Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Emotion Regulation: Top 10 Neuroscience-Backed Tools | Ethan Kross & Emma Seppälä

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

Manage anxiety, rewire your inner critic, and never worry alone. Emma Seppälä, PhD is a psychologist and research scientist from Yale, and the author of two books, The Happiness Track and Sovereign.   Ethan Kross, PhD is a professor at the University of Michigan, where he leads the Institute for Mental Fitness. He is the author of two books, Chatter and Shift.  In this episode we talk about: What emotions actually are, and why even anxiety and anger serve a purpose Why self-criticism backfires, and what the research shows about self-compassion instead How chronic suppression makes your emotions stronger, not weaker Regulation tools you can use in the moment to shift emotional states Get the 10% with Dan Harris app here Sign up for Dan's free newsletter here Follow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTok Subscribe to our YouTube Channel Additional Resources:  Support Christina Feldman's Healing Journey Join Dan, Sebene Selassie, and Jeff Warren for Meditation Party, a 3-day immersive retreat at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY, October 16–18. Grab your in-person spot here, or sign up to livestream here! To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/10HappierwithDanHarris This episode is sponsored by: BetterHelp — Online therapy, matched to your needs. Get 10% off your first month at https://www.betterhelp.com/happier ButcherBox — Premium, responsibly sourced meat delivered to your door. New listeners get free sirloin tips, ground beef, or chicken wings in every box for life, plus $20 off at https://www.butcherbox.com/happier Spark — Clean energy and focus with zero sugar. Get 30% off and free shipping with code HAPPIER at https://www.drinkspark.com

It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, gang, here's the deal. We all experience emotions all day long. Often, those emotions are powerful, negative, and very, very uncomfortable, and they can provoke us to do things that degrade our relationships and our happiness. So that is the bad news. The good news is that there are evidence-based strategies for managing and regulating your emotions. So today we've got two months Maestro's who are going to talk us through the top 10 neuroscience-backed ways to regulate your emotions. We discussed the surprising upside of anxiety and anger. We talk about how to rewire your inner critic, why suppressing emotions can backfire, but why avoidance actually sometimes makes sense, and why you should never worry alone.

This episode is part of our ongoing 10th anniversary series. I can't believe the show has been going on for more than 10 years now. So as part of this 10th anniversary, we're bringing back many of our favorite guests, pairing them up and creating these top 10 lists on subjects we know you care about by guests. Today are Dr. Emma Sepula, who's a psychologist and research scientist from Yale. She's written two books, The Happiness Track and Sovereign. And she's paired up with Dr. Ethan Cross from the University of Michigan, where he leads the newly minted Institute for Mental Fitness. Ethan has also written two books, chatter and shift.

Real quick, you know who else had thoughts on how to regulate your emotions and train your mind? A guy named the Buddha. As you may know, the Buddha came up with a kind of cookbook to help you lead a happy life. It's called the Eightfold Path.

And this summer, over on my new-ish meditation app, which is called 10% with Dan Harris. The great meditation teacher, Sharon Salzberg, will be leading an eight-part series on the Eightfold Path. every Sunday, starting on July 12th, she'll do a live session where she'll guide a meditation

and talk about one aspect of the eightfold path, from maintaining focus and mindfulness to communicating successfully with other human beings. By the way, the Buddha was very clear that doing these kinds of things as a group is a powerful way to get the learnings into your molecules. So head on over to Dan Harris.com to get the app and join the party. We'll get started with Emma Cepela and Ethan Cross right after this. We're now entering grilling season, one of my favorite times of year. And let's be honest, the difference between a good cookout and a great one comes down to the quality of your meat. I don't eat a lot of meat personally, but when I do eat it, I want it to be high quality and raised and sourced the right way.

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or a grill master, you've got everything you need to make it a great season. As an exclusive offer, new listeners can get their choice between free surloin tips, ground beef or chicken wings in every box for life, plus $20 off when you go to butcherbox.com slash happier. That's right, your choice of free surloin tips, ground beef, or chicken wings in every box for life, plus $20 off your first box, and free shipping always. That's butcherbox.com slash happier. Don't forget to use our link so they know we sent you. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. May is Mental Health Awareness Month. and a reminder that whatever you're dealing with, you do not have to deal with it alone.

I actually just came through a little bit of a depressive episode in my life was super difficult, but I got a ton of help from my therapist, also my family and friends, but my therapist in particular was just super available, really helpful with insights and recommendations and medication tweaks. Really, that's what you need, I think.

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Find support and have someone with you in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash happier. That's betterhelp.com slash happier. Emma Sepola and Ethan Cross, welcome back to the show, both of you. Thank you. Great to be here. Great to be with both of you. Yeah.

All right. So we're talking about getting your emotional shit together, aka emotion regulation. And we're going through the top 10 neuroscience-backed tip. for emotion regulation. I want to start with a foundational tip, and this one really is something that you've spoken about a lot, Ethan, so I'll start with you on this, is you say that one of the most important moves that the foundational move is to understand what an emotion actually is. Can you say more about that? A lot of people think that we should just strive to lean into the positive

and avoid negative emotions as much as possible. And I like to remind people that always, emotions when they're experienced in the right proportions are actually useful. We evolve the capacity to experience negative emotions for a reason. They help us. So how might that possibly be? How could anxiety, for example, possibly be good? Well, let me give you an example. When I think back to all the different presentations I've given over the years, there's one that sticks out and it was a flop. I experienced no anxiety beforehand. None. As a reality, result. I just kind of strolled right into the

auditorium and I didn't really know what I was going to talk about. What anxiety does is it alerts us to important things that lie ahead, harnesses our attention and effectively says, hey, dopey, pay attention, prepare.

Dope is my version of anxiety. That's how I minimize it. All of our negative emotions have that functionality when they are proportional. I'm emphasizing proportional here because the big giant problem that humanity faces is we don't just experience a little ping of anxiety, focus on the task at hand, prepare, and move on. We experience these emotions. They're too intense or they last too long, and that's where they become problematic. But, you know, when my daughter's experience a little anxiety before an exam, I say to them, hey, this is you working exactly how you should work, harness that.

And I think that's a real reframe for a lot of people because it means there's nothing wrong with you if you're feeling bad at times. In fact, there's everything right with you. Say a little bit more, Ethan, about what an emotion actually is and why it's useful to understand that. Sure. So emotions are these responses that prepare us to deal with different circumstances that we face. and these emotions that we experience, we experience them in response to things that are meaningful to us, either because it's something important happening in the world

or we think it's meaningful. And when we register specific set of meaningful circumstances, we have these different software programs that get loaded up to prepare us to deal with it. So I gave you one example already with anxiety, something important that lies ahead in the future. Let's take anger. When might we experience this response of anger?

We experience anger when we perceive some injustice. Our sense of right and wrong has been violated and there's something you could do to fix it. So this anger response gets loaded up and it motivates you to try to rectify the situation. So I see one of my daughters do something that they shouldn't do. For example, hypothetically, maybe one of my daughters has her friends over the house. and they want to do one of these crazy TikTok challenges, and I say no under no circumstances, and then they go ahead and do it,

my sense of what's right and wrong has been triggered, and I'm motivated to approach the situation to convey some anger to my daughter to prevent that from happening again. Now, this is proportional, right? It's not throwing things or hitting people or anything like that. this is an adaptive response. And you can play this game.

It's not a game. It's a calculus that describes how our emotions help us for all different kinds of emotional responses. Emmett, did you want to jump in on any of this? Yeah. I mean, I love Ethan's description. Having worked with populations with trauma like veterans, I also want to bring up that sometimes our emotions can come up. They don't correspond in their magnet. to the situation if potentially you're carrying trauma.

So I remember one of the veterans that was in one of our studies, he said, I'm standing in for the mall. And I know there's nothing wrong with the mall. I'm in the middle of Wisconsin. But I have to brace myself for 20 minutes to go into the mall. And so because he had post-traumatic stress and a memory of having been in an explosion in a war zone in a crowded environment, this memory. that he had was stopping him for being able to experience the present moment, which is one that is

unlikely to be dangerous as dangerous. So I think that's where past trauma can also impact how we experience the present and how strong our emotions are and the present. And that's where healing needs to take place and understanding, you know, in order not to have these vocal-whelming kind of emotions, if that makes sense. Yeah, it sounds attractive as somebody who has to brace himself for all kinds of things. Yeah, I just wanted to highlight, Emma, you know, that's such a wonderful example that illustrates how, on the one hand,

we have this incredibly powerful apparatus, this emotional system, or emotional beings. We experience emotions about 90% of the time that we're awake, and if you're like me, a significant portion of my sleeping, life has felt experiencing emotions for a variety of reasons. It's an imperfect tool.

tool. It's so easy to miscalibrate this tool, as is the case in that description you gave of the trauma survivor. And that really highlights the urgent need to understand how to regulate. And, you know, it just so happens. We evolve the ability to experience emotions. We also co-evolved the ability to manage that. And so I just think it really highlights that urgency really well. Well said. So let's dive into some of the tools for said management. Just to reset, we're going through the top 10 neuroscience back tips for emotion regulation. Number one is just understanding what emotions are and that regulation is possible and that even difficult emotions like anxiety and anger can be harnessed. Tip number two is to practice self-compassion. So Emma, let me go to you on that score.

Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. You know, whenever I teach audiences and ask how many of you are self-critical, 99% of the room raised their hand. And if you look at the definition of self-criticism, like the psychological definition, it's self-loathing, which sounds so intense, you know. And I think some people think, well, self-criticism just means, you know, I'm going to improve myself if I see what my flaws are. But there's a difference between self-criticism and self-awareness. Ethan was talking about this awareness, right? And so when we have awareness of say, oh, I'm not great at this. I need help with it. That's one thing. Self-criticism. is, I'm not great at this, you know, I'm such a failure and so on and so forth. I mean,

most people, especially there's an interesting statistic about most Gen X people believe I'm not good enough with regards to almost every facet of their life. That's a lot of people, feeling a lot of negative feelings about themselves. And so what the data shows is that when you're highly self-critical, it's the opposite of what people think self-criticism is good for. They think self-criticism is good for improving performance. But what The data actually shows that if you're very self-critical, you actually end up with more anxiety, more depression, you're less likely to bounce back from situations. You have fear of failure.

So it's basically the opposite of resilience. But if you take on a more self-compassionate stance, which it sounds soft and fuzzy, but it has so much hard data behind it that it's really worth paying attention to. So self-compassion is basically the difference between what most people say to themselves when they make a mistake, which is all these harsh things. and the things people would say to their best friend or their child, who just made a similar mistake, which is the opposite. I remember during the pandemic when we were doing so much teaching on Zoom, and I would just ask,

what did you say to yourself the last time you made a mistake? And I'd ask people to write it in the chat, and you'd see these hundreds of horrible things that people say to themselves. And then I would ask, well, what do you say to your best friend who calls you and tells you about a similar mistake that they made? And it's completely different. And you've got to ask yourself, why? It's like a conditioning or a program.

You know, our parents probably had this and their ancestors. You know, we don't know why it happens this way. But one thing we do know is that it is really destructive for us and does not help us regulate. And what the data shows on self-compassion, which is basically being mindful. So to what Ethan was saying and to what you teach, Dan, that being mindful of what happened, like, oh, I made a mistake. oh, you know, I'm feeling this, that, the other. But then not taking it further, but remembering that everyone makes mistakes, also remembering to speak to yourself as you would to a friend. What the data shows is you have better mental health, you have better physical health,

you have better relationships, which is also interesting because when we're really hard on ourselves, we're also hardest on the people we love the most and want to hurt the least. We have better sleep. We have better health outcomes. And the list goes on. You're basically more resilient in times of stress and difficulty. Yes. I mean, I think there's so much pathos in the fact that the thing we're doing to keep ourselves safe is actually making us less safe. I completely agree with you not only about the science, but also just from my own personal experience that switching from an inner drill sergeant to an inner coach unlocks a very powerful upward spiral of benefits. Just for people listening, self-compassion, as many of you know, was really

named and the research was very truly pioneered by a woman named Kristen Neff. And she often talks about this three-step process for moments when you're kicking your own ass. The first is just to be mindful of the fact that it's happening. The second is to call to mind the fact that millions of other people right now are dealing with the same thing. In other words, you're not an aberration for feeling whatever you're feeling. And then the third, in my opinion, the most important, is to just talk to yourself, as Emma said, as you would talk to a good friend. And this is where I combine Kristen's work with your work, Ethan, which has shown that when talking to yourself, you can use the third person. You can say, Ethan, it's not that bad or dude, bro, whatever, you're good.

That, you call it distance self-talk is a very effective way to get through to yourself, in essence. That's right. You can use your name. You can use a second person pronoun you to try to work for a problem. And what we see happening when people use language, these linguistic shifts, to change the way they refer to themselves, it alters their perspective. You're in this kind of coaching stance. You're much more patient and compassionate than you would be if you're thinking about your circumstances the way we typically do in the first person. I mean I. Language is a really interesting window into how we are thinking about ourselves, what we see in this work that I just described, it can be a lever.

It can be a tool. So when you shift from I to Dan, if you will, that's putting you into this advice giving mode. There's another linguistic shift that Emma, what you were describing made me think about. It's one of my favorite findings. We did these studies years ago in which we wanted to understand whether there's a linguistic signature to making meaning out of really telling. experiences. And we found something really interesting. Lots of people when they're trying to work through like really big stuff, they start off talking about it in the first person. Oh, man,

I really screwed up that interview. Dan was looking at me like I'm an idiot. Emma was actually rolling her eyes. Oh my God. Now everyone's going to see this. And then at a certain point, the meaning-making kind of inflection point, people do something odd. They then go, you live, you learn. What are you going to do? It happens to everyone. And they're using the word you there, not to refer to someone else or themselves. They're using the word you to refer to people in general.

They're effectively saying, what is anyone going to do if they were in this situation? Anyone would suffer the same calamity. So they're universalizing their experience. They're normalizing it. And people do this automatically without even thinking about it. We call this the generic view. It's referring to people in general. And it's an indicator of exactly what you two are saying you both personally and others benefit from.

It's this capacity to, hey, we're not alone. We're all screwing up at times. And we're already doing it. and there are ways to weaponize that tactic even further. Maybe weaponize is the wrong choice of words, but you know what I mean. I mean weaponize in a positive way. Yeah, exactly. And this is core to your work, Ethan, and I think it's incredibly powerful that we have

this inner chatter, by the way, that's the name of Ethan's first book, Chatter. And we so often are truly weaponizing it against ourselves in ways that we think is keeping us on our toes, but is actually reducing our happiness and effectiveness and the quality of our relationships, but you can, and I think this is just like world historic and its importance, you can take affirmative action to change your inner dialogue in ways that will boost your performance, boost your happiness, et cetera, et cetera. I just can't get over how awesome that is. In the interest of time, though, I do want to move on to the third tip. And Emma, I'm going to start with you again. And you argue that one of the keys to emotion regulation is to stop chronically

suppressing. Please say more. Yeah, this is some classic research and emotion regulation conducted in part by my graduate school advisor, James Gross, and colleagues. And it's just really interesting, you know, because I always just think that, you know, no matter how many degrees you have, how many languages you speak, what level you are in a company, chances are you have as much knowledge about how to handle your emotions as a five-year-old. Like, most people are walking around never having gotten any formal training and how to handle our emotions. So, you know, no matter who you ask, and from where in the world, like every audience I ask this question, I'm like, so what have you learned about what to do with your big, bad, negative emotions?

Most of the time it's suppression, you know, suck it up, buttercup, like even some cultures that are more expressive with their negative emotions, inevitably there are certain emotions that are suppressed. This is our classic emotion regulation strategy that doesn't work, because what the data actually shows is that when you suppress something, let's say, anger, right? Anger already gets your heart rate going. Your sympathetic nervous system is activated. Inflammation rises. Like there's just so much happening physiologically. When you suppress the emotion, meaning you're just like, I'm fine. Nothing's going on over here. Everything is just fine, but you're actually angry on the inside. Those systems actually get more activated. At the level of the brain,

there's more activity in areas of the brain that are responsible for emotion, for high stress. And so it's fascinating, right? It's like everybody is kind of doing this thing because they don't know what else to do, but that thing is making their emotions stronger, which inevitably leads to either people blowing up at some point in an inappropriate manner, or imploding with stomach aches and migraines and health issues, or it seeps out as passive aggression, which, you know, sometimes feels even more aggressive than actual full-blown anger, right? So the question is, well, this didn't work, you know, and this is what we've all been taught. So that's really fascinating to me. But one of my favorites,

studies on suppression is that, you know, we suppress because we're trying to be so old, right? So it'd be inappropriate for me to dump my latte on my boss's laptop right now because I'm mad at them. So I'm just going to, you know, suppress. But the problem is that if I were angry right now and I were suppressing, your heart rate would be increasing. And you wouldn't know cognitively like what's going on, but internally your heart rate would be increasing. And what's really interesting is that sometimes, you know, we've all experienced that. We're you're around someone and you don't feel comfortable around them and you don't know what. But physiologically, you're reacting.

And research, even with horses and equine facilitated therapy, I don't know if you've heard much about it, but it's really fascinating because the psychologist is working with a horse with the patient. Let's say the patient has anxiety, right? And the patient comes up and says, I'm not scared of the horse, I'm just fine. But if they're scared and they're pretending to be fine, the horse is moving. all over the place is really anxious. And as soon as that person says,

I'm actually really scared of this horse, the horse calms down. It's like, why? It doesn't understand English, right? But the horse registers inauthenticity as threat. So why am I sharing this? Because our physiology also responds that way around inauthenticity as threat, right? So this technique that most people use

doesn't work for us, doesn't work for our relationships. And research shows our relationships suffer if we tend to suppress a lot. Yeah, I just want to emphasize. that, because this is the second time you've mentioned this, the fact that, and you didn't quite use these words, these are my words, but there is a tendency among some people to think, oh, well, if I do the self-care, to use the de rigour term, to manage my emotions, well, that's kind of self-indulgent, it's selfish, I should be taking care of my kids, taking care of my colleagues,

whatever it is. But actually, developing self-compassion, learning the skills of emotion regulation more broadly, redounds to the benefit of everybody who crosses your path. I just think that's another reason to do this work. It's not just your happiness at stake. Coming up, Emma and Ethan talk about why feeling the emotion is better than suppressing it. And we talk about a breathing technique that can work when all the other mental strategies fail. For me, every day is just packed with stuff. I need a lot of energy to get through all of the meetings and all of the creative work and exercise and meditation that I pack into every day. If energy is an issue for you, you might want to check out one of our sponsors today. Spark Energy Plus Focus is your go-to

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Plus Focus is offering 30% off and free shipping. Go to DrinkSpark.com and use the code happier at checkout. That's code happier at drinkspark.com. But Emma, let me just stay with you because you just talked about tip number three, which is to stop chronically suppressing. Tip number four is the thing to do instead, which is the counterintuitive and sometimes difficult, but better than the alternative. feel the thing. I think that a lot of times we don't want to feel bad. Maybe, especially in American culture, where we're supposed to be for the pursuit of happiness,

and there's a sense that we don't ever want to feel bad ever. In certain cultures like in China, there's this Chinese quote that is eating bitterness, is good fortune, the idea that even difficult moments are a gift because you grow from them, you learn from them. And in other cultures like in Germany, for example, condolence cards look really different than here.

Condolus cards in the U.S., this is a research study run out of Stanford as well. Those cards are more like, hey, you know, I hope you feel better soon. Whereas in Germany, they're more like, I'm with you and you're suffering, right? This idea that in American culture in particular, we don't want to feel bad ever.

And there's a plethora of ways we can distract ourselves constantly, whether you're on your phone or you're busy or you're doing a million things, pleasure, watching movies, whatever. I mean, we have so many things to choose from that This can distract us from how we feel. But at the end of the day, if we're not processing what we're feeling, it's there waiting for us.

But we're just more beat up from whatever it is we've been doing to try and avoid it, if that makes sense. But if you look at a child, the child will feel that emotion 100%, the little kid, be so mad. And like two seconds later, they're best friends with the brother they were so mad at. They've let the emotion go through them. You can think of emotion as energy and motion. It's this big energy that's moving through. You know, are you letting it move through? Are you trying to push it down? I've had this experience recently, and I'm going to come to you on this, Ethan, where I've had a very unpleasant resurgence and some anxiety and depression.

And I really see, even after, I don't know, 16, 17, 18 years of being a meditator, like, I don't want to fucking feel it. It's very unpleasant. And my first instinct is to do 75 other things instead of just feeling it. And so my question for you, Ethan, is if we all can agree that it is better to feel it than suppress it, what are the modalities that you recommend for allowing yourself to feel it? Accepting the fact that, so if you're motivated to feel it and you don't want to change that, we could talk about things you could do to change it. But if you do want to sit with the emotion because it's serving you well in some manner, accepting the fact that it's going to take some. some time for the emotion to wash over you, what we often talk about as distress tolerance can be a really, really useful tool. So just recognizing, like, there is a truism that characterizes the vast majority of our emotional responses. If we get outside the territory of clinical forms

of anxiety and depression, which by definition hang around for a really long time, the bulk of our everyday emotional experiences, they follow the same time course. You're living life. Here's your emotion readout. If you're listening, I'm drawn a little finger. It's going just parallel to the floor. Then all of a sudden it spikes up like an EKG heart rate monitor. That's your emotion getting triggered.

And then it'll stay up for a while. But as time goes on, it gradually fades. One of the reasons, one of my favorite tools, temporal distancing or mental time travel into the future works is because it makes people aware of this. So what is mental time travel into the future? Oh, my God. I just had a meeting again with these two interviewees. My God, they just keep berating me endlessly, making me feel like crap.

Well, you know, I've been through this before. How am I going to feel about this tomorrow or next week? It sounds so trivial. but that tiny, tiny shift in how you're thinking about your circumstance, what it does is it activates this understanding that all of us have because we've lived through millions,

that's not an exaggeration, we live through millions of emotional experiences that have this time course. Yeah, it's going to be not so great for the next three hours, maybe 18, depending on who we are, but eventually you'll come down from it. And so,

That recognition is vital. I think it is so incredibly powerful for allowing people to sit with what they're experiencing because fundamentally, it gives them hope that circumstances are going to improve. Just to call out that Ethan has moved us into tip number five, which is reappraisal or shifting your perspective on whatever emotion you're feeling. Emma, more to say from you on this strategy? Well, I just love what Ethan said. By the way, I just love hearing your voice, Ethan, it's so soothing. Well, thank you.

Now we're changing the tenor of this interview. I can't use my two. I'm just joking. It's very kind of you to say. I love what you're sharing because also remembering, gosh, I've been through so many, like you said, millions of emotions like this in the past. I've survived them. I'm right here right now.

I just love that point. I mean, 90% of the time we're awake. I love this factoid. We're experiencing stuff. it means we're always basically feeling something. I don't even know what I was feeling this morning. I mean, I could go back. It was pain, actually.

It was in the gym. I didn't want to be there. I'm feeling fine now. So lots of ways to harness that kind of knowledge. And apologies, Dan, for jumping the gun. Not at all. Not at all. Guns are meant to be jumped.

I'm here to just eventually provide some structure, even if it's ex post facto. So let's go to tip number six. And Emma, I'll go back to you for this one. Breathe. How is breathing a tool for emotion regulation? So you know, back when I was a grad student in James Gross's lab, and I love James Gross. He's forever my mentor. I guess I had an issue with just looking at suppression and reappraise. So re-appraisal was the big thing that the lab studied, which is basically, you know, trying to reframe the situation. So it doesn't seem so bad, which works really well. It can help the, emotion, calm down, you know, at the level of the brain, at the level of physiology.

But I guess my issue with this idea of reframing was it doesn't always work. It doesn't work when you have really strong emotion. Because in order to reframe a situation or think about it from a different perspective, you know, you're using your prefrontal cortex to kind of think more logically and rationally about the situation. But what research also shows is that when your system, is in high stress or another very intense emotion, you actually have the loss of free frontal regulation. You lose the ability. It's like when we try to talk a child out of a tantrum, it doesn't

work because the kid's brain doesn't work that way. We're kind of similar when our emotion is extremely strong, which is why, you know, when someone comes up to you in their life and you're anxious and they're like, hey, you should calm down. It doesn't work, right? Very annoying, yes. So as I kept thinking about that. And I was like, there's something that's got to find a different way. Because reappraisal doesn't always work. And, you know, as academics, we're always in the head. But mental strategies don't always work for everyone all the time. Right. So, and I'll share a story with you. I shared the story about Jake and the last podcast, but is it okay if I share it again, Dan? Yeah. Yes. Okay. So about 13 years ago, my husband walked in the room and he was pale.

And I said, what's going on? And you said, Jake was in an IED. So my husband was in the Marine Corps. And Jake was one of his friends who was in Afghanistan and his vehicle drove over a roadside bomb. Hopefully none of us can even imagine how horrific that experiences, the sound, the noise, the drop-nall flying, the terror, and of course the panic and excruciating pain of very severe injury, which he had. Okay, so in that moment, usually he would fall unconscious from the trauma, but Jake looked down and he saw his legs were extremely injured. in that moment he actually didn't fall unconscious. He remembered something he'd read about in a book for soldiers who could be entering these kinds of situations. And in that book,

and it taught a breathing exercise. And so he started to engage in that breathing exercise. And because he did that, he was able to regain the ability to think clearly and to do his first active duty, which was to check on the other service members, to do his second active duty, which was give orders to call for help. And then he even had the presence of mind to turn to get his own legs and to think of proffing them upward before lying down and falling unconscious. The U.S. then urgently transported to Germany and Walter Reed. And he was told, if you hadn't done those things, you would have died that day. Now, Jake is alive and well in the U.S. He has three children. He's a stay-at-home down. I just talked to him the other day. It's just so amazing. I always think

if Jake could save his life and the life of the others in the vehicle, by using his breath in the most stressful experience we can imagine, then what can breathing not help us with in our less stressful, yet still stressful lives? And so I was really inspired to run several studies with high trauma or high anxiety populations on breathing for well-being. And I have to say that in the moment, if we live in a time when we need things that work well and work fast, breathing is probably one of the most efficient ways to downregulate when something is happening. I think I'd be curious to hear as an anxious person, and I suspect many listening would characterize themselves. Similarly, give us a breathing exercise that can help us calm down when we need it. Yeah, sure. A lot of these

breathing exercises stem out of India 10,000 years ago, the yoga tradition. But what's interesting is that different breathing practices can do different things. So some of these breathing practices are meant for people who are going to go in a battle to like amp them up and others are meant to calm you down. So I always give a caveat, learn from a professional rather than a YouTube video, because you don't know what that breathing exercise is going to do. But keeping things really simple, we know that when we breathe in, our heart rate increases. And when you breathe out, it slows down. So if you do an exercise, that's very simple where you simply breathe in, fill your lungs to a count of four and you breathe out, say, to account of eight or six or eight, something longer, if you're starting to

activate the parasympathetic nervous system and calm down. So I always recommend, you know, just close your eyes and do that for five minutes and then see before and after how you feel. You'll start to notice immediately. In fact, you can play with this in the doctor's office I sometimes do and they're checking your heart rate and they're like, are you alive? You know, but you can noticeably see a change in minutes. Really cool. Even, let me go back to you for tip number seven, using your senses to shift your emotional state. Can you hold forth on that? Yeah, so we have, you know, sight, sound, touch, smell, taste. These are systems through which we take in information from the world around us, and part of the way they work is through emotion. These are incredibly powerful shifters of our emotion.

And at one level, we all know this. So if you ask people as an example, well, actually, let me just do it on you. Dan and Emma, I'm going to make a radical assumption here. that each of you at times listens to music. Fair to say? Yes. Fair to say, yes. Okay, so why do you do it?

Why do you listen to music? I definitely love music that's soothing. And when I accidentally hear music that's more emotional or in a different way, like piano, then I will definitely notice it can bring tears even, just hearing piano in a grocery store. Okay. But on the other hand, I'll voluntarily turn on music

that is soothing when I need that, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I use rather aggressive music to work out to and then more soothing music when I'm driving and don't want to scream at people in traffic. So both of you are indicating that you're listening to music for emotional purposes, different purposes, but emotional. And if you ask people why writ large they listen to music, almost 100% will say they listen to music because they like the way it makes them feel. But then if you look at when people are struggling with anger, anxiety, sadness, how many of them actually avail themselves of music to shift their emotions? Between 10 and 30 percent, music is one of the quickest ways to shift your emotions, to regulate your emotions in another direction. When I'm presenting to big groups, I tell people, hey, I'm going to regulate your emotions right now, and it's going to take me a whole of three seconds to do.

it. Are you ready? And people look at me with like intense skepticism because we of course think it's really hard to move someone else's emotions. And then I just turn on journeys don't stop believing. Boom. 90% of the crowd is smiling and bopping their head. And the other 10% are looking at me with scorn because they hate the song. Doesn't matter. They're both feeling something, right? So the senses are just such powerful levers. And And we don't always appreciate it. Sometimes we actually leverage the senses to shift us in counterproductive ways. As an example, lots of people, when they're really sad and they don't want to be sad anymore,

they won't listen to the pump up music. They'll instead listen to the sad music to help them go deeper into that state. I'd like to tell people if that's working for you. And there's good reason to think that listening to a song that is, congruent with what you're feeling may help you process an experience. But if you want to get out of that state, go in the other direction. Now, music and sound, that's one example. If we go down the list, let's go to smell. Both of you, I don't know your hygiene practices, but I'm guessing each of you have doused yourself or slacked yourself with a substance to influence the way

you feel about yourself or other people feel when they walk by you, i.e. you're wearing deodorant or perfume cologne, aftershave, something like that, fair to say? Scented shampoo, okay, nodding heads. So scents, huge industries, why do we put those things on us? Why do hotels pump scents through the ventilation systems? They want to make people feel a certain way and pair that feeling with the establishment.

Food. I don't like to look at our credit card bill when it comes to the amount of money we spend at restaurants and at the fancy food shop sometimes. Why do we do that? It's not just sustenance. If it were, we'd be walking around with IV bags attached to our arms. Eating is an emotional experience. Touch. We don't have to go deep into touch. I think we all know how pleasant the right kind of embrace. with people who you want to be embraced with, I'll stop there, that arouses positivity. So all of your senses are just these really, really powerful shifters of your emotion. And if you understand how this works, it also puts you in a position to use those apparatus to shift other people's emotions in a helpful direction. Putting on the right music, the right sense, you know, like, daughters are having a stressful day at school. It's a, you know, it used to be actually preteen.

I could just go over and a gentle kind of caress of the back was well received. Not so much anymore. But you've got many options to choose from. So that's the power of the senses. And we shouldn't overlook them as an emotion regulation tool. I believe I met your elder daughter a couple of months ago and she's awesome. Yeah. She still, she still reminds me how much she enjoyed. You had a real gift for actually talking to her like she really mattered. And she still reminds me of that. So I'm thankful of that exchange. I don't give myself the credit in that exchange. She's a very cool kid. And just as a side note, she was telling me how she uses AI and these really clever ways to like get AI to explain math concepts in the voice of the characters from Gossip Girl.

that really struck me as a really smart way to leverage the technology. Coming up, Emma and Ethan talk about how to tend your inputs and why what you consume shapes how you feel more than you might think. And we talk about something called the emotional advisor audit. Who on your list actually helps and who just keeps you stuck? Let's get back on point here and talk about tip number eight. Emma, let me go to you for this. your advice for one way to regulate your emotions is to, and I believe this is your term, tend your inputs.

What does that mean? Yes, absolutely. So, you know, we take over 60,000 gigabytes of information in every day, and this is a conservative number from a few years ago. I don't even want to know what it is, though, but that's enough to, you know, crash small computer in a week. I mean, it is so much input. This is an average from all of our media sources that we take in every day.

So everything that we absorb, everything that we watch, everything that we listen to impacts us emotionally. You know, you check your inbox. You got eight messages. Each one of those could trigger a different emotion. Your tax person says you don't, you owe more money than you think. The next thing your boss wants something from you yesterday, you know, the next thing someone sends you their newborn baby picks. And in the couple minutes that we spend just checking our inbox, we probably experienced more emotions than our ancestors did 100 years ago. And knowing how we're impacted by things like, for example, the headlines, the news, you know, most of the news, I would say 99% of the news is, and Diane, you know, that's better than anyone, is negative, right? It's just negative. It's fear inducing, it's anger inducing. It is so important to have awareness. And I think that's been a topic we've been talking about throughout. Is this awareness of how am I feeling, but also how are things making me feel like Ethan so beautifully just spoke about? And am I, consciously choosing or letting others choose for me, for example, if I just go ahead and just sit out and watch whatever or scroll through whatever, because every single one of those things is input that has an emotional impact on you. So choosing sovereignty, making sovereign choices

and very conscious choices is so important. You know, what is the first thing you're going to do when you wake up in the morning? Are you really going to be checking your phone? Are you going to be really checking the news, what's that going to do to you? It's going to put you in fight or flight right away. Is that what you want? Great. What are you doing right before bed? Do you want to sleep well? What are you going to watch? What are you going to listen to? This goes so well with what Ethan was just saying about music and other ways that we can influence how we feel. I'd be curious on this topic of tending to your inputs. What's your take on Instagram? I, as I've mentioned many times on the show, deleted Instagram from my phone a couple months ago,

and I noticed that it was massively helpful. I completely agree that you want to be aware of what your triggers are, triggers that set you in the wrong emotional direction, but also triggers that can send you in the right direction. So as you were talking about, I deleted the New York Times app from my phone several months ago. I haven't put it back, and I'm massively happier. No, I still read the New York Times,

but I used to read it every time I checked my phone. And the bombardment of just information I found was not serving you well, so I got rid of it. With respect to Instagram, I think there's really good reason why removing it from your phone may serve you well. I have actually kept it on my iPad, and I do so for a very particular reason. So I actually find that Instagram, I use it in a very very important. very specific way. And it's an emotion regulatory way that serves me well. I watch these ridiculously funny, silly reels. It kind of takes the edge off after a long day. I'll often like share them with my friends and they send me these very silly videos that I'll show my wife one out of every five

and she just rolls her eyes and I don't know why these are funny to you. Am I the only one who's ever had this experience, by the way. I saw a video the other day. So I still have TikTok on my phone. TikTok does not bum me out the way Instagram does. I use it for the exact same reason you do. And I saw a funny video there the other day of a woman on the couch and you could hear in the distance a male laughing hysterically. And the caption said, I know in 30 seconds he's going to send me a really stupid video. I literally saw that last night. And I showed it to my wife. And she gave me the look. So I use it in a very purposeful way in that regard and it serves me well. If I went down the wrong path in it, would it trigger me in some way with social comparisons? Absolutely.

And that would not make me feel great. And so I think it's really about, like if we zoom out, what is emotion regulation about? It is about aligning your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with your goals. So what are your goals here? Right. Like my goal is, before bed, I want to feel happy. I want to feel good. It helps me go to bed. So that helps serve my goals. If my goal is to not be overwhelmed with a highlight reel of other people's lives,

then I should stay away from socially. If my goal is to not be reminded of all of the terrible things that are happening in the world right now every 13 minutes or less, then I should probably take the near times off my phone and dose it at particular times of the day. So it's really about being deliberate about what are the goals that I have and then how do I structure my life to help me reach those regulatory goals? These tools that we're talking about, they are all instruments in the service of that end. Emma, what are your, how do you tend to your inputs in the spirit of know thyself that Ethan is preaching? Like, how do you apply this? I'm very deliberate. I don't have Instagram on my

phone. I checked the news very sparingly and with a lot of awareness. You know, one spoke to Pico Iyer. I don't know if you had him on the show. Sure. Yes. Yeah. He just said, you know, I'm a current events journalist and I'm going to tell you that our job is to create anxiety because that's how people will click and then they'll click on the ads. You know what I mean? It was like very black and white, right? So I'm very deliberate with that. I guess I just want to make a point here about, you know, what, Dan, I know you talk about so much, which is meditation. When you meditate, when you meditate, regularly, you're developing the awareness that you need to have the ability not to be taken in by whatever it is, whether it's headlines or the social media app or whatever. So the more

you meditate, the more you create that awareness and the freedom to make the choice that you need. And that's what's so beautiful about it and the message that you spread down. Because I really have found myself that as absolutely key. I mean, I've been very regular with my meditation practice, no matter how I feel like this morning I was meditating and I was feeling not great during it. And I was like, I'm here and I'm meditating. I'm with this. Whatever it is, you know, I find that absolutely key to being able to then make the right choices. Not that I don't slip sometimes. Of course, I do. But even when I'm slipping, I'm aware that I'm slipping. Yes. I'm obviously a big fan of meditation. I do think it is exactly what you said. It is a way to train attention. And it's very

powerful in that regard. Over time, my views have evolved in part as a result of hosting this podcast for now 10 years plus. And Ethan and I were talking before we started rolling about the research that shows that rather than making a dogmatic case to people that there's one thing you should do to take care of yourself, it's actually more effective to present a toolkit. And so I often talk about presenting people with a menu, not a to-do list. And I find that it feels better in my body to give people a bunch of things they can do and let them choose. Speaking of you, Ethan, let's go to you for tip number nine. So I mentioned before your first book is called chatter. The second was called shift. And we've talked a little bit about shifting your attention when you

are in the grips of a powerful emotion and, you know, it's not the time to fully feel it. You also argue that that kind of strategic avoidance is sometimes the right move and not a weakness. Can you say more about that? Yeah, we have this very interesting tendency in our culture to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We overgeneralize. And so that pertains to this concept of avoidance. When I first got into this business, and I'm sure Emma has had the same experience, I get to grad school.

Avoidance is synonymous with the worst possible thing you could do for your emotional life. And why is that assumption prevalent? Because it is true that if you chronically avoid things, the outcomes are really grim. Across the board, if you have a simple decision rule, every time I am triggered in some way, I'm just going to suppress, repress, distract. things don't work out very well. But that's an extreme case of a coping style where you are doing this one thing all the time.

We also possess the ability to be strategic with our attention. In fact, that's one of the beautiful things of the human brain. We can flit our attention back and forth. And it turns out there's a lot of research which shows that the ability to divert your attention away from something that's bothering for a while and then come back to it, that can actually be really, really useful. And I'll give you a very concrete example. It's one that I have benefited from numerous times in my life. I will every, oh, I don't know, seven to ten days get an email

that provokes me. I read the email and, you know, it's either anger, you know, followed by some inner self-talk filled, like that sounds almost like a Robert De Niro character, or maybe it's anxiety-provoking in a former life, and I have, I lap sometimes, I might respond immediately. Or I can force myself to push the email aside. I have this beautiful snooze button in my email browser.

It actually takes it out of my inbox, so it's no longer a visual cue. I don't set it to come back until the next day or sometimes two days, right? And when the email comes back, I am now approaching it from an entirely different point of view. That is a case that speaks to the strategic value of strategic attention deployment or being strategic with your avoidance. So I like to always invite people to play around with this idea. sometimes you can't actually avoid something that is bothering you for even a short period of time. It's so hot, if you will, that you can't distract productively.

If that's the case, like, no problem, you have another two dozen tools that you could bring to bear to deal with that kind of circumstance. But many of the emotional curveballs that we are thrown in life, we can take some time away from and then come back. And that's a helpful tactic to have in your toolbox. Agreed. Let's get to the 10th tip in the interest of time here. And to me, and I'll be interested here if you two agree, to me, this may be the most powerful. And it is to lean on your relationships as a way to regulate your emotions.

Emma, let me start with you on this. Yeah, we know that after food and shelter, our greatest need is for positive social relationships. In particular, we need to feel safe, seeing her at value appreciated. I mean, that is so basic, whether you're an infant or you're 99, we really need that. But when they're positive, when they're supportive, when they're accepting, that is really powerful. And it's a relationship with people. For some people, it might be a relationship with animals and even be relationships with nature. And in fact, all three could be part of someone's toolkit.

You know, we know, for example, that when you go out into nature, it reduces your anxiety in minutes, increases well-being, it even increases citizenship behavior. So there's something so profound about that communion with the other, assuming it's a positive other, of course, whether it's human, whether it's animal, whether it's the natural world. I love that you're ending on this. Ethan, you talk about doing something you call an emotional advisor audit. What does that mean? it means thinking about who the people are in your life that you go to for support when you're struggling. I couldn't agree more with both of you. Other people are one of the greatest resources that we possess when it comes to our emotional lives, which means our lives more generally, as we're emotional creatures, but they can also be tremendous liabilities. I often

have this fun experience. I'll just ask people in a group, like, so how many of you think that other people are a tremendous asset in your emotional life. Every hand goes up. All right, one more question for you before it to do. How many of you think that other people can be a tremendous liability in your emotional life? Every hand goes out. So what's the deal? The deal is that the right kinds of relationships, the right kind of people can be a total

game changer for helping extricate you from the bowels of chatter despair or whatever. phrase you want to call when you're descending down the rabbit hole. But even that like well-intentioned support providers can sometimes make things worse. So the audit I like to give people is list the names of the people that you go to for support. I want you to actually write those names down. And then for every person, I want you to ask yourself, when you go to them, do they do the following two things in this sequence? Do they first and foremost connect with you a emotionally, empathize, validate, normalize your experience, just listen and learn about what you're going through.

Then once they have a sense of that and you feel like you've had the opportunity to connect with them and really release this, do they then start working with you to help you reframe this, to broaden your perspective, to ultimately allow you to reach a sense of closure that we need to move on. The people who do both of those things for you in that sequence, they are your emotional advisors. They form the foundation of your advisory board. Now, if you have people on your list who don't meet both of those criteria, I give people two choices. First, I pass around red sharpies and I say, you can cross them off the list. They're gone. And, you know, I joke, that doesn't mean they're out of your life. It means maybe just don't go to them for

emotional support because oftentimes that people just get us to co-ruminate. They just ask us questions about what we're feeling in ways that make the situation a whole lot worse. The other choice and the one I hope people take me up on is to educate our networks about how to be a great support provider. What I've just described is grounded in decades of scientific knowledge. We have a roadmap for how to help other people. I can speak from experience before I became familiar with this work.

I didn't know how to help someone else when they called me for support. Like I remember, someone once called me. Someone passed away. And I was like, oh, I'm so sorry. Oh, yeah, I'm really, I'm sorry. Sounds terrible. What can I do to help? I didn't know what else to do how to guide that conversation.

I very rarely find myself in that situation now because I have this science-based roadmap. And it's an easy one we can give to everyone. what do you say if somebody calls you and tells you there's been a death in the family? What is the right thing to say? The first thing to say is I do start with the sorry, so that's an old trick. But then I ask them to just tell me about how they're feeling and what's happening, what's going on. And I just allow them to start working through that with me. And sometimes that's all we do on that call, but sometimes they'll voice.

a desire to try to get past that. And then we start broaching that. And I'll at times shift the conversation from just talking about how we're feeling to, well, all right, let's, you know, let's try to look at this bigger picture. You've got, you know, they've had a wonderful life. Right. So there are ways of gently starting to try to nudge the conversation in that perspective broading direction. Sometimes that happens over a few calls, though. Yes. Grief is a a mysterious force. Dan, can I add a point to jump on Ethan? Yes.

I love what Ethan said. I just wanted to add that when we help others, it helps us. And I think that's a point that we often forget. But the data shows that when we live lives that are characterized by a greater sensitivity to others and more altruism or even just the intention to help or uplift others, it actually profoundly benefits our own well-being. And sometimes when we're not feeling well, I think we can all probably remember a time when we were feeling stressed or like,

oh, it's a terrible day, but somebody else calls us and they're really having an emergency, and you show up at their door or wherever they are and help them. And then if you think about how you feel, you feel amazing. You feel so energized and positive. And there's something so profound about that being there for others, this compassion that we forget. there's so much data showing how it improves psychological, being physical, being even longevity.

And the last thing I want to do is I want to, you know, on the topic of self-compassion, remind people to watch your TED Talk and Dan, which is so wonderful and such an incredible example of what self-compassion can do for yourself as well as your relationships. Thank you. I second that.

Thank you. Okay. We are at time. But we have made it through. And congratulations to us. We have made it through all 10, tips. And yeah, let me just say personally, even though I've heard many of these things before, it is so incredibly helpful to be reminded because, you know, you can hear, and I say this a lot,

you can hear really wise, strategic advice, emotional advice, and life just pulls you back into your habit patterns. And so it is so helpful to be reminded by smart, thoughtful people. So Emma Seppela and Ethan Cross, thank you both. Really appreciate it. Thanks again to Emma and Ethan. Great to have them as part of this 10th anniversary series. Before I let you go, I do want to tell you about something that's happening in the Western Dharma scene that you should probably know about. Christina Feldman, who's an amazing teacher at the Insight Meditation Society, is dealing with some quite serious health problems and could use some help. Her friends have set up a GoFundMe.

And if you'd like to support, you can find the link to that GoFundMe in the show notes to this. episode, or you can just do a Google search, Christina Feldman, GoFundMe. Her name is F-E-L-D-M-A-N. As you know, we in the 10% world really like to support Dharma teachers in their hours of need, and this certainly is one for Christina. She's amazing. If you want to help her, this is your opportunity. Also, speaking of amazing Dharma teachers, don't forget to go check out my new-ish meditation app, 10% with Dan Harris, where we have a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers. Plus, you can get this podcast without any ads.

We do weekly exclusive live stream events. And this really is a great way to support me and my team, but also these amazing teachers. Plus, there's a free 14-day trial if you want to check it out before you spend any money. I just want to end by saying thank you to everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.