when the anxiety is so high
that I can't actually even sit down to get the
work done, or even when I do start doing the
(04:12):
work to prepare, the anxiety sticks with me in ways
that are interfering with my sleep and putting me on edge.
That's a kind of miscalibration. The emotional response is out
of sync with the situation.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
That I'm in Yeah, I'm thinking of another example, which is,
you know, when we feel just indignation at injustice for example, right,
we might ask ourselves, is that indignation and anger motivating
us to do something about it? Or are we feeling
so oppressed by that negativity that we are we're stuck
in bed right, like we're unable to act. So that's
(04:46):
another context where that would be relevant.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
It's a perfect example.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Well, the good news is that in those instances where
our emotions are overwhelming us, when they're counterproductive, when they're
eroding our well being, we do have this ability for regulation.
So let's start with what you mean by emotion regulation.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
So emotion regulation quite simply is the capacity to turn
the volume up or down on the emotions we're experiencing,
lengthen or shorten their duration, and in some cases, switch
from one emotional response to an entirely different one. I
use the term that you know, the title of my
book is shift. It's about shifting up or down, long
(05:29):
or shorter, or to a different response altogether. And I
find it kind of beautiful that on the one hand,
we evolve to experience all of these different emotions, but
also this remarkable set of capabilities to rain them in.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
So what is the research show, I mean, other than
like intuitively feeling like it would be a very good
thing to better regulate our emotions, what does the research
show about the well being outcomes associated with better emotion regulation?
Speaker 3 (05:59):
So you have goals?
Speaker 2 (06:01):
What are your goals in life? Are they to think
and perform well, to have good relationships, to be healthy.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
If you can.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Manage your emotions, they're going to help you achieve all
of those goals. And that's what the research supports. So
people who are better at managing their emotions, they tend
to do better at school. They can delay gratification longer,
which is often important when you're studying for things.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
They have improved.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Relationships with other people because they can manage their emotions,
which are often triggered by others, more effectively, and so
they don't end up having as much friction in their relationships.
So really, this is a kind of master aptitude that
should benefit people across the board.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
There's this one study that you reference in your book
Ethan from the nineteen seventies, and I'm wondering if you
can talk about it a bit. It looked at emotion
regulation in people over a long period of time.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
So basically a cohort of newborns were followed over the
course of their lives and every few years with their
ability to manage their emotions. Their self control capacity was
assess by putting them through a series of tasks and
having other people rap their capacity. And then the researchers
(07:15):
patiently waited and just every few years they kept on
checking in on this group of participants to see how
they were doing across the board, from their health to
their achievement levels at school.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
And in life.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
And what they found that was notable were a couple
of things. Number One, the ability to manage one's emotions
early on in life predicted a lot about how the
kids fared once they got older.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
So kids who were adept at.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Managing their emotions earlier on they advanced further in their careers.
They saved more money, they planned more for retirement, they
were physically healthier, and perhaps for me most mind blowingly, yes,
that is a phrase. They're like. Brain scans showed that
their brains and other full body scans and their organs
(08:06):
actually aged more slowly, so across the board, this capacity
to manage one's emotions is predicting really positive outcomes.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Later on in life.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
But the other really important finding in that study was
that it wasn't the case that if you were a
young kid and you were bad at self control, you
were consistently bad at And the reason I love that
finding is because I think it's so easy for us
to look at someone as a kid or an adult
and say things like, oh, you're terrible at self control,
(08:39):
you have no self control? Oh, absolutely right, and we
make these blanket judgments about how people fare. But what
the finding suggests, along with a slew of other evidence,
is that this is malleable. This can change. If you're
not good at managing your emotions, now you can actually
get better. How do you get better, I would argue
(09:00):
it's by familiarizing yourself with the tools that are out
there and then start practicing them in your lives.
Speaker 1 (09:06):
It's such a hopeful message embedded in this study, right,
which is that for those who struggle with emotion regulation,
or for those parents who see their kids struggling with
emotion regulation, there's hope for us all. So that's very exciting.
There is this notion out there and is quite prevalent
that it is very important, actually crucial for us to
(09:28):
quote feel our feelings right, to sit in them and
marinate in them, and if we avoid them, we're actually
doing a disservice because those negative emotions will rear their
ugly head in the future with even more forcefulness, like
with the vengeance. Right for the sake of everyone listening,
please please please tell us what the science says.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Well, there's this widespread assumption, and I bought into this
hook line and sinker for a very long time that
when you're experiencing something bad, you should just deal with
it right then and there, approach it, work through your feelings.
That was a message that was taught to me growing
up in my family. That was a common message that
(10:09):
was delivered. And then when I got to grad school,
there's lots of research which showed that chronically avoiding things
is bad. And the research on chronic avoidance is rock solid.
So if your coping tactic is to across the board,
just avoid thinking about any kind of negative thing that
happens to you and just distract endlessly and sometimes even
(10:31):
do it with illicit substances or other unhealthy behaviors. That
doesn't predict good things. But what is missing from the
way we often talk about this concept of avoidance is
you don't have to pick between only approaching or only avoiding.
You can actually be flexible and strategic and shift back
(10:53):
and forth with whether you focus on something that's bothering
you and whether you take some time away. And it
turns out research shows that being flexible in that manner
can be very helpful. So sometimes strategically avoiding a problem
for a certain period of time can be useful. And
I'll give you a couple of examples of how that
might work. So, first of all, sometimes when we get
(11:16):
triggered by an emotion, it feels so amazingly big and
we just want to dive in. But if we take
some time away from it and then you come back
to the problem several hours later or even a day later,
time has taken the steam out of the emotional response.
And this is a well known finding that as time
goes on, the intensity of our emotions fade. That's true
(11:37):
of most of our emotional responses. They get triggered, they
jack up in their intensity, and then as time goes on,
the intensity goes down. So if you take some time
away by avoiding strategically and then return you're coming back
to the problem and it's not as intense and it's
a lot easier to work with as a result. One
of my favorite studies that demonstrates how being strategic in
(12:01):
this way, being able to both approach and avoid emotions
can be useful, was done by a psychologist named George
Bonano who who was working at Teachers College at Columbia
right around the time that the nine to eleven attacks occurred.
And what he did is, in the immediate aftermath of
those attacks, he was really curious about what are the
(12:22):
factors that allow people to be resilient in the face
of a collective tragedy. And so what he did is
he brought participants into the lab who were living in
New York City, and he had them engage in a
task where on some trials they were explicitly told to
express their emotions powerfully, so really immerse yourself in them
(12:43):
in a certain sense and just show them to someone else.
And on other trials they were told to suppress their emotions,
so really conceal these things, try to push them away
to the point that no one else can even see
that you're experiencing these things, and then he tracked those
participants over time to see how they fared emotionally. And
what he found is that the participants who fared best,
(13:06):
the participants who showed the most resilience in the face
of the attacks, where the participants who were able to
both express their emotions when they were asked to do
so and suppress their emotions when they were asked to
do so. So it was being really good at both
of these skills that predicted the most success.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Yeah, and one of the things I've read in Banano's
research is he says, you know, it's not strictly necessary
for every person to have to quote work through their grief.
For example. Right, there are studies showing that those who
show more positive emotions following a traumatic experience actually show
better long term outcomes. And I like this research overall
(13:48):
because there's this broader lesson that emerges from it, which
is there is no one size fits all approach to
emotional well being or to processing difficult situations. And I
do feel like there is so much judgment of ourselves
and of others in terms of how they process challenging events. Right.
(14:08):
I've I've been in situations where someone did seem very avoidant,
and it was like you're a little alarmed. You're like,
oh no, what's going to happen. This is going to
be terrible. They actually turned out fine.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
I cannot reinforce enough the message that you just articulated, Maya,
there are no one sized solutions when it comes to
managing your emotional lives. Forget avoidance. Let's take something even
more innocuous. Let's take like mindfulness or meditation. Lots of
people advocate that as a solution as a panacea to
our emotional distress, and it helps tons of people. And
(14:42):
if that's you, great, keep meditating, be mindful. This is fantastic.
But I've also come across lots of people who say
this doesn't work for me, and they actually feel bad, like, well,
what's wrong with me that this isn't helping me. There's
nothing wrong with you again, there's everything right with you.
You're a human being. There are reasons we don't quite
(15:03):
understand yet why some people acclimate to some tools more
than others.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Yeah, no, I really this is very freeing. We're so
often met by prescriptions around you know, how to do
grief the right way, or how to process anger. The
right way. And I love what you said about mindfulness
and meditation. Like I've spent a total of ten minutes
during my time on planet Earth meditating and like that
(15:29):
is my max. Like I don't think I'll ever be
able to do it or commit to it. It just
doesn't work for me. A quick walk outside has always
been a better antidote, you know, for whatever distress I'm feeling.
So I think that's a wonderful message.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
We did this these two large studies.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
This is research that just came out where we track
people during the COVID nineteen pandemic, and each day we
measured people's COVID anxiety and we also asked them which
of eighteen different tools did you use to manage your emotions?
And some of them were healthy tools and others were
less healthy, like alcohol usage, things like that. What we
(16:06):
found was Number One, on average, people use between three
and four tools each day to manage your emotion, so
it was seldom the case that people just did one thing.
Number Two, there was remarkable diversity in the combinations of
tools that people.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
Used to manage their circumstances.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
When I say remarkable, that is an understatement. We were
floored there are no one size fits all solutions when
it comes to managing your emotional life. Just embrace that,
and I think you'll naturally look for the tools and
combinations of tools that work best for you.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
After the break, Ethan shares some of these tools and
explains why your favorite perfume might be one of them.
We'll be back in a moment with a slight change
of plans. We've been talking about how there's no one
(17:11):
size fits all approach, but there are tools that we
can be experimental with, right that everyone who's listening can
try out and see how well they work in any
given context. So let's start by digging into some techniques
that we can use to strategically shift our attention away
from our negative emotions. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
So, I think it's helpful to have a few different
categories of tools so that you can know on the
fly where to look when you're struggling with an emotion
and want to ring them in.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
And so in the book, I.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Provide three categories of tools that are things you can
do on your own inside you. Those are internal shifters,
and then there are things outside of us that I
call external shifters. For internal shifters, one category, or what
I call sensory shifters. Our senses are remarkably efficient tools
for pushing our emotions around.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
And we all know.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
This intuitively because we've experienced some triggered in response to
sensory experiences throughout our lives. But we often fail to
activate these sensory shifters strategically when we need them. So
let me zoom in on one of my favorite sensory shifters.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Music.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
In one study, participants were asked, why do you listen
to music? Almost everyone in the study ninety six or
ninety seven percent of participants. So, I like to listen
to music because I like the way it makes me feel.
It's an emotional experience. But then, we've done studies where
we ask people to think about the last time they
were angry, anxious, or sad, and you said, what did
(18:45):
you do when you had those emotions and you tried
to rain them in? Only between ten and thirty percent
of participants report going to music to push their emotions
in a particular direction.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
You mean being proactive about it, proactive and strategic, and like,
I've listened to music my entire life.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
MC hammer, you can't touch this. This is like my
first cassette followed by Madonna The Immacuate Collection. Let the
judgment of my music tastes begin now.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
I was just going to say, I'm really enjoying this.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Yes, yes, it gets worse, Yeah, don't worry. But I've
loved music. I've listened to it throughout my life. And
yet have I been strategic about putting on certain songs
to push my emotions in different directions when I've struggled
with things Until recently, The answer to that question is no.
But now that I'm aware of this, it's on my radar,
(19:34):
I'm incredibly strategic about it. I have a playlist designed
to amplify emotional responses like get me revved up when
I want to feel that way. I also have songs
that I go to that calm me down and take
the edge off. Music is such a powerful to One
more example of this is sent We are spritsing ourselves
(19:55):
with these chemicals to manipulate the way other people feel
about us and the way we feel about ourselves all
the time. I was just in an airport yesterday, I
was traveling internationally, and I walk through the duty free shop.
That's not a duty free shop. That's an emotion regulation store. Right,
there's like perfumes and colognes all over the place. Why
(20:16):
are we wearing those? Why is it that some hotels,
when you walk in there, they smell so unbelievably good
you never want to leave. It's because they are harnessing
what we know about senses and emotion regulation. They're piping
certain sense through their ventilation system to make the place
(20:38):
smell great. So once you're aware of this stuff, now
you've got access to tools to push your emotions around
right in the heat of the moment, and they work really,
really fast.
Speaker 1 (20:50):
I also love music, and it's occurring to me in
this moment that I too, have never strategically turned music
on to shift my emotions. What are your thoughts on
finding music that is congruent with our emotional state versus
music that's incongruate. So if I'm feeling like, really really sad,
don't I just want to play adele.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Yeah, commiseration and someone understands me. And so whether that's
good or bad depends on your goals. So if we
stick with sadness, I'm a proponent of the idea that
sadness is functional in the right dosage. Right, my worldview
is challenged. I can't really fix what's going on. I
just lost my job or I just lost someone I love.
(21:32):
I've got to now reframe how I think about myself
in this world so I can get back out there
and persevere. And so sadness helps me do that hard
cognitive work. And if the music is going to facilitate that,
keep that emotion active to help me do that rethinking
and reframing, that could well be a good thing. Here's
(21:54):
where that becomes a problem. If you're feeling sad and
you don't want to feel sad anymore, but you find
yourself listening to the music, then the music is going
to be counter to your goals. And that's where you
want to resist the temptation to go to Adele and
if it's me, you go to Journey insteads although it
depends on the Journey song.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
But right, right, do you mind talking a bit about
the neuroscience behind the senses and why this is such
a powerful tool for us to leverage.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Yeah, So your sensory apparatus is linked to your capacity
to experience emotions in the brain. In some cases the
networks are overlapping actually, and What that means for our
everyday lives is different sensory experiences can trigger emotions automatically.
(22:46):
They can trigger those emotional experiences super super fast. The
reason why that's so important is sometimes emotion regulation feels
like it's really really hard to do, and it sometimes
is hard to do. When we try to, for example,
reframe how we're thinking about things. Sometimes that can be challenging,
like take a lot of effort. Sure, the sensory ways
(23:09):
of pushing our emotions around don't have the same effortfulness.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
There.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
In fact, effort list to some degree, and that's in
part where their power resides.
Speaker 1 (23:19):
It's so funny that you talk about the sensory stuff,
though I don't know if you know this. So during
my postdoc and cognitive neuroscience, we actually we took an
old factometer, which is this machine that delivers sense to people,
and we installed it in the fMRI machine, so into
the brain scanner, and as people lay there and we're
faced with decisions and expressions of risk preferences and whatnot,
(23:41):
we fed them different sense, right, like calming sense and
nostalgic sense and comfy cozy sense like cookies or whatever.
And we looked at how that sensory information affected, often
outside of awareness, right, their willingness to take risks, or
their willingness to delay rewards and things like that. So anyway,
this is such a fascinating topic.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
I think we just don't appreciate it enough. I mean,
and there are simple things you could do, think in sense.
I mean, it's just once you are alert to this
link between sensory experience and emotions, it will change the
way you view the world. Like awareness of this gives
you agency to push it around.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
So we talked about one internal shifter, right, which is
our senses. Any other internal shifters that we should keep
in mind.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Attention is another one. And this is what attention refers to.
Is you've got this spotlight in your mind. It's where
are you focusing it. Sometimes you want to focus on
the thing that's bugging you because you want to work
through it. Sometimes you want to point it elsewhere, you
want to get a break. You have a distraction, then
come back to it. If it's a positive experience, sometimes
focusing on the source of positivity can help you amplify
(24:48):
that state. So the key is you want to be
flexible in how you wield that attentional spotlight. And then
the final internal shifter is what I call a perspective shifter.
The idea is, sometimes you can't afford to look away
from something. You have to stare right at it, and
so we can also reframe it, think differently about it.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
And one key to doing that is.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
This ability to step back and look at the bigger picture,
get some distance from the problem. And once you get
some distance, it's often a lot easier to reframe how
we're thinking about things. It can be hard to reframe
when you're standing right in the middle of the fire,
so to speak. So there are lots of different ways
you could shift your perspective.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
One of my favorites.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Not to say this is for everyone, that would violate
what I genuinely believe no one size fits all solutions.
But one tool that works for me is called distance
self talk. It's trying to work through a problem, but
using my own name to try to think it through
rather than the first person. I so, all right, Ethan,
how are you going to manage the situation? That gives
me some mental space. It helps me think about myself
(25:55):
like I'm someone else, which makes it easier for me
to think more objectively about the circumstance. Temporal distancing is
another tool that is immediately accessible in my toolbag. So
another way to talk about this mental time travel. If
I'm struggling with a problem it feels really big, I
could jump into this time travel machine and ask myself,
(26:17):
how am I going to feel about this five days
from now, five weeks from now, five years from now.
I know from a lifetime of experience is that I
experience lots of big emotions all the time, but as
time goes on, they wane in their intensity. I forget
about that when I'm in the midst of something. So
those are the three internal shifters, sensation, attention, and perspective.
(26:40):
The key is that these are like simple shifts that
we can engage, and they're like psychological jiu jitsu moves
that can alter the trajectory of our emotional responses ever
so slightly. But that ever so slightness, I would argue,
is sometimes all you need to get back on track.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
I love that. Okay, So we talked about these internal shifters.
What about external shifters? So situations in which we actually
are capable of changing aspects of our environment.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
So other people can shift our emotions. And when we
find the right people to talk to you about our emotions,
people who are skilled at both letting us express our
emotions if we want to, but also helping us work through.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
Them as well.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
That's a really powerful asset that we possess. One of
my favorite findings in social psychology is a great way
to make yourself feel better when you're not feeling so
good is to do something good for someone else.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Helping others know my favorite insight, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
Yeah, helps ourselves.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
That's another way that other people can shift us. You
mentioned going.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Outside for a walk.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
That's great, but there's some other powerful space shifters out
there that I don't think we always have top of mind.
We often get attached to places. I'm attached to the
tea house where I wrote my first book in ann Arbor.
Every time I go into that teahouse, I'm filled with
a sense of warmth and comfort. The arboretum is another
(28:05):
source of warmth and comfort for me, and so whenever
I visit those places if I'm not feeling great, they
make me feel better. When my kids were young and
they get upset for any reason, I remember them often
saying and at the time. It was just so curious
to me. They just wanted to go home. They wanted
to go to their rooms. That was a place that
they were safely and securely attached to. And so think
(28:28):
about the spaces in your environment that provide you with
a source of resilience. We all have those safe places,
but what are they and do you actually strategically visit
them when you're struggling.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
We've been talking about how helpful emotion regulation can be
and how it's correlated with all sorts of positive health
benefits and better outcomes for society. Even and I say
this as someone who with a very practical orientation, sometimes
I feel like our emotional reactions need not be evaluated
(29:03):
based on whether they have utility, right, like whether they
lead to some productive ends. Like sometimes we just want
to feel things for the sake of feeling them, because
it's vindicating, it's therapeutic, there's some catharsis in it. I'm
thinking about the awful atrocities that we've witnessed all over
the world in the last year. And you know, Ethan,
(29:25):
sometimes I just want to feel like really insert expletive
mad like and you know, I just want to feel
that and So what do you say to people like
me in those circumstances where we might feel powerless to
change something, and where having that strong negative reaction feels
necessary because it is just like the most human response
(29:47):
to have in the face of that information.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
One thing I think that is important is to not
overthink things too much when it comes to our emotional
lives and the way you just describe that, I just
want to be angry for a while. If that's your
goal and you're capable of achieving it, embrace it. If
it ain't broke, don't fix it. But if you want
to feel differently, you should also know that there's tremendous
(30:15):
potential for you to do that. There are lots of
tools available for you to rain those responses in or
amplify them if you so choose.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
Yeah, it's almost like I'm seeding in that moment, like
this is not the most productive response and it's actually
serving no one to feel this way. But I just
given to that impulse, because again, there's something cathartic about
having just embracing human empathy, right Like when you feel
outraged on behalf of someone else, you know that's just
(30:43):
a rich part of the human experience.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
I would say that's probably for you.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
There's a you're in the functional zone for a while.
Experiencing those emotions give yourself the permission to feel those emotions,
and that's a gift to yourself. Emotions, all of them
serve a function. You know, if you experience negative emotions,
welcome to the human condition. This is a good thing.
Speaker 3 (31:07):
Hopefully listeners find that libera.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Hey, thanks so much for listening. And just a reminder,
I'm starting a newsletter. I'm so excited to have another
place to connect with all of you, and I'll be
sharing personal updates and links to things that I'm interested
in and exciting new science, also takeaways from conversations on
this show. It's totally free and you can sign up
using the link in our show notes. Next week on
(31:56):
the show, why It's so hard to stand up for
what you believe in.
Speaker 4 (32:02):
We have been so trained in compliance from a young age,
and we've become so socialized to comply onto obey that
we don't have the skill set for defines. We don't
know how to do it, and so is that training
that's missing from all lives.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Psychologist Sunita Saw walks us through the art and Science
of Saying No, That's next week on A Slight Change
of Plans See Again. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written,
and executive produced by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change
Family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate
(32:37):
Parkinson Morgan, our producers Britney Cronin and Megan Luvin, and
our sound engineer Erica Huang. Louis Scara wrote our delightful
theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A
Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries,
so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a
very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A
(32:59):
Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker,
See you next week.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
The do
Host
Dr. Maya Shankar
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.