Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 519: The Art and Science of Keeping Your Sh*t Together | Shinzen Young and James Gross

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

In western culture, there's been a long held view that our ability to reason should be placed above our emotions. But the hard truth is that our emotions are there and they're non-negotiable��� and If you don't know how to work with them, they can own you.The good news is that you can work with them and that there are many systems for doing so. To boot, you can learn a ton by listening to your emotions in the right ways. Today’s guests, Shinzen Young and James Gross will help us understand how to work with our emotions and offer both techniques in modern science and ancient wisdom in order to do so. Gross is the Ernest R. Hilgard Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory. Young is an American mindfulness teacher and neuroscience research consultant. He teaches something called Unified Mindfulness, which you will hear him describe in this conversation.This is part one in a series we’re calling The Art and Science of Keeping Your Sh*t Together. In each episode we bring together a meditative adept or Buddhist scholar and a respected scientist. The idea is to give you the best of both worlds to arm you with both modern and ancient tools for regulating your emotions. In this episode we talk about:James’s “modal model” for understanding what emotions are and how they workJames’s five different types of strategies you can use for regulating your emotionsShinzen’s contention that emotions have two sides to themHow we can experience emotions with more fulfillment and less suffering via a mindfulness training he calls “focus factors”James’s “process model of emotion regulation” What James believes are the elements that unite science and BuddhismShinzen’s contention that anyone can experience massive benefits of mindfulness training if their meditation practice has four key componentsFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/shinzen-young-james-gross-519See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings. So much of life is dominated by mysterious forces in ancient civilizations. These forces were referred to as the passions or pathos or affectus. These days, we call them emotions or feelings. In Western culture, there's been a long-held view that our ability to reason should be placed above our passions, our emotions, our heart, as some say.

But the hard truth is, emotions are there. They're non-negotiable. If you don't know how to work with them, they can own you. The good news is that you can work with them and that there are many systems for doing so. To boot, you can learn a ton by listening to your emotions in the right ways. Today, we are kicking off a special series

which we are calling the art and science of keeping your shit together. For the next two weeks, we're going to bring together an eminent scientist and a deeply skilled meditation teacher. The scientists will talk about what they've learned about emotional regulation through the research and the meditation teacher will talk about whether the research rhymes with their personal experience and their understanding of ancient wisdom. And both parties will talk about how to put it all into practice in your moment to moment life. Our scientist today is making his first appearance on this show, James Gross, is the Ernest R. Hillguard Professor of Psychology at Stanford University,

where he directs the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory. So he's no slouch. He has come up with something fascinating. He calls it the modal model for understanding what emotions are and how they work. That may sound a little academic, but in this conversation, you're gonna hear him lay out five strategies that you can easily embrace to regulate your emotions.

Chiming in with his responses and his own techniques will be Shenzhen young, who is making his second appearance on this show. Shenzhen is an American mindfulness teacher and neuroscience research consultant. He teaches something called unified mindfulness, which you will hear him describe in this conversation. These are two truly fascinating dudes, and I think you're going to love this conversation. By the way, this summit series where we bring together modern science and ancient wisdom is a bit of an experiment for us. The idea really is to give you the best of both worlds when it comes to, you know, keeping your shit together. But we really want to know if it's working for you, so please hit me up on Twitter if you have any feedback.

Okay, we'll get started with James Gross and Shin Zen Young right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without do. What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app.

It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm all One word spelled out Okay on with the show Hey y'all is your girl Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress singer and entrepreneur on my new podcast baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends family and experts the questions that are in my head Like it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace?

Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. What's up? James Gross and Shins and Young, welcome to the show. Thank you. Love way to be here. So James, let me start with you. From a scientific perspective. What are

emotions? How do you understand emotions? Dan emotions like anger or fear or happiness are responses that we make to situations that somehow we see as important. And these emotions unfold over time and involve changes in how we feel in our behavior and in how our body is responding. And as these changes play out, sometimes they feel pleasant or good or positive, sometimes they feel unpleasant or bad or negative. But we need to be really careful with how we use those terms, negative and positive emotions, because whether they feel good in the moment or feel bad in the moment,

emotions can be either helpful or unhelpful. Some emotions that feel bad in the moment, let's say, feeling angry about something that really doesn't feel right. That anger, although it might feel unpleasant and uncomfortable, could really motivate us to behave in ways that help better align the world with the way we think things should be. Similarly, positive emotions, things that feel good in the moment might actually not be helpful in the long term. So if we really, really treasure a certain sort of capacity to be right in every conversation

we have, that might feel good in the moment, but it may mean that no one wants to talk to us. So I think we need to be careful about how we think about positive and negative. And I'm very interested in not just what emotions are and how they play out, but how to determine when they can be helpful to us or others when they can be unhelpful. And when they're unhelpful, what we can do about them. We're going to go deep into that, into regulation. But staying with you for a second, on the sort of conceptual level here,

the definitional level, when we talk about what emotions are from your scientific standpoint, you've got something you call the modal model of emotion. What is that? That's right, Dan. So when we think about emotions unfolding over time, it's helpful to realize that in many circumstances, the way they play out is that they start with a situation that we see is somehow relevant or important to one of our goals.

And in that situation, we then pay attention to features of that situation that matter to us. So there's a situation, we then pay attention, but then we need another step, which is that we have to evaluate or appraise the situation. In other words, what's going on? I need to make sense of it. And then after that appraisal, we see the loosely coordinated changes in how we feel, in how we behave, and how our body responds. And it's that sequence of a situation that we pay attention to, then think about or appraise, and then we have the responses that we refer to as the modal model, just because that's often how

emotions play out over time. I'm going to ask a question that may sound a little obnoxious, but I don't mean it that way. It's coming from a place of real curiosity. But so what if we understand how emotions play out in this modal model, what do we do about that? How does that help us? Yeah. So I think one of our goals in science is to understand the way things are, but I agree with

you that stopping there isn't very satisfying, and often we want to use that knowledge to actually change the way things are or might be. So one of the reasons we're so interested in articulating this so-called modal model or understanding how emotions unfold is that because sometimes I may not want to have an emotion that I anticipate having or actually am having in the moment, if I have a sense of how emotions actually work, what's going on under the hood, how they unfold over time, I then have a tremendously powerful place to stand for thinking about the things I can change to alter the emotion trajectory.

So in a world where every emotion that anyone ever had was just right, was helpful in all ways, I don't think we'd need to worry about a deep understanding of emotions unfolding. But we're not in that world, in my view, we know that there's tremendous suffering, which we'll talk more about, I assume, emotions are causing grave distress, anxiety levels are higher now than they have been for years, depression, and other negative affective states

associated with grave suffering. And because we're in that world, I think we urgently need to better understand scientifically and at the level of each of our own lives how emotions unfold so that we can then have a place to stand for thinking about the ways that we can tune or more skillfully express and experience our emotions. So I'll come back to you in a second to talk about how we can more skillfully express our emotions based on what you've learned in your studies.

But let me switch over to Shins and for a second. Shins and I'm sure you've got a lot that you want to respond to from James' comments. But let me start with this question and you can take it in whatever direction you want. From your perspective, as somebody who has participated in a lot of scientific research and who is also a Buddhist influenced mindfulness coach, how do you understand emotions? I would say emotion has two sides.

There's emotional experience, certain mental images, certain mental talk, certain types of body sensation are deemed by a given individual at a given moment to be emotional in nature. So that's part of emotional experience. Then there's also emotional expression, both affect in the sense that, okay, you have a facial expression or a voice tone or a kind of body movement or an odor that indicates what's going on subjectively for you, but also broadly, the things we say, the decisions we come to, the actions we take in the world, are influenced by our subjective emotional experience.

So from a mindfulness practice point of view, we're interested in training certain generic focus factors, systematically if possible, systematically training focus factors like flexible concentration, sensory clarity, deep equanimity, and so forth. The effect of applying things like flexible concentration, sensory clarity, equanimity, and such, to our emotional life. Well, it's going to affect both sides. On the subjective side, it will allow pleasant emotions to be more fulfilling when you experience them in a state of concentration, clarity, equanimity, in other words, when you experience them with mindful awareness, the pleasant emotions actually deepen fulfillment.

It will allow the unpleasant emotions to still hurt, but not cause suffering. So the idea is that the pleasant side of subjective emotional experience fulfills more. In general, your base level of emotional fulfillment, as you go about the day, improves year by year. Your suffering due to uncomfortable emotions goes down. So I would say from the point of view of mindfulness practice, from the point of view of mindfulness practice, we would look at each of the modes and moments that James is talking about in terms of, okay, how our focus factors applied here by what mechanism

does it reduce suffering, elevate fulfillment, cause us to behave in more effective and mature ways? That would be a mindful science approach to emotions. James, is that job with how you view the world or are you hearing any irreconcilable differences in there? So thanks, Shinsen. I really like what you've just said and agree that training of the sort you've described mindfulness and all of its different impacts on focus tremendously powerful tool for shaping or tuning the emotion process. One of the things that I found helpful just thinking about what Shinsons shared with us is the concept of meta-emotion.

This is a slightly clunky term, but just has to do with the fact that of the many things that we might have emotions about, we humans sometimes have emotions about our emotions. So that's the idea of meta-emotions. And one of the ways of understanding what shinshen just shared with us, which is that with mindful practice, we can enjoy greater subjective sense of wellness and positive responding, diminished sense of suffering and unpleasantness. And yet retain a lot of agency and activity in the world, one of the ways of understanding that apparently paradoxical impact of mindfulness is this concept of meta-emotion because a huge source of human suffering, I think, arises from a tremendously powerful capacity that we have as humans to reflect on our own experience. What is it like to be a shinsen or dian or james? We can moment by moment tell a story about how things are going for each of us as we move through our lives. And as we do that, and this is tremendously important for our planning and for our effective coordination with other people.

At moments, we can have emotional responses about our emotional responses. We may feel anxious and then feel angry at ourselves for feeling anxious. And this multiplicative power of a meta-emotion is incredibly important to understand, because a lot of the suffering I think that we experience arises not from the momentary emotion that might help us out of a pinch or activate to prepare for an important assignment. But it's the emotion that we have about that emotion. We can't believe here again we're angry with our kids or frustrated with a parent. And it's that stacking of emotions, that meta-emotion that generates a ton of suffering. And that I think with training, we can come to think differently about those emotions

that we're having, not as harmful, but as helpful if they're limited in time and scope. And that then decreases the negative meta-emotion that we might experience, allowing us to effectively engage, joyfully, seriously, pursuing our goals, but not with that extra layer of commentary and negativity that we sometimes travel through life with.

Yeah, I mean, you're describing something is kind of one of the delicacies of a contemplative life, which is every once in a while, somebody comes along and points out something that we're all kind of aware of, but it's never been crystallized or articulated. And this idea that every once in a while, we notice maybe a shutter inducing attack of bigotry. Or we notice we're anxious at inconvenient moment. Or we notice that somebody's mouth noises while they're chewing drive us nuts. And as soon as we see this about ourselves,

we tell ourselves immediately a whole story about how horrible we are, how broken we are, how irreparable we are in any number of ways, deficient in any number of ways. I've seen that so often in my own mind and I think it's an under pointed out phenomenon. Shins, and do you have a name for this? Does this sound familiar to you?

It sounds very familiar. I mentioned sensory clarity. So if you were to ask me, what are the dimensions of sensory clarity? I'd probably give the same six dimensions I'd probably give the same six dimensions that are most commonly spoken of in science. Sensory clarity is your ability to track how much of what, when and where, interacting in what ways and changing in what ways. So what you were reporting is an interaction. You know that a certain image talk body emotion may trigger a different image talk body emotion and that one might trigger

yet another one. And if you're familiar with that triggering sequence, then you won't be hijacked by it. They sometimes, in traditional Buddhism, talk about the first arrow and the second arrow. But actually, there's much more to it than that. There's a third arrow, a fourth arrow. Once you start to look at how a train of reactivity can occur. Now, sometimes people think, oh, well, the trick is you stop that reaction, that second arrow, or you catch it at the third arrow. But you don't necessarily have to stop it. You can just bring concentration clarity and equanimity to the second arrow and the third arrow if there's a reaction to a reaction. But at some point, the arrows stop.

There is a last arrow, a last kind of reactivity, but it's deep, deep in subliminal, early sensory and motor processing. And so it has to be trained in the subconscious. You train the subconscious into heightened sensory clarity, equanimity, and flexible concentration, those three skills I mentioned. When that training reaches the subconscious,

then whatever hits you is flowing. It's fluid. And fluid pleasure is more fulfilling. And fluid pain will motivate you, but it won't freak you out, like the coagulated versions. So in the end, the deepest training about sort of meta-tameta-tameta, what's triggering, what? The buck stops when you've trained the subconscious to automatically process each inner or outer see-here feel in a clear concentrated and equanimous way so that you go from self and world feeling like a shard of ice to

self and world feeling like waves of water interacting. You've said so many fascinating things in the preceding paragraphs. There's no shortage, though, of technical terminology that I do want to give you a chance to unpack. I will very quickly for people who haven't heard the term before unpack the notion of the second arrow. It's an old Buddhist expression. Some guys walking through the forest, he gets hit by an arrow and then immediately starts thinking, you know, why am I always the guy who

gets hit by an arrow now, I'm going to be late for dinner blah blah blah. And that, that set of compulsive thoughts and the difficult emotions that accompany the first arrow, that's the second arrow. And so just to make clear when Shinson is talking about second arrows and third arrows and fourth arrows, that's what he's referring to. However, used a lot of other terminologies and about flexible concentration see here feel sensory clarity deep Equanimity, can you just give us a sense of what exactly you're pointing to with this terminology and how it's trainable? So what is mindfulness practice? So, what is mindfulness practice? People can answer that question in a lot of different ways. If I were to answer it from the pragmatic science point of view,

I would say mindfulness practice is an abbreviation for focus training. And there's two parts to focus training, the focus and the training. So the focus refers to what I call focus factors. Things like the terms I mentioned, flexible concentration, which you could think of as the ability to focus on what you want, when you want, for as long as you want, in daily life. That's flexible concentration. Equanimity is the ability to allow sensory experience to come and go without push and pull. It's the inverse of craving and aversion.

It's the inverse of coagulating the natural flow that is the nature of early neuronal processing, I believe. That's equanimity. Sensory clarity, you always know this thought has a visual component. This thought has an auditory component. This thought has a somatic component. That's the clarity piece. When people lose their stuff, freak out, it's called overwhelm or flooding, but what is that? You just lost track, what part is mental image, what part is mental talk, what part is body emotion.

When you can no longer track your inner-sea-hear-feel with specificity, that's when you start to suffer or do something you regret usually both. The converse is also true. If you're able to maintain concentration clarity and equanimity, then the overwhelm is reduced. So these kinds of skills are eminently trainable, and they're broadly applicable to all dimensions of personal flourishing and personal maturation.

So mindfulness practice in this way of thinking is the training, meaning the training to acquire focus factors and the training to apply focus factors to broad personal goals. That's how I would define from the viewpoint of practical science mindfulness, practice. So the technical terms I was throwing around are characteristic of my approach, which tends to be informed by science, so try to be careful about how we say things. After the break, James talks about the five different types of strategies you can employ over the life cycle of any given emotion.

And Shinsen will contend that anybody can experience massive benefits of mindfulness training if their practice has four key components. Keep it here. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke, and we're the hosts of Wunderys Podcast, even the rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threatened to veer Rue off course. In our series Rue Paul Born Naked, we'll show you how Rue Paul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere.

Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. James, what Shin Zen is talking about to be able to experience whatever comes up in your mind in this supple fashion without necessarily getting caught by all of it, that sounds very attractive. I imagine some people listening to this or thinking, well, I don't know how much time I have to people listening to this or thinking, well, I don't know how much time I have to do all this meditation. In your view, do we need to spend significant amounts of time in meditation, in order to be better at emotional regulation, or are there other routes? So I deeply respect the traditions that Shinsen is helping us better understand, and also

think that there's growing evidence that the kinds of training practices that Shinsen is referring to can be very powerful. But as you say, Dan, not everyone is in a position to dedicate substantial resources, time and energy to what can be years or even decades of intensive study. And so from a scientific perspective, we've been very interested in trying to think about how we can leverage this very simple set of ideas about how emotions arise and unfold over time to create a simple framework that we can use in everyday life for tuning or adjusting or skillfully experiencing our emotions. And we call that the process model of emotion regulation. And the idea is very, very simple.

If you want to change a process like emotion, it really helps to know how is emotion even generated. And if emotions are often generated as the modal model suggests in situations that we pay attention to and then think about our appraise in certain ways. It's that that gives rise to these coordinated responses, behavior and feeling and physiology. That gives us a really, I think, important head start in trying to adjust or influence our emotions.

And in particular, the process model sets that there are five families of emotion regulatory processes. Starting at the very front end of the emotion generative process, there's something called situation selection. And that's just a fancy way of saying, we pay attention to which situations give us pleasure, which give us pain. And if there are certain emotions that we really badly don't want to experience in a given context, one powerful way to do that, to avoid these emotions, is to avoid the situations that would give rise to them. If, by contrast, we want to experience a certain set of emotions that we feel are

very valuable, we might seek out those situations. So that's all the first family of emotion regulation processes, situations selection. Going one step down the path towards an emotion experience, the next step is situation modification. Now we're in a situation, perhaps we weren't able to choose, whether we were in it or not, where it worked, we have to be at work to make money. But in that situation, we often have certain number of opportunities to adjust the situation that we're in in ways that will help us experience desired emotions

or avoid emotions that are unhelpful for us. So that's a second family of regulatory opportunity. A third, and you can see I'm just going straight down the line, starting with a situation which I can either put myself in or avoid. If I'm in this situation, second family is just modifying it. Third family of regulatory processes moves over to the attention stage. Now this is a stage that Shinsen has really emphasized with great reason. That's a tremendously powerful step in the emotion generative process. And it looks as though people have many opportunities to by focusing their attention on one or another aspects of a situation, powerfully shape which emotions they experience.

So that's another family of regulatory opportunity. A fourth family of regulatory opportunity comes at the stage of our appraisal or evaluation of the situation that we're in and that we've paid attention to. And here we're now thinking in ways that may shape our emotions. Increasing emotions would like to have

or decreasing emotions would prefer not to have. Again, a very powerful set of processes, again, shins in, I think is mentioned, some of those when he talks about equanimity. And we can come back to the connections between these. And then the fifth family of emotion regulation processes comes at the very tail end. We're in a situation.

We paid attention to it, thought about it in certain ways. But there's still an opportunity to make some adjustments in how we actually express that emotion. For example, behaviorally, we can clamp down on the behavioral expression, or we can change our pattern of physiological responding. These are all response modulation strategies. We're trying to directly modify the responses that constitute an emotion. So Dan, from my perspective then, this very simple process model is just a way of people who don't have perhaps the opportunity for perhaps years or decades of extreme practice to at least get an initial handle on what is an

emotion and when it's not going well for me or for somebody else, what can I do about it? And this five process family, it's just a sort of toolkit that people can use in thinking about the agency they have around their emotions. And I wanna be clear here, it's important to be clear. It's not our view that emotions are entirely malleable, that we have perfect control over our emotions, at least those of us without significant training. So nearly all of us are in a world where we have partial capacity to shape our emotions.

And our hope is that by articulating models like the process model, we're just giving people tools, conceptual tools that allow them without a lot of complex terminology to at least get started on this project of being aware of their emotions, and then helping to shape them as they think might be appropriate given their particular circumstances. Let me stay with you for a second. I'd like to rummage around in this toolkit

that you're offering here. Situation selection was the first of the five. I think that's pretty obvious. I don't know that we need to say much more about that to the extent that we're capable of avoiding situations that are likely to trigger us. Situation modification though, that I wonder what advice you have once we're in a situation

where things are not going well, how can we modify based on your work? Yeah, so let me go back and problematize something you gave us a pass on, which is situation selection. I think you said, well, that's pretty straightforward. Let me just say it may not be quite as straightforward as one would have us think, because if you're, let's say very anxious about a party

and you decide not to go to the party or you're very stressed by a work event and you decide just to not go to it. It may seem simple that you've decided not to engage in something that would make you anxious and you're less anxious and you're all set. But the challenge here is reflecting on whether just because it feels better in the moment, that really is the helpful, most helpful thing for you to do. And I challenge us to think more deeply about whether it's easy to tell, always, whether it's good to skip a situation or engage in it or what have you. So you're right that it's simple and it's effects.

For not in a situation, of course, we're not going to respond to that situation. We're not even in it. But whether that's a helpful or advisable step, I think is a totally separate question, because people, for example, with severe social anxiety, significantly compromise their lives often because they are avoiding that is to say they're doing situation selection extremely effectively, but that effectiveness comes at a cost because they're not living the life they want to live and the life that they would value. So that's just a word more about situation

selection, which I know wasn't your main focus, but I just think each of these steps is quite a bit more complicated when we double-click. With respect to your question, which is the second step, and just sort of getting practical, what does that even mean, situation modification? Well, it can range, and part of the challenge in trying to offer general sort of advice here, using a model like this, is that it's so situation- specific. So let's say that I'm having dinner with a friend and the next booth over at the restaurant a bunch of really noisy people come in and your blood pressure just starts to skyrocket. You're

really annoyed that this nice quiet restaurant you carefully picked out. You want to spend some time with your friend who you haven't seen for a while, you start to feel angry. So situation modification in this case would be really simple when you think about it. It's instead of stewing the entire evening and getting really mad and snappy with your friend and leaving early, you just ask whether you can be receded on the opposite side of the restaurant. Now, that may be a little uncomfortable because you've already started to engage in your meal, but that would be a skillful use of situation modification. Times a million, right?

So there are many degrees of freedom or opportunities for change that we have in situations. If we start to adopt this mindset of agency around our emotions, we notice them, and then can step up a level and think, is this an emotion that I want to have? Is it helpful for me? Sometimes the answer is yes, and we're all good. But when the answer is no, I really don't want to feel stressed and angry when I'm having dinner with my friend. Then we can review the toolbox. Think, well, I can't really pick a different restaurant at this stage because we're here already. But I can do situation modification in that simple sense of shifting to another booth or

what have you. So that would be an example down of a concrete step that we can take and put that way. You sort of think, well, of course, you can do that. But you'd be surprised how many of us suffer in situations that we could easily change if we ever had that thought. Could I change a situation? And sometimes those changes have to be affected by someone else. So a boss might need to put you on a different work team. And so you'd have to have the thought that somebody else could actually help engage in

situation modification to help you achieve your goals. But I think the first step is representing the emotion, seeing that it's perhaps unhelpful, and then thinking about the toolbox, the space opened up by the process model. So a couple of things to say. First, I'm glad you to use your term problematized my giving you a pass on situation selection. As I was saying the words, I realized that it was inappropriate to give you a pass because I myself am in the middle of doing what's called exposure therapy for my claustrophobia.

My instinct is to avoid elevators and airplanes. of doing what's called exposure therapy for my claustrophobia. My instinct is to avoid elevators and airplanes, but the therapy is to approach carefully in a modulated way. So I'm glad you corrected me on that, and I appreciate you're moving on to unpack situation modification. Just a level set where we are here in the interview, you a few minutes ago laid out five tools in a toolkit for regulating our emotions. We've covered two of them, situation selection, situation modification.

We're going to go into the next three, but I do want to pause for a second and bring in Shenzhen in case anything's been said that you, Shenzhen then want to react to? Well, first of all, your list of five things, every single one of those, we talk about to our students and our coaches. And we actually have suggestions, try this technique, here's the strategy. You should definitely do that, or, you know, etc., etc. So all of these five principles, they actually line up with how we train the coaches in the system, the unified mind from a system.

Another thing I wanted to mention, you mentioned about sort of meta, not METTA, but META Greek for at another level, meta fear of fear. There's like fear of emotion per se. And a retraining of oneself to where that's not the case would be a very mature thing to do. And boy, do I remember from my own personal history when I was little. My mother tells me I was what mother's call a difficult baby. I get this feedback and I even in my own memory, I was never happy.

I was always emotionally upset. And as I got into the 3, 4, 5 year old to where I could speak, I became utterly terrified of adult emotions. Adults would like have a bereavement or be very angry and they'd lose their stuff. And I'd have to leave the room. And one of the first things I started to notice when I began training, which was in a traditional setting in Asia, was that started to change. I became less and less afraid of my inner emotional self. So I certainly saw that kind of meta-change. The other thing I would like to comment on is the issue of the amount of time and energy needed for, shall we say, an ordinary modern person to be successful

with mindfulness practice. So I distinguish between systematic approaches to mindfulness training and non-systematic approaches. And that's not actually to say that the non-systematic ones are necessarily bad. Different approaches work for different people. But a systematic approach is good for a number of reasons, for the purposes of the modern world and for the purposes of a scientific perspective on things. So a systematic practice has four components. You have a set of techniques, a non-empty set of techniques. It could just be one technique.

Count your breath or it could be two dozen techniques, but you have some techniques that are analogous to exercises. You're going to do those in systematic ways. And just as when you do physical exercise, it changes the fabric of your body. When you do these attentional exercises, it's going to change the fabric of consciousness. It's going to increase things like your base level clarity, concentration, equanimity, and so forth. So you have a set of exercises you do. You do a little bit each day. Our minimum suggestion is 10 minutes of formal practice each day, which actually doesn't seem like much, but you have to keep it up for your whole life. And that's

non-trivial. Then in addition to that minimum daily formal practice, every now and again you do retreats. I have to retreat by yourself a one week retreat with a group, with a teacher, without a teacher, you do intensive practice. It's analogous to intense rehearsal if you were a musician or the training that precedes your Boston marathon if you're like a runner or something like that. So every now and again, you do intensive practice. So you have day to day schedule a practice, but it doesn't have to be more than 10 minutes, but every day. And then you have retreats. Doesn't have to be more than four hours, but it's intensive practice. You've got your techniques. And then you have support. Ideally, you have at least one interactive competent coach who works with you, knows you,

and systematically supports you through your practice, customizing the guidance to your interests and proclivities. Establish and maintain that for your lifetime. An ordinary person living an ordinary modern life can do this in terms of time and energy. It's not an inordinate request, but it does take a lot of maturity because it's a long-term investment. You have a pretty good shot if you have a highly systematic practice that sometime in the course of your life, you will start to experience some of the deeper things that we would associate with the classic

results. But this is what the 20th century showed us with MBSR, Mindfulness-based reduction. That's what started the revolution. 40 years ago, modern humans with an ordinary science-centered view of the world with an ordinary allocation of time and energy. If they keep it up their whole lives, have a pretty good shot at some really good stuff. So I would say for the individual invest in the future, your future, which is also the future of everyone you care about in the future of this planet, find an approach, hopefully a systematic one, to mindful of his training, and then participate in that. When you're eight years old, you have raged air grief shame, interest joy, love gratitude. Hopefully by the time you're 80 years old, I've just got two years to go till I'm 80. Hopefully by the time you're 80

years old, you do that much, much better than you did it when you were eight. Dolly noted and yes, I will plus one until I have no breath left in my lungs on systematic training in meditation and mindfulness. After the break James gross explains what he believes are the elements that unite science and Buddhism when it comes to emotions plus shins and argues and argues that sooner or later, the monastery will come for you. He'll explain what he means by that. Keep it here. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪

James, let me just go back to you. You may have something you want to say in response, and you can sure do that. But let me tee you up with a question, which is related to it, because Shins and has brought us nicely to the third tool in your toolbox here, and you can sure do that. But let me tee you up with a question, which is related to it, because Shinsen has brought us nicely to the third tool in your toolbox here,

which is attention deployment. How do you understand attentional deployment, and is it different from what Shinsen has just described? So attentional deployment Dan refers to our capacity to shift our attention in order to modify which aspects of the environment have psychological sort of reality for us in a given moment. And it's that reality that really drives the emotion process. So if we can shift our attention in a situation, and this can be an external situation, or it can be shifting our inner gaze to one thought

versus another thought. We exert tremendous sort of change in our emotion trajectory. So practically, these are very simple steps sometimes that we do without thinking about it, perhaps. We might distract ourselves, someone's telling us something we really don't want to hear. And we're starting to feel anxious. One of the things we might do to calm our anxiety is to start counting ceiling tiles or to start rehearsing what one's going to get at the grocery store when one next goes shopping. And these are just ways of implementing attention

deployment. We're shifting our attention with a goal to modifying the emotion that we either are experiencing or that we might experience because we think it's really not a helpful emotion or a pleasant one. So that's the third family of emotion regulatory processes. And a third family of emotion regulatory processes. And I would plus two, the idea that, you know, these practices, mindfulness practices that Shinsen's been talking about, are tremendous training vehicles and are not impossible for many people.

I just have great empathy for the many people for whom even 10 minutes a day of systematic practice with, you know, some help with the conceptual framework, the idea of a retreat where you go away for half a day or a day, and then have a coach. These are wonderful resources, but I just am aware that many, many people for various reasons don't have access to those. I think many people honestly struggle sometimes to remember to brush their teeth, which is even faster than 10 minutes usually. So I just think that in everyday life, the hurly, burly of raising kids and the pandemic and managing our concerns and so forth, even though I think it would be a wonderful thing

for people to make these long-term investments, it can be really difficult. And I think you get a lot of mileage as we move towards maybe more skillful and advanced training to just keep an eye on these basic tools that we have at our disposal, situation selection, situation modification, attention deployment. The fourth family of regulatory processes, cognitive change is another really powerful one that we've spent some time studying. Cognitive change refers to being in a situation and paying attention to it,

but then having the realization that you can change the meaning that that situation has by flexibly representing the situation the realization that you can change the meaning that that situation has by flexibly representing the situation in a slightly different way. Give you a concrete example from everyday life. Walking down the hallway at work, I say hi to a colleague who's passing by and they completely don't pay any attention to me. My initial response might be one of sadness or anger or anxiety depending on my mood. And I might have the associated thought, well, they don't even think I'm important or

they're mad at me or I've done something wrong or I'm about to get assigned to some awful committee or I might be about to get fired, and I can then catch myself, and cognitive change might look like, realizing I'm starting to feel angry or anxious, realizing I don't wanna feel that, realizing that the thought that I had, that they must be angry, or they must know something awful is about to happen to me,

it's just one of many thoughts I might have in that situation. A very different thought would be, gee, I wonder if they're okay. I wonder if their concern or upset or distracted. And that very different thought suddenly triggers a different emotional response. I no longer am gripped by anger or sadness or anxiety. Instead, I feel compassion. Wonder, is there something I can do to help them? Completely different emotional response. That's cognitive change. It's also known as re-appraisal. So I'm just appraising again. I'm thinking differently about the situation, and that's a tremendously powerful resource. The fifth family, just for completeness, is all the way at the end of the emotion-generative cycle. So I now am in a situation of paid attention,

thought about it in whatever ways I'm gonna think about it, and I'm starting to have an emotional response. Response modulation just refers to my efforts to manage the output, the emotion responses, like the behavior or the physiological component. And I'm trying to directly manage that. Concretely, someone says something upsetting to me at work. I may feel that I don't have time. I can't change the situation.

I can't think about something different because they're looking right at me. I don't know how to think differently about the hard thing they've just told me. But I don't want to show anger at this person. So I then clamp down on my behavioral expression in the hopes that they won't see it. So that's expressive suppression. That too has its place in our toolbox. But what we found is that this strategy in particular of clamping down on the output of our emotions while sometimes helpful, if done chronically, can be very, very unhelpful for our mental and physical health. And so what we've become quite interested in, given this toolbox, is, well, under what circumstances do different strategies provide the best sort of response to an emotional situation that we

find ourselves in. And I know this sounds, even this sounds maybe a lot to keep track of, the idea that emotions unfold over time and that we can think about these different opportunities for changing emotions by changing what situations we get into or changing some feature of the situation or a tension or how we think or even the response itself, that sounds like a lot. But there's one very simple idea that underlies all of them. And I think the take-home message for me is this idea,

which is that emotions arise in particular circumstances because of the way we make sense of those situations. They're not necessarily fixed and final that we have agency and that emotions are something any one of us can exert some degree of control or influence over. That idea is an immensely powerful idea. And we found in our research that if someone has

this idea, just that idea, that they believe that emotions are the kind of thing that they can exert some measure of control over. They are much more likely to effectively engage in all of these different activities. Then someone who says, nah, emotions are not things that I can have anything to do with. They're like the weather. I wake up feeling bad. I'm crappy to everybody around me all day. Nothing I can do about it. Just have to wait for something to change. That mindset, that kind of helpless and hopeless mindset predicts negative outcomes. People don't, why should they, if they don't believe it can change, why should they try to change it? By contrast, people who have this agentic sense of themselves as capable of shaping or influencing their

emotions, at least to some degree, they try. And when they try, they often succeed. And when they succeed, they reinforce that belief, putting them on a positive spiral. So although we can talk about different strategies and tools and so forth, there's only one idea here that I think is at the heart of everything, from my perspective, which is one's belief about emotions, and one's sense of oneself as an agent that has some degree of control or influence over those emotions. That was such a helpful and skillful articulation and I suspect shins in that you are four square in James's camp on this point.

You got it. What you're saying, James, is what I would say is the central message of Buddhism broadly considered, which is that there's a capacity to be happy. That capacity to be happy can be significantly elevated. You know, from my perspective as an outsider to Buddhism, but someone who's deeply sympathetic to what I understand, some of the themes or ideas that have been well developed over millennia within Buddhism, I take, you know, one of the central kind of insights here, Buddha's four noble truths, the, you know, again, I defer to Shenzhen, but roughly the idea that they're suffering, that there are causes that can be identified or understood,

that this can lead to a cessation or diminution of suffering, and that there are ways of living, paths of living that are really very effective in enhancing well-being or diminishing suffering. So that's a lay person's rendering of the four noble truths, kind of part of the essence of many Buddhist traditions, as I understand them as an outsider. But if you think about it from that perspective, again in agreement with Shinsen, we're really talking very broadly about suffering here. So this is

attachment and aversion sort of a sense of misunderstanding that generates these forces illusion and so these three poisons of attachment aversion and illusion I think really can be well described from the point of view of this conception that you know really is built out of psychological science that says, well, how do emotions unfold? And how can we gain some measure of understanding of how we can navigate these emotional unfoldings

in ways that will enhance our well-being? And this deep commitment to and awareness of a human capacity to transcend or modify many of the aspects of our suffering, I think unites, not surprisingly, contemporary, affective science with these deep, rich traditions that are so empirically oriented in Buddhism that really center on, well, what are the things we can do? And I think if something like the process model adds any value at all, it's just provision of a simple conceptual framework for people who may not be as deeply immersed or have the resources to be as deeply immersed in Buddhism and other very rich world traditions. It's something that anyone

can kind of understand the idea that emotions unfold, that we can influence that unfolding with a handful of strategies. And I think just getting this idea is so powerful. We get such a huge return on investment from just that idea. But I think it is exciting to see that these very different traditions and perspectives unite so nicely behind the idea that we actually have these remarkable capacities that we may not even be aware of, and just helping people be aware of what they can actually do is tremendously powerful. One thing that Shenzhen pointed to that I thought was terrifically important, but that we didn't really have time to elaborate is the idea.

Shinsen, you shared a little bit about your own experiences in childhood and having, as I understood you to say, maybe greater reactivity to certain emotional circumstances. And I think that really highlights something tremendously important, which is that as we look out from our own little perch in our own little sort of world to try to understand other people's experiences, it's very important to appreciate just how different those experiences can be, even in

people who are close to us like our family members loved ones and associates at work. So I think a measure of humility and sort of curiosity about what it's like to be someone else really serves us well because while we may feel certain patterns of emotion at certain intensity ranges as we move through our lives, others may be very, very different in their emotional landscapes. And so the challenges and affordances, the things that they really want to try to change

and the tools and resources they may have available are going to be very different for each person. So someone who wakes up in a really crappy mood every day, really feeling discouraged and anxious, and that's something that goes back as far as they can remember. They're just in a very different position as they try to think about skillfully navigating emotions from someone who just is lucky enough to be born with a much more optimistic and happy temperament who also may have challenges. But just that sense that we're each just trying to gently and skillfully help not just ourselves but other people. And so not maybe being quite so quick to be judgmental or angry or disappointed with other people

when they don't kind of live in the way that would like them to. I think that's an important kind of coda to some of our conversation today. Well, I have a coda also, a Codusol, a little addendum to this whole thing. We were talking about the relevance of what I would call systematic and actually a comprehensive approaches to focus training, also known as mindfulness practice. The one thing I didn't say is it's quite true. Most modern people are not going to go off to a monastery. They're not going to do the traditional kinds of intensive things that historically have been done east and west. They're not going to do the kinds of things our shamanic ancestors did with their board deals and

ceremonies. However, the fact is no matter how you try to set up your life to be a comfortable, modern person, sooner or later the monastery will come to you. Sooner or later, the monastery will come to you. You will have a life challenge because of what's happening to you or someone you care about. You will have a life challenge that can't be reached by ordinary means. That's when knowing that mindfulness training is readily available on the internet, for free, for everyone, knowing that fact may be the most important thing to remember. Because sooner or later you need the big guns. Like the French philosopher said, I think it was Pascal. The last act is gruesome, no matter how lovely the rest of the play may have been.

Sooner or later we get sick, sooner or later we die. Sooner or later really bad shit happens if I'm allowed to say that word on this program. And now what are you going to do? Well, there are people who have done systematic training dealt with that kind of thing, pain, arreavement, bottoming out and realizing you have to make a behavior change, you're realizing you have to make a behavior change here, you've got an anguish or a substance or food issue. Sooner or later, everyone comes to moments like that where they really need the big guns. It's good to know that in the modern world, the big guns are just to click away when the monastery comes to you and you need radical reengineering to flourish.

Knowing that there are fully contemporary and basically free approaches to this heritage that we get from the east and the West of contemplative practice. That's really news you may have to use one of these days. That would be my quota. Well, I basically agree with everything everybody said this whole time, including both of your respective codas. So I just want to wrap up by saying thank you to both of you for making time for this.

I think it's helped a lot of people, certainly helped me and it's been enjoyable. So again, thank you. Great pleasure. Thank you. Delightful, as always, Dan. Thanks again to James Gross and Shins and Young. That was fun.

I also want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show, specifically DJ Kashmir, who has been working really hard on this particular series, which is a bit of an experiment. Again, we'd love to hear your responses. 10% happier this show is also produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justin, Davey and Lauren Smith. Our senior producer is Marissa Schneiderman. Kimi Regler is our managing producer and our executive producer is Jen Poient, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode. Hey, hey, prime members.

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