Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Manage Your Emotions So They Don’t Manage You | Dr. Ethan Kross

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

How much control do we really have over our emotions? And what if the key to mastering them is easier than you think?This week’s conversation is a special one. It was recorded in front of a live audience at Live Talks Los Angeles, where I had the incredible opportunity to sit down with Dr. Ethan Kross, one of the world’s leading experts on emotion and self-control. He’s a pioneering psychologist, professor at the University of Michigan, and the bestselling author of Chatter, and his latest book, Shift.In this conversation, we break down the science of emotional regulation, the tools for shifting emotional states, and how we can cultivate self-efficacy—that’s the belief that we have the power to navigate life’s toughest moments. This conversation with Dr. Kross is audio only—so make sure to listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get ready for insights that can reshape the way you work with emotions and the role they play in your life._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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opportunity to sit down with Dr. Ethan Cross, one of the world's leading experts on emotion and self-control. He's a pioneering researcher, professor at the University of Michigan, and the best-selling author of Chatter and his latest book, Shift. In this conversation, we break down the science of emotional regulation, the tools for shifting emotional states, and how we can cultivate self-efficacy. That's the belief that we have the power to navigate life's toughest moments. Get ready for insights. They will reshape the way you work with emotions and the role they play in your life. So with that, let's dive into this special live conversation with Dr. Ethan Cross. It's a real treat for me to sit with you.

And first, I loved your first book, Chatter. It was incredible. It was a massive contribution to the field of psychology and to well-being in general. And I was anticipating the second book because he was right on the pulse for what many of us think about in the field, that there was this buzz about what are you going to do next? And so you went from thinking patterns to shifting patterns. So can we first just begin with why did you want to write this book? Well, first, thank you for the kind words about chatter. Thank all of you for coming here today. Actually, this book, Shift, really grew out of an experience I had talking about chatter. And so I would do a bunch of events like this. And after those events, people would come up to me and say,

that was great, but, which never really felt really good because you know what they say about that, right? Like anything before the but doesn't count. Ah, crap. So chatter is about getting stuck in these negative thought loops, worry, rumination, nothing that affects Los Angelians, I'm sure. And so they'd say, thanks for sharing some tools for how to manage this chatter. But what about anger or envy? Why do we experience emotions in the first place? Should we manage them? Are they good? And so what it really got me to start thinking about was the importance of trying to provide people with a science-based guide that welcomes you to your emotional life, introduces you to that life, and explains to you how you can skillfully work

with your emotions if you want to. I find it remarkable that we are an emotional species. All of you here have experienced probably like millions and millions of emotions throughout your lives. Yet how many people here, by a show of hands actually, if you wouldn't mind entertaining me, how many of you here would feel really confident

coming up on stage right now and defining what an emotion is? These are the psychologists and the clinicians in the room. Very few. That's kind of amazing to me. We're experiencing emotions throughout our lives every day, and yet most of you aren't confident about what an emotion is. So that was the impetus.

Wait, hold on. Don't leave us hanging. Go ahead. Take a run at your definition of an emotion. Well, you know, we got some people here who want to try. We won't do it. And I've got to apologize. I've been enthusiastically talking about this book for the past week and a half.

So this kind of raspiness here. No, I was not like doing bad things before this. It is just from speaking too much. So what is an emotion? An emotion is a response that we have to things that are meaningful to us. And those could be experiences in the world or things that we imagine in our minds.

And when we encounter things that are meaningful, depending on the nature of those experiences, we experience this emotional response. And it's kind of like a software program getting loaded up to help you deal with the situation you're in. So I'm a proponent of the belief that all of our emotions, even the quote unquote bad ones, are actually helpful when they're experienced in the right proportions.

One of our colleagues, esteemed colleagues, Dr. Antonio Damasio, has a really crisp understanding about the difference between feelings and emotions. And I'd like for you to open this up a little bit. Sure. But the way he describes it is that emotions are physiological sensations. They're observable, you can see them. If my heart is pounding,

there's an emotional component to it. So they're physiological experiences. Feelings are psychological. They're private. They are intimate to the person until they share their feelings, until they make it known. So feelings and emotions, do you agree with Dr. Damasio's take on those two? Close, but that's something that we scientists sometimes do. We don't always agree. I'd say about 75%. So here's how I think about emotions and feelings. And it's a really important distinction. Emotion is an umbrella term. And when you're experiencing an emotion like anger or anxiety, it captures this loosely coordinated set of responses. So there are things happening in

your body. So when I get anxious, I absolutely, I feel it in my stomach, like gastric distress, like let me get to the bathroom now, right? Very salient. That emotion is also harnessing the way I think, right? It's taking my attention and zooming it in on the issue at hand what is this threat that I need to think about it's also affecting the way my motor behaviors work like so I will start clenching a little bit and you can usually see it on my face so can folks here like decode anger like could you what about sadness I bet you a bunch you're really good at that can you show me a sad face anyone on a hum bunch, you're really good at that. Can you show me a sad face? Anyone want to humor me? You're good. That was a good one. My daughters, I have two daughters.

They are savants when it comes to showing me a sad face, particularly when I discipline them. You know, it's like in an exaggerated way, I go, and that serves all function. So that's the emotion. It's this kind of, I say loosely coordinated because those things tend to happen together, but they don't always. Sometimes I could experience anger,

but I've got a pretty good poker face and I could suppress it. So that's what I mean loosely coordinated. A feeling is something very different. A feeling is the conscious experience of an emotion. So I like to use like physical illness here as a metaphor. Like when you have the flu, there are lots of things happening in your body that you have no awareness of, but you are aware of the melees and fever and chills. The feelings are the fever and chills of an emotional response. It's the component that you have conscious awareness of. So that's my take on feelings and emotions. This is a complicated conversation about thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behavior. That's really what we're talking about. And can you walk us through just at the top, is there a difference

in your findings? And you've published over 125 studies from your laboratory about how the inner life works to have a broad umbrella. Is there a difference that you can point to when it comes to the emotional experience between men and women? Or is there a gender experience between the two? And it's a loaded question, potentially loaded answer, but let's just start at the top about the bias that many people might come to that one gender is this way and another gender is that way. Well, number one, there's a whole lot that is more similar about men and women than there are differences. And I like to just get that out of the way, period. Having said that, we do know that some of our vulnerabilities are a little bit different. So women tend to be

vulnerable to experiencing what we call internalizing problems. So more rumination, more worry. Men struggle more with externalizing problems, aggressiveness, outbursts, somewhat consistent with the stereotypes that are out there. But here's the really good news. Most of my career is focused on the tools that people can use to manage. Emotions run wild, if you will, when the emotions start to take over. And most of the tools that we've looked at, they tend to work equally well for men and women, even though our triggers may be a little bit different. When you go to the toolkit, they tend to work the same. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms,

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I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. So you introduced a new word about triggers. And then if I'd stitch that back to one of your earlier positions, which is that an emotion takes place when there is something important or meaningful. So the trigger is lodged in the way that we're framing or experiencing or interpreting an event. The event is the event. It is only based on the way we make the event that makes it so. So if there's a trigger in my psychology, the way I'm seeing something, there's an emotional response. So are you more interested in the downstream tools for emotional management, or are you

more interested in the upstream tools for framing and psychology? And of course, it's a bang-bang experience. I mean, they're so intertwined and coupled. I like them all. You like them all. I want to know them all. And I want to know how we can best equip people to be most robust in the face of dealing with struggles, both in terms of helping them recover quickly when they find themselves triggered in a way

that they don't want to be, and also helping them be less triggered as they go down their lives. So I'm curious if you use the framework I'm going to say now. But well, actually, let me back up a second. So I tell a story in the book about a real existential threat I experienced earlier in my career. I came across an article that reported that 40% of people don't believe they can control their emotions. Now, you all have to understand, like, in my email signature, it says I'm the director of the

emotion and self-control laboratory. Like to find this out, like have I wasted my life? Like how is this possible? This is all I do is study control. And almost half of the population, if we extrapolate from the study, doesn't think they can. And so here's the way I've made sense of it. And it really was a reframe for me. There are lots of emotional experiences we have in this world that we don't control their activation. So anyone here ever just like have a dark thought

pop up in their head, maybe something they're ashamed of telling someone else about, but it happens. And I'm sure with hands, let's put our hands up. Should be all of you, by the way. Like, I know how your minds work. It's everyone. Like, we don't have control over when that random dark thought pops up. We also don't have control when we happen to brush up against someone who hasn't showered in three weeks. Does that elicit an emotional reaction? Yeah, like automatic. The inverse is true as well. Someone who smells great, pleasant response. There are many facets to our emotional lives where we just do not have control. However, once that emotion is triggered, that is our playground for getting in there and intervening to control the trajectory of the response.

And so I find that a really useful way of breaking down the space. Before we get into the tools that you found to be meaningful, I stopped framing the idea that we can control our emotions because of that 40% and the 60% aren't really sure, you know, and maybe 50% aren't really sure and 10% are like, oh, of course I control my emotions. And so it begs the question that you just spoke about, well, of course I control my emotions. And so it begs the question that you just spoke about, well, there's this automatic response and then sometimes I'm caught in the rapids of emotions and I just, but sometimes I feel like I'm pretty composed and I'm together. And so I stopped framing it that way and I found that there's a easier entry when

I talk about working well with emotions as opposed to trying to control emotions. And I'm not sure who coined the imagery that I'm about to share, that the elephant and the rider. And the elephant is kind of like, is supposed to be able to guide the... I'm sorry, the rider is supposed to be able to guide the elephant. And the rider are our thoughts and the emotions is the elephant. Now, when the emotion, when the elephant wants to run, when the emotions run, they're just as powerful as you can imagine. No strength in any rider can really control the power of the elephant and the emotions. So do you ascribe to that or is it somewhat adjacent? I would say it's adjacent. I might need you to convince me a little bit more that we can totally control our emotions.

Wait, you're saying you would want me to take a position that we can or we cannot? A little bit more that we can. I want you to believe it. So we're going to give you the assessment after we finish talking tonight. Okay. See if I've convinced you. So I completely believe that when an emotional is activated, we sometimes don't have control

over it. But I do think there are things you can do to modulate those emotions, to steer the elephant around, if you will, and sometimes even shut it down, have the elephant sit down. I think there are sometimes things you can do. Because you've got two guides to this elephant analogy, is that intensity and duration. That's right. And so you can modulate intensity and you can temper duration if you have tools and skills.

If you have tools. So shift. What the hell does it mean to shift? So you could turn the intensity up and down on your emotions, increasing and decreasing their volume. You could also shorten and lengthen their duration. That's also about shifting. In some cases, you can shift from

one emotion to another one altogether. And that's a more challenging enterprise. That's an accident at many funerals. People are telling stories and laughing, da, da, da, and then on a dime turning and crying. And like that back and forth, nearly thrashing between emotional states. There is evidence there of just how quickly we can pivot through an emotional state. Absolutely. And everyone here, I think, has probably experienced this and maybe done it unintentionally

through one of the first shifters I talk about, which is sensation. Wait, sorry, let's go back up. What is a shifter? And then let's get down into some of the- So a shifter, well, actually, before we go into shifter, there's one other point I want to make, which is about why I really want you to believe that you can really control your emotions.

Awesome. Because the research shows that... The name of your laboratory. Well, that's... You're bringing it back to my vanity. It is that. That's part of it. But there's also this concept of self-efficacy, which you're well aware of, which is if you

believe that you can do something, that is like a master belief. This puts you on a totally different trajectory. This is the one. If there was anything I could wish for my loved ones and people I get to work with- Self-efficacy. The foundational belief is that I can do things. I can do hard things. I have the ability within me to figure things out. And the word efficacy means power,

a sense of feeling powerful. Absolutely. And the reason why this is so important, if you don't think you can do something, why the hell are you going to take any effort to try to do it? It makes no sense, right? If you do not think that you could do anything to become more physically fit, why am I going to go to the gym and do these very painful things where people are yelling at me every day? Like it makes no sense. But if I think doing that's going to lead me to achieve a goal, that is then putting me on a totally different trajectory. So I like to think of this whole process of managing our emotions. There are two parts, motivation, you got to have

that, and then ability or skills, and you need those two. And skills is that shifters is another term for skills, right? So these different tools, synonym for shifters, that you can use to change the volume on your emotions, how long you stay in them, or even go from one emotion to the other. And what I've appreciated, again, not to get too ahead, because I do want to spend good, ample time on your favorite shifters, but your framing is wonderful, which is there's internal shifters, there is other people that are shifters. That's right. There's environmental elements that are shifters, there's cultural shifters. You can be people that are shifters. There's environmental elements that are shifters.

There's cultural shifters. You can be a shifter for another person. You can organize your environment as a shifter. And then there's this larger culture, which I think is, in my mind, one of the most powerful. It's the master shifter. Oh, yeah. So the cultural stuff. Totally agree with you. Absolutely. Because it's invisible, and it really shapes so much of our thinking and behaviors. But before we get to the shifters, can you speak right to, I have a 16-year-old parent, so this is slight selfishly here, but can you speak to the parents in the room, in the audience about how you would go about or how you do go about helping install that master belief that a young person can have power in a turbulent world where they

are getting, let alone hormonally and situationally, ripped around by the world around them. Our world is turbulent right now. Fair statement. Oh, yeah. Okay. So how do you help the young ones develop a sense of self-efficacy? I talk to them all the time. And this is first person. I've got two daughters,

15 and 11. And even though I'm a quote unquote expert on emotion regulation, they think I know nothing. It's really humbling. And nonetheless, I put it in the air. So I think of culture, it's the air we breathe. And from the time they're little kids, it's the simple stuff. If we try, we can achieve. You can do this. It's those simple messages that I convey to them over and over about how to deal with hard things, including their emotional life and school, so that I'm instilling what I'm doing when I'm repeating those messages to them is I am shaping their values and beliefs. That's layer one of what culture is all about. So what the hell is culture? We all talk about culture, but we can get pretty concrete and

tactical. Cultures are values and beliefs. What is the value? Are our emotions good for us or bad for us? Is anxiety a good thing or a bad thing? My oldest daughter switched to a tougher school when she was in middle school. And when she started in sixth grade, she had like demands that she had never encountered before. And went into her bedroom one night and I see she's visibly distraught. Like, sweetie, what's going on? She's like, I don't know. I'm feeling this stuff and I don't know what it is. And so this is your body doing exactly what it should be doing to help you manage the situation. That's a little anxiety. And what it's telling you is you've got an important test

tomorrow. We need to study a little bit. This is a really good thing that you're experiencing this because it's telling you to pay attention. That little frame there that I gave her totally shifted her emotional response. And it also conveyed the belief to her that this is something that she can manage and do. So, you know, I think you should talk to your kids about this stuff. I think you should model it. And I think you should give them tools kids about this stuff. I think you should model it. And I think you should give them tools. Because that's the other thing that cultures give to us. Cultures give us practices and tools to reinforce the values and beliefs we have. So if I tell you, you can, in fact, manage your emotions if you really want to,

I've also got to give you the tools to show that I'm not just talking. Yeah. Let's open up a couple tools that you think are just wonderful starting places for folks. And you've used two different words about emotions, controlling and managing. Those are two very different words. What are you more interested, controlling emotions or managing emotions? You know, I don't draw a fine distinction between those, but tell me what you think when you hear those. One creates space for me. When I'm managing something, I can manage well or not, or I can, there's just more space in it. Controlling is like either I did it or not. I controlled it or I didn't control it. Interesting. And I don't want to back myself or the athletes that I work with into like, it was a binary area yeah so that's why i talk

about working well with emotions yeah and so it gives us i think more that that that resonates and i think intuitively i didn't actually think about it as deeply and eloquently as you just put it but there was a reason i called the book managing your emotions yeah not controlling it i think it's softer and it's more inviting to folks. Yeah, there you go. Okay. So we'll run with that one today. We're on the same page. We're on the same page. I didn't share this. I have, when I was introducing you, is that

how much respect I have. I'm in the field of high performance, high stakes, consequential environments. The psychology that is grounded in the laboratory and that must work in environments of high speed and consequence. And your research and your tools and your framing of the research, there's a safety bucket that I have or safety feeling that I have that if it's come from your laboratory or people that you've coauthored with, it's grounded in good science. So the conversion from good science to what actually works in the field is hard work. And you've done a great job in our field of high performance sports psychology. So I'll just reframe that right now that the gifts you've given our field

and the gifts you've given so many is rich. So I just want to make sure that that comes back around. Deep gratitude in it, like right back at you, because in some ways, I think it's easier to identify and do these experiments. But the real challenge, as we're going to talk about, is then taking this knowledge and giving it to people in a way that really moves the needle on their emotional lives. And that is the terrain that you are the sensei in. The sensei. Oh, that's good.

Yeah. They like that one. We'll do that. Okay. Let's get into the tools. Let's get a handful of tools. A handful of tools. So there are some shifters inside us, things you could do on your own, and then there are

shifters out there in the world. Let's start with one of my favorite shifters, our sensory shifters. I was totally blind to this for much of my life. And at some point I was like, what are you doing? And so I'm curious about your own experience here. So sensation. We all have the capacity to sense the world around us. We all have the equivalent of like the world around us. We all have the equivalent of

satellite dishes melted on our bodies. And those satellite dishes just help us make sense of the world. And we got to do that to safely navigate it. And so we're getting information all the time through sensation. And part of the stuff that we get is like, is this good or bad for me? So there's emotional quality to sensation. You can harness your senses to powerfully shift your emotions. Everyone here listen to music? Why do you listen to music? There you go, stop, no one else, they'll say anything else.

We're not gonna give any of, feels good. You actually ask people in studies, why do you listen to music? Close to 100% will give that answer I like the way it makes me feel I've been listening to music since I'm five years old Since MC Hammer graced my cassette player Right. I love music and yet if you ask me like how strategic have I been in? Using music as a tool to shift me so that when I'm angry or

anxious or sad I go to a specific set of songs to push my emotion in the other direction. Only the last few years that I've done that. I had an experience with my daughter. I was coaching soccer and she wakes up one morning on a Saturday and she's just like totally morose. She's not into it. She's bumming me out. I managed to get her into the car. We're driving in a soccer field. And then just serendipitously, one of my favorite songs, which I will shamefully admit right here, Journeys Don't Stop Believin', comes on the radio. And I lean into this experience. I love that song. I'm bopping, I'm jamming, I'm actually humming along. And normally when I do this in the presence of my daughters, I cease to be in their presence

for very long because they kick me out. But I look in the rear view mirror and she's bopping. And it's changing. It's contagious. Emotions are contagious. And that was a real aha for me. And so I went back to the literature in the lab. And we then did some studies. We said, hey, the last time you felt angry or anxious or sad, what did you do to shift your emotions? Only between 10% and 30% of participants use music.

Music is a powerful kick in the emotional butt. And we often get it wrong. Anyone here ever feel really sad? And rather than tuning into Journey in all its glory, you go the other direction, like Air Supply or Chicago? Anyone ever do that? Like sad, to perpetuate that state? If you want to stay sad, keep doing it. But if you want to go the other way, that's exactly the wrong thing to do. So that's just one example. So to make it applied in the sport world, for those who don't know, I spent nine seasons with an NFL team. And during that time, it was a great debate before a game, should we play music for the locker room? And so there's a vibe that we're trying to create, or should we play music for the locker room?

And so there's a vibe that we're trying to create, or should we have people have their own music to get into a vibe? So it was almost like, I don't know, a full assumption that music is part of the ready experience, but some people wanted gospel, our quarterback wanted gospel music, and then some people, different positions,

wanted more aggressive music. So we landed people, different positions, wanted more aggressive music. So we landed with there's going to be an upbeat, more aggressive tone that was loud and intense for the locker room. And then if you didn't want that, get your headphones on, choose your own thing. And so that was what we landed on. And that's reasonable. I think there is some value to the communal experience to have this be a shared cultural. We couldn't imagine everyone in their own headset. We wanted some intensity.

This is not boxing. This is a team sport, right? Yeah, right. But having said that, there are different preferences. I would love to know the- Journey was not- I was going to say, how popular is Journey on that NFL spot? It's not doing it.

You suggest that, you're out. You're out. So music is a shifter. Music is a shifter. It's like, it. You suggest that, you're out. You're out. So music is a shifter. Music's a shifter. It's like, here you go. I have an emotion regulation device. I carry it around wherever I go. I have playlists that I use to amp me up, to get me lower.

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to help you regulate your emotions. Tell me more. It's a duty-free shop. Okay, yes. Duty-free shop. You go to the duty-free shop, you're bombarded with... Smells.

Smells. Yeah. Right, like we spritz ourselves with all sorts of stuff to change the way other people feel about us and how we feel about ourselves. Hotels benefit from this. I just checked into a lovely hotel in West Hollywood. I opened the door. I'm like, oh my God, I'm home. I should spend more money at this place, right? I should stay here forever. They're piping scents through the ventilation to shift us. That's right.

Give you one more example. Wait, let's stay on this one for just a moment. This is something that elite athletes and teams will do is because they travel, the away disadvantage is part of the ecosystem. So they want a home type of feeling. So they'll use like a lavender at home, like spray in their room. So that, not because the lavender

is the most powerful shifter it's a shifter potentially but when they spray it at home then they have something that they can carry with them and spray on the pillow at the hotel clever so now you've got some semblance of familiarity yeah especially priming for bed yeah you know lavender and sure yeah very clever i haven't heard of that yeah that's exactly a way of using a shifter all of our senses can shift us like all of them food for sure like you know great food bad food shifting in different directions but one other powerful one and then we'll go to different bucket is um it's a tool that i call affectionate but not creepy touch you familiar with it? I hope I am. So touch, touch is the first sense to develop

and it is a powerful shifter. When we encode an affectionate embrace from someone else, two things happen. There's an automatic release of stress-fighting chemicals in our bodies and you're reminded at the conscious level that someone cares about you. Now, I say it has to be not creepy because the research shows that when it is perceived as unwanted, like we're not stupid, right? Like we don't have that stress relaxation response. So it does have to be wanted, but you know, it's easy to do this at home, right? When you talk about kids, right? Putting your hand on their shoulder when they're struggling and stressed out about homework.

Giving your loved one a hug. These are ways that we can shift other people powerfully without having to do much. One of the things I try to do in the book is burst a lot of myths about emotion management. We often think that managing our emotions is really hard not hard to give a hug right like there are simple things that you can do i have not read the original research but it seems to be pretty popular that at around 10 seconds there's some oxytocin exchange the cuddle chemical the down regulation neurochemical is that a myth or is it grounded in science the 10 seconds the duration of the hug yeah i'm pleading the fifth on the 10 seconds i'm not i i truly i don't know either i've seen it i'm not aware of that of that finding but that

doesn't mean that it's not good it's just my fragile brain right now um but oxytocin more generally is absolutely a powerful type of response that that kind of affectionate embrace elicits. And you're hijacking now the chemicals that are pushing around our emotions to your benefit. Again, I'm going to go back to a question I asked earlier about upstream and downstream. So these are downstream tools or manipulations to impact your senses, to modulate your emotional responses. And then the framing of it matters so much because if I spray the lavender spray and I say, oh God, what am I doing? This is so stupid.

I've just mutated the potentiality of the lavender. To a degree. Puslebo and nocebo is what I wanted to talk about with you, which is an upstream framing about the impact of a thing. So there are certain tools or shifters. They're going to impact you regardless of whether you believe they're going to impact you or not. So I'm going to give you an example now that is going to definitively make this case in your mind. You ready for it? Yeah. Okay. You like brush up

against someone who has terrible body odor, right? Like you're going to have a negative reaction, regardless of whether you think that should impact your emotions. However, our beliefs... However, let me add to however. If I am deeply tuned from a compassionate standpoint, and let's just imagine that this person is highly disheveled. Yeah. Okay. And if my framing, this is one of the great researchers from Richie Davidson and mindfulness,

is that when he was put in a full-body MRI to measure his brain, there's a gunshot that went off in the middle of it, and I'm shortchanging the experiment, that he was one of the only few when the gunshot went off, it didn't light up his fight, flight, freeze mechanism. His amygdala system didn't activate. And when he came out of the tube, the researchers said, so did you hear the gunshot? He said, yeah. And they said, so tell us what happened. And he said, oh boy, I was just really concerned that somebody might

be hurt. Where the rest of us untrained, without a disciplined mind, immediately go to, am I okay? And go to a panic mode. So if you're really conditioned and trained, you can even hijack your hijack system, your amygdala. Well, yes, we can actually change the sensitivity of our threat response system without question. And so your compassionate response to the intense body odor can push around the magnitude of how disgusted you are. And probably duration too.

Right? Right. Okay. So you could accentuate that or reduce it, but you're still likely going to have the initial response, I would argue. Yeah. Okay. So the beliefs are powerful modulators of these experiences.

And that's another shifter I talk about, how our beliefs can shift your stuff around. How we can upgrade our belief system to work more efficiently or even optimally with emotions. So let me share with you my favorite set of, we'll call them perspective shifters or belief shifters. They're distancing tools. But before I do, let me just explain to people here why I think it's so important to talk about beliefs. Has anyone here ever heard this idea that you should just change the way you think to change the way you feel?

It's easy, right? So we're going home from, I'm with my wife and another couple, we're coming home from dinner in Detroit one night. And this buddy of mine is really struggling with an interpersonal issue at work. And he's going in, he's getting into it. And his wife just turns to him and goes, why don't you just think positively about it? Just focus on the bright side. And I have this very distinct memory of his response. He goes, yeah, easier effing said than done. And I think that really resonated with me. Sometimes I know I can think differently, but I have trouble doing it when I'm really wrapped around

an emotional response. And so perspective shifting is a set of tools that you can use. I think of them as like psychological jujitsu moves to push our beliefs around. And there are a couple of different ways that they work. So let me give you a few, very tactical here. So one is a category of tools called mental time travel. So we often hear about the importance of being in the moment. Well, you can also travel in time to your benefit. And there are two key ways you do it. If I'm really struggling with something big, I think to myself, how am I going to feel about this tomorrow, next week, next year? It sounds so unbelievably simple. It's almost like, why are we even talking about this?

And yet that is a profound jujitsu. This is like advanced level psyops here. And here's why. All of you here have lived through millions of emotional experiences, and most of them take a very specific time course. Like something happens, it triggers, and then as time goes on, those emotions subside. Different experiences may be triggered more intensely than others. Some last longer than others, but all of them follows that shape. You all know this to be true. I've never met any of you, and I know you have experienced this, because this is a truism

of the human condition. When you jump into that time travel machine, you are activating that recognition that God, as awful as what I'm dealing with right now is, it's eventually going to subside. And once you have that realization, that gives you hope. Hope is a powerful tool for downshifting a big negative emotion. And this is a flexible tool. How am I going to feel tomorrow, next week, next month, next year? And you could also go back in time. This works a little bit differently. It's equally powerful. I open up the book telling a story about my grandparents who very narrowly escaped being slaughtered during the Holocaust. Terrible, terrible story,

although it was a great ending. Homeless for three years and ghetto to ghetto, all this dramatic, almost Steven Spielbergian kind of story. The story in itself was a shifter. Story, and that's exactly right. It is my shifter. It was one for me reading it as well. Yeah. I mean, what's the expression? Is it ace in the hole? Or what's that? Do you know that expression? Yeah, I do know. I don't know where you're going with it. It's like the quiver. What's the secret weapon I possess?

Oh, is? Is their story. Yeah. Because when I am struggling with something, something really big comes up. And I'm like lost in it. I jump into this mental time travel machine. I program it to go to 1943. I get out. I hang out with Bubby and Papa in the frozen Polish woods just for a little bit. It's like, I don't like it back there. It's cold, right? I

don't spend a lot of time, but I spend enough time to know that what I'm experiencing here pales in comparison to what they endured. So this is a way of broadening my perspective powerfully, right? Really putting in perspective what I'm going through. You don't need to have Holocaust surviving grandparents to do this. We all have our own personal experiences or familial or cultural experiences that we can lean on in this way through mental time travel to broaden our perspective. I'd like to add one piece to it. That one, great piece of writing. Thank you for sharing that with

us. And the power of reminding ourselves of what others have gone through, is what you've eloquently pointed to. And you've also said, remember that we have our own. This is something, I don't know the science here, but I know that this is working. And this might be a study that we could do together. When I'm facing something that is hard, challenging, difficult, it's an environment of speed and accuracy, And both of those are called on for me to perform properly. And let's say I'm framing this challenge favorably, like, come on, this is something I really want to do. So I'm moving, I'm motivated in the right direction. And there's certainly moments where I'm like, yeah, but so there's some doubt that would creep

in. And if we don't have like a readiness to be able to quickly tap in to memories or things that we are not consciously aware of that can serve us in that moment, the doubt, the self-saving mechanism, the fear response, which is normal and appropriate, run the show. So our biology will take over. We tighten up, we narrow down, and then we're starting like, I don't know, I don't know. So what I've found is that the practice, and this is where mental imagery has paid dividends. Mental imagery is seeing great

successes or seeing hard times in the past that I've worked through or the athletes have worked through and have it right underneath the surface. So as soon as somebody gets brushed off balance, they've done the internal work well in advance to have these many hundreds, tens of stories that they've experienced that they can call on. Now it pops through the surface and it's like, wait, hold on. That's right. That and my skills, right?

That stuff in the past, my skills right now. Yeah, come on, let's go. That's exactly the hope that I have for this book, which is it gives you all tools, these shifters, that you can familiarize yourself with ahead of time so that when you find yourself in the kinds of situations that you're describing, you don't have to like, uh, what do I do?

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So I'm asked quite a bit by journalists and audiences, do I ever struggle with my emotions? I say, no, I'm perfect. Of course I struggle with my emotions at times. I'm a human, but what I am really good at is I have plants. I have cocktails of tools, of shifters that I go to automatically so that I get angry or anxious. I've got these three things I do right away without thinking. What's automatic? What are they? It's mental time travel. Forward or backward?

It's typically forward. I save the backward for the more intense stuff. Okay. So if you're upset, you travel forward to- How am I going to feel about this tomorrow morning? Okay, got it. Like 90% of the times, it dissolves right then and there. Right, okay. I do something we haven't talked about.

It's one of my personal favorites. It's called distanced self-talk. I coach myself through the problem using my own name and you. And I do this out loud in front of large audiences. That was a joke. Silently, very important. But, you know, Ethan, how are you gonna handle this?

I think to myself, that may sound kind of kooky, but consider this. Are you all much better at giving advice to other people than you are taking your own advice? Do as I say, not as I do. Like this is a maxim, another one of these universals. When you use your name or you, it gets you to think about yourself like you're advising someone else. So I do that. And then if weather permits, which it doesn't sadly always where I live, I will go for a walk in a green setting. Usually that is all I need to do. But if it's not, then I elevate to level two. I tap into my emotional advisors. I call them up. I've got

an amazing group that I could lean on who are skilled at coaching me through problems. And this is an exercise you call forward in the book is do the work ahead of time. Who are the people that give you advice? Who are the people that listen? That's right. So in the book, you ask people to go forward or to do the work ahead of time

so you're not caught in the rapids of life. That is the key here, right? So I wish I can meet with each of you after this talk and you could share with me some of your emotional challenges we all have them and i could just prescribe a combination of tools that will just send you on your merry way i cannot do that and i don't know any scientist or practitioner who can't say, say that again. This is really important because if we miss this insight, others feel like they're less than, like, well, that worked for the great Ethan, but it's not working for me. That's right. So there are no one size fits all solutions. This

is a mantra I live by, and I live by it based on what I know of how all of our brains work and the science here. There are no one size fits all solutions. So the best thing I can do for you is give you the tools that scientists have identified. They've been carefully profiled so we understand how they work. And then I can invite you to start doing some self-experimenting to figure out what are the unique combinations that work for you, giving your unique emotional makeup. Every one of you has a unique emotional fingerprint. So what are the tools that match that fingerprint? It's a lot like physical fitness, the way I think about it. Step one to becoming physically fit, you got to learn how

to use each machine. Like what are the different exercises? Once you do that, now you got to figure out how to cobble together a routine that serves your goals. And your goals, it's not just like being this much weight, right? And being able to run this far. It's also like, what do you actually enjoy doing? Right? So same is true when it comes to all of these strategies and understanding how they fit together. And so that's really what the book is about. Yeah. Giving you the tools and then inviting you to self-experiment and share them with others. Let's stay on science for just a minute. The you versus I self-talk. I want to make sure that you're rested on, or that the community here knows that you're resting on science there. This is not something that was clever for you one day,

like, oh, I feel more powerful when I say, come on, Ethan, you can do it. As opposed to, I can do this. This has been studied. This is a lot of research in my lab and others. What we do is we bring people into the lab. And although it's going to sound mean, you may think less of me. We induce negative emotions. We stress people out. And we do this in creative ways that we attempt to simulate real life because we have to. We've got to put you in the diagnostic condition to test our ideas about different tools. So one example would be we bring people into the lab and we greet them with a smile.

Hey, thanks for coming to our study. This is a study on public speaking. Today we're going to ask you to give a speech on why you're ideally qualified to land your dream job. We want you to talk about your strengths and weaknesses. One of the greatest fears for most people in the Western world. Right. And you're going to actually come up here and there are going to be judges who are actually actors who we train to look really mean. Some of you would qualify for that job role by your facial expressions right now. Just kidding. And then we, in one condition, we say, hey, you know,

this is on, we care about how people prepare themselves before speech. Some people report trying to work through their feelings by asking themselves, why am I feeling this way? That's what we tell one group. Another group, we say the same thing, but some people report trying to work through their feelings by asking themselves, why is, and if I'm the subject, why is Ethan feeling this way? Ask yourself, why are, you know, use your name and you as much as possible. And then we show that the people who use their name and you, they perform better. They have less anxiety. They ruminate less. We put them in a MRI machine and find that they experience reductions in the emotional networks

in their brain without exerting much effort. We see these effects kick in within a few seconds. So this has been extensively studied as have all the tools that I talk about here. So let's turn on a couple more tools that the community here would be very familiar with. Mindfulness, journaling, breath work. You've already hit on being in nature, and maybe you can just pull on why the research there is pretty profound, but why that one's important. But can you hit on those big ones, which is mindfulness, journaling, and maybe breath work?

Sure. So mindfulness. A la meditation. Meditation. Great tool. If it works for you, keep doing it. Two disclaimers. If it doesn't work for you, don't beat yourself up.

There are a lot of people who it doesn't work for, and that's fine because remember, there are no one size fits all solutions. Second disclaimer for mindfulness is you don't just have to do meditation. You can do this and layer on the other tools I've talked about too. We tend to search for single magic pills. They do not exist. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I'm asked, Dr. Cross, what is the one thing people should do right now to deal with X, Y, or Z? I can't in good faith answer that question. And if you had to answer that question? I would say there's a phenomenal book out there that lists all of the tools. The way I answer that question is I give like three or four super simple things that people can do, right?

Not one. So that's mindfulness. Journaling, great tool. We just wrapped up a study. We published at looking at how people manage their COVID anxiety. Really fine grain research where we, every day for several days, we ask, what tools did you use? Which of 18 different tools? And we get people to rate their anxiety. Journaling was perhaps the most effective tool for lowering people's anxiety. It was also the least utilized tool of the entire set. Why?

It's effortful. Sitting down and finding 15 to 20 minutes is a luxury that a lot of people don't feel that they have. So really useful, one of the ways it works is by helping people distance, right? You're writing about yourself. You're becoming the character in your story, but not frequently utilized. One of the things I just want to add an asterisk next to is that let's say mindfulness or journaling is when somebody says it's not for me, I want to pause for just a moment to make sure that you've put in the right amount of work to know that it actually doesn't work for you, which is an invisible made-up line to try to sort out. But really important because some of these tools, you can see their effects right away.

Like go home, put some journey on on the way home. You'll feel something, that's for sure. I can't promise you it's all positive, but you will feel something. That's an immediate kick in the butt kind of tool. Other tools like mindfulness and journaling, not only will you not necessarily feel their benefits right away You might actually experience some distress before you do kind of like exercise like you go into a new routine it hurts badly for me before you start to experience gains Mindfulness it can be really uncomfortable Sitting for 15 minutes by yourself very averse. If there's one classic

study, people would rather give themselves electric shocks than be alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. Mindfulness takes some time to develop that habit. Journaling too, when you're first getting into a painful thing, that can be really painful for folks. But if you push through, the research suggests it may well help you. I say may, not to be a downer. I say may because that's the reality. Not every tool works for every person. But what is at stake here is so low. These are not medications laden with side effects.

Give the tools a shot. If they work, keep using them and layer on additional tools. If you find that they don't, pivot. Finding Mastery is brought to you by iRestore. When it comes to my health, I try to approach things with a proactive mindset. It's not about avoiding poor health. This is about creating the conditions for growth.

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I love that. So right now, you can get 25% off all mattresses at Lisaisa.com plus an extra $50 off when you use the code finding mastery at checkout. That's lisa.com. The promo code is finding mastery for 25% off and then plus an extra $50 on us because quality sleep is just too important to leave to chance. Beautiful. Dr. Cross, this has been amazing. We're going to get to some questions from the community here. And as folks are formulating their questions, one word answers. Ready? It all comes down to shift. Success is marked by shifting. Okay. If I could sit with one master, who would it be? Dr. Shifter.

I see where this is going. Could you help us make a distinction between ruminating, journaling, and being mindful? So ruminating, journaling, and mindful. Ruminating is getting stuck in a negative thought loop. So there's a problem and you're trying to work through it, but you keep turning it over and over and you're not making progress towards resolving it. Journaling is when you're sitting down to write about your deepest thoughts and feelings about a problem. And the beauty of journaling is that the act of writing guides you

to work through it. Because stories, you're writing a story. One of the first things we learn about stories is it got a beginning, a middle, and an end. So the act of writing guards against letting you slip into rumination. Mindfulness is used in lots of different ways by different people but the definition that i think is most common involves getting in touch with your moment to moment experience and recognizing the fleeting nature of your thoughts so thoughts come and they go and you can let them go and often we do that through repeating a mantra or focusing on our breath over and over. Because when you do those things, you see all these thoughts pop up. And eventually through repeated practice learn, you don't have to actually engage with those

thoughts. You can let them go. I had a question. I've got two teenagers, 15 and 13. And a lot of times they'll say to me, I can't change how I feel. Why are you trying to make me change how I feel? I'm trying to understand the difference between allowing them to have the feelings and me managing. What's the line between that I'm not changing or trying to control how they're feeling, let them experience the discomfort or the whatever, versus me trying

to manage, fix, you know, whatever the parenting trap I fall into. Well, you know, teens are, first of all, it's a challenging time, right? Very challenging. And there's a lot of neural development that is happening. And so there's emotion regulation difficulties that are very common among that age group. Step one, one thing that we didn't really get into has to, I forget, did we talk about the functionality of emotions? We didn't, right? Yes, we did talk. Okay. Ready

you for action. All emotions are useful. So you might share with them that when they're not flipping out ideally, like, you know, at the dinner table, like, hey, I just went to this talk. Did you know that anxiety can be good for you? So you want to kind of get that in their awareness, that their emotions can be helpful. And then in terms of intervening, it's if you want to, when you want to. If you want to, when you want to change your emotions, when you want to manage them, let's talk.

But you don't want to offer the unsolicited advice because that can blow up in your face as I have certainly experienced at times. Good questions. Do you see that in 2025, the need to manage one's emotions is more critical or has it always been this important? And I guess I would even backing that up further, like from a evolutionary standpoint, how do you see the role of our emotions in terms of supporting our survival, like do you see the role of our emotions in terms of supporting our survival, like as it was originally sort of designed? We don't want to live life

without emotions. They are critical to our survival. I think we're living through very turbulent times. I think norms about reporting our emotions, talking about them have changed very powerfully over the past 25 years, such that we are much more likely to verbalize the distress that we are experiencing. I think that's a really good thing in many ways, because we're getting people more help. But I also think that these struggles that we're talking about are timeless issues. One of my favorite little detours that I took in the book was to get into the history of emotion and emotion dysregulation.

And here's something I think about a lot. Between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago, our ancestors invented what is widely believed to be the first surgical technique. Does anyone know what that was? Trepanation, carving holes in people's skulls. One of the reasons why it was believed to be used? Helping people with big emotional dysregulation. Let the evil spirits causing those problems out.

First surgical technique ever invented was a tool to help us manage our emotions. Give me 30 seconds more to close this loop. If you then fast forward to the late 1940s, Portuguese physician wins the Nobel Prize for another emotion regulation innovation. It is called the Leucotomy, later rebranded the Frontal Lobotomy, poking holes in our cortex to provide people with relief.

Nobel Prize. The best-selling book of all time is the Bible. What is the most famous story in that book? Adam and Eve, I think so. Story of emotion dysregulation. I think these are timeless issues. And we should all be really grateful that Michael and I are not handing out ice picks here.

We're not talking about anything invasive like that. Good job, Ethan. And so that's a positive message for 2025. I'm really interested in hormones, and I wonder what the research is that you've either done or that you can speak to in terms of emotional regulation. It seems like women especially are subjects of one at this point in terms of hormone replacement therapy and other issues.

Thanks. So hormones are another level of analysis that they impact our emotions. So there are biological mechanisms that absolutely can predispose us to be more vulnerable to bigger emotional responses, if you will, or muted emotional responses. And hormones are like the chemical messengers that play a role in determining the volume of our emotions. But our hormones don't flow divorced from everything else happening inside our minds and in our brains and our bodies. And so what we know is that a lot of the different tools that we are talking about have implications for hormonal responses. They can shift those responses. I mean, touch is a great example. Touch and affection and embrace has implications for the cascade of hormones we experience.

So it's not to say that thinking in a particular way is going to counteract the change in hormones that someone may be experiencing at a certain point in their life. But we can massage those hormones around. Dr. Cross, thank you so much for sharing and taking the time to put real research into a great read. And so this is a joy for me to be able to do this with you. And thank you for including me in your mission. Well, thank you for just being a fantastic conversation partner. And thank all of you for being a great audience coming out. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show,

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