The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Coach Yourself Through a Crisis

Episode Date: March 19, 2020

We all need to keep a clear head at times of crisis - but that's not always easy. So when strong emotions of fear and anxiety start to cloud your judgement, turn to an effective and reassuring voice of reason... you. Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory gives us concrete strategies on how to coach yourself so you can approach upsetting problems in a calmer and more reasoned way.If you have a question you want answered on a future coronavirus bonus episode then tweet @lauriesantos or @pushkinpods using #happinesslabpod Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. Welcome to a special set of episodes of The Happiness Lab. The now global spread of coronavirus is affecting all of us. This disease has brought a host of medical, economic, and political problems. But it's also given us a ton of uncertainty and anxiety, which are beginning to have an enormous negative impact on our collective well-being. But whenever I'm confused or fearful, I remember that looking for answers in evidence-based science is always the best way

to go. And that's where I'm hoping this podcast can help. If you're like me, you probably feel like your entire life has been, or is about to be, upended by this awful crisis. Which leads to lots and lots of negative emotions and stressful personal situations. Last week, for example, I wound up working 24-7 to get all the students in my residential college here at Yale back home safely. All that stress and rushed goodbyes made me feel incredibly sad and anxious. But after paying so much attention to my students, I realized that I'd not given my own situation much thought.

So I decided to head to the grocery store, which was a major error. All the toilet paper's gone, a lot of the frozen foods, a lot of the bread. Vegetables, cleaning supplies, meats and dairy are hard to come by. Every single supermarket is just completely wiped out. There was no produce left. People were wearing gloves and masks, frantically grabbing random stuff. And so I, too, just started rushing around. When I got back home, I realized I bought a bunch of foods that didn't make any sense whatsoever.

I bought cans of stuff that I already had in my pantry, and a bar of soap I totally didn't need. Plus, I forgot essentials like coffee, which I had planned to pick up, but had completely forgotten in the mayhem. My futile, panicky shopping experience made me realize something important. In this current crisis, none of us seem able to make reasonable decisions because we're all too anxious and overwhelmed, which is kind of a problem because right now we all need our wits about us to make effective plans.

We need to make sure that our kids get to eat healthy, that our elderly family members are taken care of, but it's hard to plan for this virus effectively when everything feels so overwhelming and emotional. I wanted to call someone who could help me find strategies to regulate all this anxiety so that I could make better decisions. And I knew just the scientist to call. My name is Ethan Cross. I'm a professor in the psychology department at the University of Michigan, and I direct a laboratory that

specializes in the study of self-control and emotion. So Ethan, everybody needs somebody who's an expert on self-control and emotion. So Ethan, everybody needs somebody who's an expert on self-control and emotion right now, because this is an incredibly emotional time. Like everyone's freaking out. Yeah. So I've never lived through a time like this before. And it certainly makes me think like psychology has a lot to potentially contribute to what really the world is going through right now. And so a lot of your work focuses on how emotion affects planning and what's called self-regulation. So talk about kind of the effect that this sort of heightened emotion is having on how people are just acting in their daily lives right now. So intense emotions like

anxiety can have a powerful effect on how we think, feel, and behave. One thing it does is it zooms us in on the source of threat. So when we experience an intense emotion like anxiety, we are precision focused on what is potentially bothering us. And when we over-focus in that way on things, that can have some important consequences for our ability to make decisions and perform in the contexts that are important to us. So as an example, if you're in the supermarket

and you're looking for, you know, supplies to last you the next 30 days, if you're over-focused on the anxiety, you may have the experience of, you know, putting your hand out and running down the aisles and just putting everything in your food cart, right? You're not thinking about the bigger picture, the broader context. Hey, what do I have in the pantry that I need to supplement, right? What things are perishable and what's not. And so that's just one example of how anxiety can zoom us in on problems. The other consequence of that is if we're over-focused on a particular threat. So let's say, what am I going to do for the next 30 days or 60 days when I've got to stay at home with my family and work and help my kids

continue to learn. If you're constantly thinking about that particular issue, that doesn't leave a whole lot of mental space to think about other things. The papers you have to do, the projects you're working on, and so forth and so on. And so we know that human attention is a limited resource. We have this unbelievable ability to think in creative, abstract ways around the world, but we're using all of that capacity to zoom in on this threat. And as a result, you don't get a whole lot of work done. So that's how intense anxiety can essentially knock out our ability to think well. It can also have negative implications for our relationships.

That's the second big negative consequence. One of the things we know about intense emotion is it acts like jet fuel that propels us to share our experiences with others. There's decades of research which shows that when people experience, across different cultures, intense emotions, they are highly motivated

to talk with other people about what they're experiencing. But oftentimes what happens with intense anxiety is we talk to other people and we continue to talk and talk and talk and talk. And that has the effect of pushing other people away, of counterproductively and paradoxically actually creating a sense of social isolation and loneliness rather than bringing us the social support we need. And so that's the second negative consequence we have to be aware of. The third is what intense anxiety, if chronically activated, can do to our bodies, our physical health. And the situation doesn't get any rosier

when we look at that dimension. And the reason for that is intense feelings of emotions activate a biological fight or flight immune response that can be amazingly helpful for dealing with potential threats. It's like activating the army reserves or the National Guard to deal with an impending attack. Well, turns out that biological system works really well in the short term. But when it's chronically activated over time, as is the case with chronic rumination and worry and anxiety, that's when the biological systems begin to break down. So they begin to perform less well. And as a result, we know that intense anxiety is linked to a host of negative physical maladies. This is all pretty darn negative, right? And the good news is that it need not be that way.

And that's what you're an expert on, this phenomenon of emotion regulation. So talk to our listeners, what is emotion regulation and kind of how does it work? So emotion regulation is the ability to align how you're feeling with how you want to feel. Oftentimes it takes the form of being able to reduce a negative response, a negative feeling like an anxious state or sadness. If we're regulating, we want to bring those down a little bit. But it can also take the form of amplifying those states, right? So you could push up your anger sometimes if you want to.

Sometimes that can be helpful in a particular interpersonal context. And the same thing applies to positive emotions too. So it's really this facility that people have with pushing their emotions up and down. I do think it's important to just clarify from the outset that when we talk about emotion regulation, we're not talking about turning emotions off and not feeling anything. We're often talking about reining them in to a point that we think is most adaptive for us, given the situations that we're in. And in the current climate, when dealing with coronavirus, I don't think we want to actually shut off anxiety altogether. That feeling of anxiety is what

is leading people to stay in their home as they should stay in their home, to flatten the curve and get this under control. So we want to maintain some anxious feelings, but what we don't want to do is let those anxious feelings explode. So your work has focused on certain things we can do to emotionally regulate. And one of the strategies I love that comes from your lab is this idea of psychological distance. So we're all talking about social distancing now, but that's not what psychological distance means. Walk me through what psychological distance is and kind of how we achieve it in our normal lives. The example I like to give people to really convey what psychological distance is all about is to ask you to think about a situation or a time in your life when a friend or loved one has come to you with a problem that they are spinning over.

They're ruminating, they're worrying excessively, they don't know what to do. And when they pose a problem to you, it's relatively easy for you to coach them through that situation. The reason for that is that you have psychological distance from that problem. It's not happening to you. It's happening to your friend. And you're, as a result, more capable of weighing in on that problem more objectively, more rationally. What we've learned is that we have evolved tools to gain psychological distance from our own problems. And that when we adopt more distanced stances, when we think about our own

life, that can help us think about our experiences more objectively, just like we are capable of thinking about other people's situations more objectively. And there are lots of different tools that exist to help us do that. We naturally get this idea of seeking advice from someone with a bit of psychological distance. When times are tough, we know we need a friend or coach to help us. But the problem with the current crisis is that no one has psychological distance. We're all in the same boat, which means everyone we know is freaking out and anxious.

It feels like we're all under threat. So what can we do to gain a little psychological distance when all our friends are just as stressed as we are? When we get back from the break, Ethan will share some psychological tips for harnessing your inner BFF, your own wise internal psychological coach who can calm you down and get you thinking a little bit more We'll see you next time. them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. Scientists find inspiration in lots of ways. Isaac Newton began thinking about gravity

after seeing an apple fall from a tree. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin after someone accidentally left a petri dish uncovered. For psychologist Ethan Cross, inspiration about finding the importance of an inner coach came from what might at first seem like an odd source. Basketball player LeBron James. It was this interesting moment in time where LeBron James, for the first time, was about to become a free agent. And he had his choice of where he wanted to play basketball. And several teams, including my beloved Knicks, were vying for his attention.

And he ended up doing an ESPN primetime special to declare his decision. But I didn't realize when I was about to watch the show that he was going to provide this insight into his thinking process, which he did. At one moment in the interview, he said, One thing that I didn't want to do is make an emotional decision. And I wanted to do what was best, you know, for LeBron James and what LeBron James is going to do to make him happy. He basically utters an emotion regulatory goal, right? He says, you know, the one thing I, first person, didn't want to do is make an emotional decision. And the moment he committed to that goal, he switched.

He did something very seemingly odd. He started talking about himself using his own name. LeBron James has got to do what is best for LeBron James. And so this got my collaborators and I to start thinking about why would a person do such a thing, right? Like 99% of the time, we use names to think about and refer to others. And so what we started doing and thinking about and importantly running lots and lots of experiments on was the idea that language can provide people with a tool to gain distance from their own problems. The idea is that when we use words like names or words like you or he or she, we almost exclusively use those parts of speech when we think about and refer to other people. And so the idea is that when we use those parts of speech to refer to ourselves, that

should lead us to think about ourselves more similar to how we think about others. And it should provide us with the distance that comes with thinking about other people as a result. And LeBron was using this in a time when that was incredibly anxious for him, right? Like when he might've had that same narrowing we were just talking about a second ago where there's this kind of threat of, is he going to make the right decision? He's kind of too narrow and he can't make the right choice. But in some sense, he's like harnessing an external coach, like he's kind of talking to himself as though he was someone else. And so you've done studies that have looked at this empirically, trying to get people to do

exactly what LeBron did in times of stress. Yeah. So we brought participants into the laboratory and we induced stress using one of the most powerful techniques that we can humanely use. People are going to think shocks, but it's not actually shocks, right? I would argue that it's worse than shocks, actually. It's like public speaking. Yeah, public speaking, which I think is worse for many people than physical harm. And when they got into the lab, we told them,

today we want you to give us a speech on why you're ideally qualified to land your dream job. This is a total surprise for participants. And we tell them you can't take any notes. And so this is a very reliable way of inducing social threat anxiety. So after we get everyone stressed out, we basically randomly assign people by the flip of a coin to one of two groups. In one condition, we say, you know, one of the things we're interested in this study are the different ways that people report preparing themselves psychologically before having to give public speeches. Some people report trying to work through and make sense of what they're feeling in the first person. So that's what we'd like you to do. Ask yourself,

why am I feeling this way? In the other condition, we give people the exact same set of instructions with one difference. We say, some people report trying to work through their feelings using their own name and other non-first-person pronouns. So that's what we'd like you to do. Why is Ethan feeling this way? And so in one condition, it's why am I? In the other condition, it's why is Ethan? That's the only difference between the two. And they introspect using these different parts of speech for about three minutes. When that phase of the study is done, we take them down the hall to another room. There's an X on the floor in masking tape.

We say, stand right there. They look up. Seated right in front of them are three actors who are, they're told, are evaluators. And we train these actors to maintain stoic, disapproving facial expressions. So not positive when you look up at them. And right behind them, there's a giant video camera with like a blinking red light that's recording what happens. And then we have the participants give their speech. So they do the presentation. When the study is done, one of the things we do is we have judges who don't know what condition the participants were assigned to rate participants' performances for how persuasive were their speeches. And what we find is that participants who use their own name are rated as having delivered more persuasive speeches.

What that means to me is that all of the things being equal about participants in the two groups, it's the participants who use their own name that are more likely to get this job they're interviewing for. Now, we also did a few other things in the study. So we asked people how much shame and embarrassment they felt right after they gave their speech. Participants who use their name felt less shameful. They felt less self-conscious and embarrassed. And then what we also did is we had people sit down in another room. You could think of this as like a stewing period. And I'm imagining like, if I'm a subject in this study, I'm going to sit there and think, I did a really crappy job. I suck. Like you're just going to be, I'm sure your subjects are just ruminating about how terrible they did. Well, that's exactly what we wanted to look at. And so we had people self-report how much time they spent ruminating about what they did. Oh my God,

I can't believe I said that. I kept thinking about what I could have said better. And then we also had them describe in writing the stream of thoughts that were flowing through their head. And sure enough, participants who had used their own name showed that they were ruminating less about their performance than participants in the other group. Which is kind of crazy when you think about it, because it's really just changing one word in the way you're talking to yourself. And it has these incredible consequences. It's pretty crazy. Yeah, it is. And I would encourage listeners to just try doing this linguistic shift. Also, by the way, do it silently, not out loud. All of the science that we've done on this deals with these silent shifts in how people use language to think about

themselves. We have not done it talking out loud to yourself. That actually may well be useful, but it importantly also violates lots of social norms that exist about not talking to yourself out loud. So I would not encourage that. You've also been showing that this isn't just a strategy that adults can use. This might be the kind of thing that parents can employ when talking to their kids in this really stressful time to get them to help regulate their own emotions. One of the most powerful manifestations of it is something called the Batman effect, which a set of developmental psychologists, Stephanie Carlson and Rachel White, have really pioneered. What they show is that if you have a kid engaging in a really stressful task that they don't want to do, and they're tempted to do other things, if you ask

them to just pause and reflect on why they're doing, let's say, their homework. In one condition, you say, well, think about why you're doing it. And you know, why am I doing it? And the other condition, you might say, imagine you're Batman and think about why Batman is working on this hard, difficult task. And when you have a kid think about themselves like a superhero, it turns out they perform better, they feel better. And there's even some evidence that those techniques are most useful for the kids who have the most difficulty controlling their emotions. You've also shown that this technique works in the face of the kinds of pandemic threats we're facing now. You had done some work in the context of the Ebola crisis from a few years ago showing that this works as well. Right. So, you know, Ebola was a really interesting phenomenon. Ebola

was actually quite different from coronavirus in ways that we'll talk about in a little bit, but it provided us with a really interesting opportunity to see how these linguistic shifts work outside the lab in daily life when people are dealing with a threat. What was interesting about Ebola was there were actually lots of reasons why people shouldn't be worried about the threat of an Ebola outbreak in the United States. It's not an airborne disease. The medical infrastructure in the United States is much better than in Africa where there were outbreaks. And yet you still had lots of people seemingly incapable of accessing those fact-based reasons

why things aren't gonna go south really fast. And so everyone was zoomed in on the threat. Could we zoom them out, help them get a sense of the bigger perspective in ways that would alleviate their anxiety? And so right when the threat was peaking, we did a study online with over a thousand people spread across all 50 states. And we had half of participants think about their concerns about Ebola in the first person, and the other half of participants were asked to do so using their own name. their concerns about Ebola in the first person, and the other half of participants were asked to do so using their own name. And what we found was that the more people use their own name to think about this problem, to work through their feelings, the more they were able to think about the reasons

why they shouldn't be worried, the more they generated fact-based reasons. It's not airborne, the infrastructure is better, and so forth and so on. And not surprisingly, the more people thought about these reasons not to worry, the less they actually worried, and the lower they thought there was a risk of a widespread outbreak. And so I think that was a nice way of looking at how these linguistic shifts play outside the laboratory. Now, the situation with the coronavirus is actually a little different. We are not getting clear messaging about why we shouldn't be worrying about this pandemic. You tune into some channels

or publications and they say, there's no need to worry. Other people will say, no, actually, the risk is quite severe. We're talking about millions of people. And so we don't actually know what's fact and what's not. I think that's in part what is driving so much anxiety about this situation. So in this context, I think there is still benefit that can be had from distancing. But the technique that I've been recommending to people, it's something else that we call temporal distancing, or you might think about it as mental time travel. So one of the things we know,

and this is a fact, is that what we are now going through, we have experienced as a species before. There have been other pandemics that have occurred. They've varied in their intensity, but they've happened. And importantly, we're still here capable of talking about them. So they've happened and we've gotten through it. And so what temporal distancing, if I asked you to think about how you feel, not right now, but how are you going to feel two years from now, right? When most forecasts suggest this will have subsided, we'll have vaccines, herd immunity will likely develop and so forth. There's lots and lots of research which show that engaging in this form of mental time travel, thinking about how we're going to feel not right now in this moment, but in

six months from now or a year from now or two years from now, what that does is it highlights the impermanence of what we are currently experiencing. And this is another strategy that we use when we're giving advice to each other. Like whenever I talk to my college students about some threat that they see right at the moment, you know, this grade that's looming, they got a really horrible grade. It's like, hey, in three years time, this isn't going to really matter that much. Like the coaches from the outside can give you some psychological distance by harnessing how you're going to think about things in the future. It's just we're just doing the same thing inside our own heads. Exactly. And, you know, there are countless

distancing techniques that exist. We've talked about, right, this linguistic shift. Now we're talking about temporal distancing. The key here is to think about which distancing tactic works best in this particular situation. There's a reason why we have these different strategies. They're all related, but they work a little differently. So this is super advice because it seems like we can use each of these strategies in the coronavirus situation, but at different times. So when I'm going to the grocery store and I'm just super anxious and I need to calm down, I can talk to myself in the third person, like, Lori, you're going to get through this, you're going to make a good decision, et cetera, et cetera. But kind of collectively,

as a culture, we might be able to use this temporal distancing strategy to really think, hang on, let's pause for a second. We're going to get through this. We've gotten through this before. Three years from now, this is going to be fine, et cetera. When you use these strategies yourself, are you switching between them? Are these the kind of go-to strategies that you tend to use? Totally. Ethan, get your-to strategies that you tend to use? Totally. Ethan, get your act together. This is going to be fine. And the temporal distancing. I use those two interchangeably. You actually did something that was really interesting when you just described how you shift from using Lori to the temporal distancing. When you were describing the mental time travel stuff, you actually used the word we. We're going to get through this, not I'm going to get through this.

We. We is also another form of distancing, right? It's not just about me. It's about all of us together. And so I think that's another illustration right there of how language is serving as this conduit that's helping you distance in that moment. My prediction would be, you might feel a little bit different if it was,

I'm gonna get through this in four years from now rather than we're gonna get through it. I wanted to end with the question of like, what's Ethan doing right now? I mean, have you watched yourself use these strategies in the stressful situation? Lori, of course I've watched myself use the strategies. This is all I do. I'm feeling anxious too.

And I think that's appropriate. I know I'm in it with everyone else. We human beings, people, all of us are incredibly resilient. And the human mind has this amazing facility for thinking flexibly about the challenges that we face. And there's some evidence, actually, that these kinds of emotion regulation tools are even more effective when we're under threat because there's so much more negative emotion to help rein in under those circumstances. So I think they can help take the edge off. And I think that's what we want them to do.

Taking the edge off just a little bit can often be the difference, I think, between getting your work done and not getting it done, being happy and cheery around your family and not. And so I encourage people to try them. So in some sense, these are strategies that can get us back to kind of normal functioning in a really abnormal time. Yeah, I think that's a great way of putting it. That's the hope. I, for one, plan to take Ethan's ideas to heart. Or should I say, Lori's going to start taking Ethan's ideas to heart. Or should I say, Lori's going to start taking Ethan's ideas to heart. Lori's going to think carefully

about what she can do in this crisis. And Lori's going to realize that she's been through things like this before and she's come through them okay. And so I hope you'll join me, Lori, for the next special episode of The Happiness Lab. The Happiness Lab is made by me, Dr. Laurie Santos. It's produced and co-written by Ryan Dilley.

Our original music is by Zachary Silver. We're a Pushkin podcast, so special thanks go to Jacob Weisberg, Mia LaBelle, Heather Fane, Carly Migliori, Julia Barton, and the rest of the team. shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini is because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too.

Be more you this year and find them on Bumble.