The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Hack Your Emotions

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

Negative emotions like fear or anger are part of being human. These feelings tell us something - perhaps prompting us to take action or bring about change. However, they're powerful and disruptive - and if they hang around too long or are too intense, they can take a huge toll on our happiness and wellbeing. We need to shift them... but how? Psychologist Ethan Kross knows. He's the author of Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You and founder of the Emotion and Self Control Lab at the University of Michigan - and shares his top science-backed tips to rein in feelings like sorrow, disappointment or rage. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin Negative emotions, feelings like fear, anger, sadness, and overwhelm, are just part of being human. But that doesn't make them any easier to manage. Whether it's the sense of dread we get before a challenging task or the frustration of dealing with unmet expectations, our big feelings can drain our energy, mess up our performance, and make us feel like crap.

The good news is that we don't have to be at the mercy of our big feelings. Research shows that with the right strategies, we can not only manage tough emotions effectively, but also use them to our advantage, no matter what life throws our way. So in today's episode of the Happiness Labs How-To Season, we will dive into the science of emotion regulation. And to help us, we have one of my favorite experts on the topic.

Here to teach you how to shift your emotions is my friend, psychologist, Ethan Cross. Great to see you guys. Let me put on some background here. No, no, you're good. What do you think? I'm just gonna blur it here. No, no, you're good. What do you think? I'm just going to blur it here. Yeah, blur is fine.

Okay. Ethan founded the Emotion and Self-Control Lab at the University of Michigan, and his latest book tackles the topic of dealing with big feelings head on. It's called Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. We'll get to Ethan's specific tips in a moment, but I wanted to begin with how Ethan got interested in emotion regulation in the first place. Ethan credits a lot of his interest in the topic to his grandmother. Well, my grandmother had this remarkable story.

So she was growing up in Poland around the time of World War II. And when it hit, she basically lost everything. So her family was for the most part slaughtered. She ended up living in the forest for quite a while, bouncing around from one ghetto to the next. And she ultimately survived, moved over to the States with nothing, this kind of classic immigrant story.

And I remember as a kid just being totally fascinated about her experience, as I think so many of us are when we're little, we wanna just know about where we come from, where the people we love come from. So I would ask her repeatedly, like, Bubby, what happened back then? How did you feel and how did you survive?

She would not engage with me on those topics. There's this great quote that she once said, which was like, don't ask why, why is a crooked letter, which is actually a really interesting phrase that makes you think or didn't mean like, what does that mean? Well, what she meant was, you know, asking why is just a source of pain. So just don't go there. And it was interesting that she had mastered that command of, of English language, because if you spoke to her, she spoke terrible English.

She had like, you know, very accented and never quite really learned how to speak fluently, but she had mastered that little bit. Of course, I proceeded to not listen to her and I ended up devoting my career to doing exactly what she told me not to do, which is asking why about our emotional lives? Why do we have the emotions we do? And when we find them getting tweaked in ways that we don't want them to be tweaked, they get activated too intensely or for too long, what can we do to rein them in? And so I do attribute a lot of where I am today to those early experiences with my grandmother.

Ooh, for the record, aside from not talking to me about the pain of the war, was an incredibly emotive and warm individual. So just to put that out there, she was capable of experiencing emotion. And she did. She just didn't really like to talk about it. It also seems like she was really not interested in talking about the negative emotions. What are some of the negative emotions you expected she experienced, but you didn't hear her talking about?

Terror, fear, anxiety. I did discover later on in her life, she did recount her experiences for a project at the United States Holocaust Museum, which is where I learned a lot about her story. And I also heard about her stories. Once a year, she would allow herself to go back to what happened. There's like a grassroots organization of survivors from the town and the towns nearby where she grew up. And they get together and they just talk about what happened. And I remember learning about an experience where several of her immediate family members were killed, but her dad and her had made it, and they're in this small ghetto,

and her dad says, they're coming, they're coming to kill us. Hide. She hid somewhere in the apartment, I can't remember where, and then her dad left. And then he just never came back. So when I think about that, or when I think about her experience standing on a line,

knowing that she would be taken to be killed. And if it wasn't for my grandfather, essentially convincing the police officer to look the other way while she ran away. I think to myself, how would I feel in that situation? And it's terror. It is anxiety. It is dismay, this complex cocktail of negative emotions. And so, you know, I guess in retrospect, it made a lot of sense why she didn't really want to talk to me about that. So these are not pleasant states to be in. But, you know, Laurie, the thing is, in my mind, my grandmother was superwoman for not only being able to survive those experiences, but for then arguably by many metrics of success, being able to thrive, moving over here, living

the dream, working super hard, eventually buying her own home, restarting her family. And it was really that story that captivated me from a young age. And in your book, you talk about how we've wanted to figure out ways to regulate our emotions, especially our negative emotions, for a long time. And I didn't know the history of some of the kookier ways that people went about this. So share some of these kind of strange, historic ways

that we've tried to regulate our emotions. So the best way I can convey my experience reading up on the history of emotions and emotion regulations is to use the phrase, blew my mind. It's just remarkable. So we have likely been struggling with our ability to manage our emotions for as long as we have been roaming the planet.

Why do I say that? Well, if you look at some of the earliest writings ever discovered writing on clay tablets, these were writings that talked about the pain of emotion of being rejected, the pain of a broken heart and how that was managed. The first surgical technique, the first technique that we believed was developed for surgical technique was drilling holes in people's heads. And there are likely many reasons that it was believed to be used. But one of them, according to medical historians, is to help people manage extreme emotions, dysregulated states. And like, you know, if you think back eight to 10,000 years ago, when that first came on the scene, you have this instance of people being consumed with emotion. And what do we got to do? Well, our theory about

what may have been driving that was there are some evil spirits in there. So you got to, you got to purge yourself of those. And that kind of purging mentality existed for quite some time, exorcisms, leeches, bloodletting. But then if we fast forward to the 1940s, there's another giant spike on the emotion regulation timeline. A Portuguese physician wins the Nobel Prize for what I would describe as an emotion regulation intervention. That is right. Someone has won the Nobel Prize for emotion regulation intervention. What was it called? The Leukotomy, or in modern terms, the frontal lobotomy. So flip back

the eyelid, poke a few holes in your frontal cortex and turn the volume down on how we are feeling. Nobel Prize. But you know, one other really fun kind of historical fact that I forgot to put in there is if you go to the bestselling book of all time by a wide margin, let's tell everyone what was what is the bestselling book of all time? The Bible? No. You got it. I feel like I'm on Jeopardy. I was like, I think it's the Bible. But yeah, Bible has sold many, many copies. What is one of the most famous stories from the Bible? It is the story of Adam and Eve. This is a story about emotion regulation or the failure to regulate emotions.

So we've been struggling with this stuff for a really long time. Nicole Sarris And I get it. I mean, there have been times when if I knew it was medically reasonable to drill a hole in my head and I would stop ruminating or being sad or kind of especially after like breakups and things like that, like, I would have gone for it, you know? You know, the pain is real. And if you look at the statistics, they're shocking. You know this, Lori, better than most, and folks who are listening to the podcast

are no doubt familiar with these statistics too, but the wellness industry, by some estimates, is a trillion dollar industry. You see increasing amounts of resources being devoted to helping people with mental health, with well-being writ large. Culturally, I think we are now at an inflection point where we really recognize the role that our emotions are playing in our lives and understand the need to manage them. So here's the really good news. What fills me with hope is that we have learned a lot about how we can manage our emotions

without having to take these extreme steps of damaging our brains, which to be clear, I think I could speak for you, Laurie, and saying we do not endorse that on this podcast. We're not endorsing brain holes. No, yes, no brain holes. No, no holes. Like that just leave the holes out of the equation. Like we've got a fantastic array of non-invasive tools that we can use if we know what those tools are and how they work. This is not to say we know everything about emotion regulation. We have a lot to learn. That's exciting. But we have learned quite a bit. And what also, to use my favorite phrase, blows my mind is if you ask most people, hey, were you ever taught these tools growing up?

By far and away the majority will say no. If I ask an audience, hey, when was the first time you learned how to exercise physically? Most people will say, yeah, probably like first or second grade. We have gym class. Yeah, jumping jacks, pushups. You know how to do those. I mean, I like to do it, but we know what to do. Okay, when is the first time you learned how to man,

like formally learned how to manage your emotions? Most people will say never. And that to me is a travesty. And I think it's something that we have the opportunity to address by, you know, quite frankly, what you're doing on this podcast, which is to take science and to share it with folks in ways that can benefit them. I still find it amazing that we teach physical education and even driver's ed to our young

people, but we don't always give them the tools they need to cope with their big feelings. It's time for a short break, but Ethan will soon be back to share the first of his evidence-based how-to tips for regulating big feelings. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. Big emotions often feel pretty out of control. When feelings like fear, overwhelm, and anger kick in, they often feel like they're here to stay. But psychologist Ethan Cross, author of Shift!

Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You, argues that there are lots of ways to get big feelings under control. And his first tip for doing so is to find the right outside sensory stimulus. A hug from a friend, hearing a kind word, or maybe even sipping a warm drink. Research shows that using our senses can be a great way to break out of big feelings. In fact, Ethan has a particularly good example of his own emotions being altered by a cheesy song, or let me rephrase, by a stone cold rock classic. So Journey, Don't Stop Believing, I will admit, huge fan. It's one of my go-to feel-good

pump up songs. If we go back in time about five or so years, I was coaching my daughter's soccer team on the weekends. She was around five or six and I love, love, love coaching kid's soccer. Not because I'm particularly good at it. It's also, I'm not getting super immersed. It's just, it's just a fun contrast to everything else I do. And so I would look forward to these games with her on the weekend throughout the week. And normally she was just a ball of excitement and ready to go. But there was this one day that really sticks out in my memory where she was just really bumming me out. She was super glum. It was like I was pulling her to get into the car to go. She did not want to be there. And I start driving, look in the rear view mirror, her head's kind of like draped over her shoulder, no smile. And then all of a sudden, don't stop believing

comes on the radio. And I'm instantly kind of getting a little bit more excited. And then I start audibly, you know, kind of humming and singing along and turn the volume up a little bit. And then I look in the back seat and I noticed that she's beginning to jam out also. And she's bopping her head and she's kind of humming along. You know, fast forward about seven minutes, we get to the park and before I can even park the car, she like just opens the door, bolts out of the car and scores what I remember to be 7,000 goals that game. Not true, but it was really in many ways that experience with my

daughter and Jordy, a light bulb went off. From that point on, when I would look at my dashboard and see the music console, I no longer just saw an LED dashboard. I now saw an emotion regulation device. This is such an important idea because I also use music without realizing it to regulate my emotions all the time. But I think this is a spot where I kind of mess up, right? Because unlike you who had this moment where your daughter is feeling glum and you put on Don't Stop Believing, which is like the most happy pump up, get out dancing and go

to your soccer match related song ever. When I'm feeling kind of glum, I don't gravitate towards the journey or I gravitate towards journey, but different journey songs, the kind of sad, you know. Chicago, yeah. Yeah, like it's like the whiny, you know, love bites kinds of songs, right? And so what am I doing wrong there?

Cause I'm using music to kind of move my emotions around, but it seems like it's not shifting. Well, I wouldn't say you're doing something wrong unless it's counter to your goals. And let me unpack that for a second. So one really important message I hope to convey in this book is that all of our emotions are functional when they're experiencing the right proportions,

not too intense or not too long. What do I mean by that? How could anger or sadness or envy ever be useful? Well, if you look at what those emotions are doing, they're often being triggered in particular situations where the way they are motivating you to think, feel and behave can actually be adaptive. So let's take sadness as an example, because you brought up the kind of Chicago, Adele genre of songs. We typically experience sadness when we experience some loss that we cannot regain. So the loss of a loved one, we don't get a job, we can't ever get it.

And in that circumstance, when we feel this emotion, what research shows it motivates us to do it, it slows us down physiologically, it leads us to turn our attention inward, to introspect, to try to make sense of the situation. There is a need for meaning making often when you experience sadness. Well, the world is no longer the way I expected it to be or have experienced it. I gotta like reconfigure how I make sense of this world now.

So let me take some time by myself to engage in that reflective process. But because going off in the corner by myself, maybe a little dangerous, right? We don't want to leave people totally alone. We have evolved to send warning signs to other folks to let them know that we're experiencing sadness and might need a little help, which is often a sad expression. When you see a sad expression on someone else's face, you mimic them. My kids, by the way, have mastered this. I can be really appropriately upset for some negative behavior, and they do this exaggerated stick out the lower limb. And it is so powerful. It gets me every time.

In any case, I digress. So sadness can be functional,, can help us think through some problems. So your intuition to like listen to journey, that is a way of you going deeper into that potentially sad state to facilitate that introspective meaning making process. Here's the big but that I want to convey though, and I think it's where you originally were going. If you are feeling sad, and you don't want to feel sad, don't listen to sad music, then what you want to do is you want to resist that urge to listen to the music that is congruent. So we're talking about this emotional congruency effect, and you want to go in the other direction. So this is what I do strategically. If I've got

like a high stakes presentation coming up, and I have some jitters, right, I'm not going to listen to music that just amplifies that and say, I'm going some jitters, right? I'm not going to listen to music that just amplifies that and say, I'm going the journey route, right? I'm going to other terribly, terribly cheesy pump up music, living on a prayer being another great example with a little bit of Metallica, enter the sand man mixed in, right? Like this is a way in which I'm strategically harnessing my senses to push my emotions on a different trajectory. And the senses should not be underestimated as a tool that could be strategically used to do that

because we know that the links between sensation and emotional experience, these are very strong links that exist in our brains. And so if you are aware of how your senses could affect you, this opens up the door to all manner of tools that you can recruit to help you out. And one of the reasons I loved reading your book is that, of course, I've known about the music example, maybe not for shifting in the right direction, but I knew that that was a powerful sensory tool I could use. Your book really reminded me, there are lots of

sensory tools you can use, right? I can use touch of like a comfy blanket, right? I could use like just the visuals, like turning the light on more to kind of wake myself up more. There's just so many different kinds of sensory experiences you can use to shift your emotions around. I kind of remembered audition, but I kind of forgotten about some of the other ones. Yeah, I mean, this was my experience too. In fact, one of my graduate students, my'm Mikayla Rodriguez, we actually wrote a paper after I dug into this literature, I'm like, why aren't we talking about our senses more? So we wrote this paper called Sensory Emotion Regulation, in which we looked at each of

the major senses, and all of them have this capacity to relatively effortlessly shift our emotions. And I think the effort piece is an important one to put on people's radar. I talk about a ton of different tools in shift for pushing our emotions around. Some of them are quite effortful. They take resources for us to implement these tools

and there's nothing wrong with that. There's a time and place for that. But what we know about all of us human beings is that in general, if we don't have to exert effort, we're not going to do it. We tend to be a lazy species in that regard because we're trying to conserve our resources. Our senses push our emotions around really, really fast. And so touch is another great example that I like to remind folks about. I call this tool affectionate,

but not creepy touch because you have to be careful about how I call this tool affectionate, but not creepy touch, because you have to be careful about how you wield that tool. But you know, like a fist bump at work, that's a tactile exchange that activates an emotional response, right? Like what is the first tool we use with kids when they're born into this world to sue them, to regulate them. It is skin to skin contact. Those kinds of tactile experiences, they stay with us throughout our lives. The caveat of course is research does show that if a tactile experience is not wanted,

which would be the creepy form of touch, it not only mitigates positive effects, it actually can elicit a negative reaction. So to be clear to everyone who's listening, Lori and Ethan, but I think I can say this for you, Lori, we are not advocating haphazardly touching people at work and in your lives. In the appropriate context though, this can't be powerful. And I think we can just use forms of self-touch that feel really good, right? Reading your book, I was reminded there's this blanket that just feels really cozy. And when I'm having a bad day, like I can just kind of

go to it, right? I have like slippers that are just really comfortable, right? Yeah. I'm also a huge fan of some of Kristin Neff's suggestions that, you know, if you need that kind of self-touch, but you're not around somebody for whom it would be effectively appropriate to ask them, you can give yourself some self-touch, a little self-hug or a little self-soothing because brains are stupid. They don't know who's giving you that self-touch. Well, I'll share with you and I guess everyone who's listening, a somewhat embarrassing implementation of this tool.

And I did it unknowingly. I was giving a presentation the other day and it was after lunch. So I had an upset stomach and I found myself pacing the room and just rubbing my stomach presentation the other day and it was after lunch. So I had an upset stomach and I found myself pacing the room and just rubbing my stomach a little bit. Rubbing your tummy. Yeah, rubbing my tummy. And then I had the metamorph, what are you doing?

Stop doing this. So I stopped doing it immediately. So here's other one fun, fun finding in this space. Organizations are leveraging this tool of sensation as a regulator all the time and often completely out of our awareness. So many organizations, for example, have beautiful artwork on the walls and visual stimuli designed to push us into a different emotional space. That may not be so surprising, but what was surprising to me were the ways in which organizations often pump certain kinds of odors through their ventilation systems to arouse a certain

kind of positive response. And there are companies that really specialize in constructing the right odors to match the organization's goals. And so this came full circle to me because earlier on in life, I remember my children, whenever we go on vacation, we go to a hotel and I remember they're going, ah, daddy, it's so nice in here. This is such a nice place. And that is exactly the goal. And it is a way that we are being regulated by another organization through this path. But the idea is that we can do exactly the same thing ourselves. Totally.

With scented candles or just all the kinds of ways that we can manipulate our sensory environment to feel better. That's right. And you know, the real hope that I have for this book is it lays out all of the tools that exist. Some of these tools may be, you may have encountered some of these tools but not realized it.

You may not know about some of these tools, but the idea is that when we lay all of us out and explain how this works, now we give you the opportunity to start wielding these tools strategically to help you match your emotion regulatory goals. My hope is that that is a boon to people in terms of, you know, improving their lives. And so let's jump to tool number two, which is how we can shift our emotion using our attention. A big one that I know I tend to use a

lot when it comes to shifting my emotions with attention is through distraction. Uh, am I alone as distraction and kind of go-to strategy for lots of folks? Distraction is a, is a, is a, that's a biggie and it is a go-to for lots of folks. And what's interesting is it doesn't always get the props that it deserves. There's a common belief that when you experience big significant emotional events in your life, you should not avoid them. You should not distract. You should approach them, work through them. This message is often reinforced in popular culture. And it turns out, if you look at the science, it is not entirely true. So what we have seen is that really the key to wielding

your attention effectively is being strategic in how you do so. Approaching certain kinds of experiences to work through them when the conditions are right. But also, if you can distract in a healthy way, what I mean by that is not by substance abuses or risky behaviors, which some people do, but a positive form of distraction can often be really useful for giving you some space from the experience to then let you re-approach it

with a healthier perspective. My grandmother is actually really effective at using attention strategically. She would not dwell on the experience over and over. She didn't get lost in rumination and chatter about this event. She would focus on things that were under her control, her kids, her job. But when the conversation with other people one time a year, or even if she ran into fellow survivors, lend itself to thinking about this experience, she would, she would

grapple with it. So she wouldn't avoid it to the point where it was a chronic form of avoidance that we know is really harmful. You know, there are various, I think, steps that people can follow to figure out when they should approach and when they should avoid or go back and forth between their experiences. Step one is just like recognizing there's no one size fits all solution here, not for wielding your attention or for that matter for using any of the different shifters and emotion regulation tools I talk about in the book. What we know is that variability is the rule, not the exception. Different tools work for different people in different situations. I liken it to physical exercise. If I take 10 people in my social

network and I ask them what they do to keep physically fit, I'm likely going to get 10 different physical health routines. The data that we and others have collected suggests that emotion regulation is very, very similar. We rely on different tools in different situations. similar. We rely on different tools in different situations. Let's say you encounter an experience that provokes you in some way, and you decide to distract. And so what's your favorite distraction, Laurie? The word or archive where I kind of go back and do old word or puzzles that I haven't done before. That is a really, really good distractor, because it is pleasant, but also it is cognitively

demanding. So it captures your attention, which is useful for distraction. You want a distraction to capture your attention, to prevent it from going back right away to the situation that's just provoked you. So okay, so let's say, you know, you have, let's say a podcast interview doesn't go the way you want. That would never happen, Ethan. Come on. No, it would never happen. So, you know, so that happens and you distract and then when you're done distracting, turns out you're done. You're not thinking about that problem that that interview again. Well, if

that's the case and it doesn't resurface into awareness, like fantastic, keep doing what you do, move on with your life. Your psychological immune system has done its job behind the scenes. Time has passed, the intensity of the emotions has subsided, and you're off to the next challenge, the next interview. If, on the other hand, you take a break, you distract, and then you find yourself thinking about the experience again when you're done, well, then that could be a signal to then, okay, let me reengage with it. And now with the gift of time, which

often moderates the intensity of our emotions. Now let me try to work through this experience a little bit more productively. And maybe I'll even layer another shifter, another tool on to help me do that. So maybe I'll try to figure out, well, why did this happen? Why didn't this interview go very well? I'll think about it from a distance perspective. All right, Lori, why do you think this didn't go so well? So you'll try to process it from a more objective standpoint. So you're layering in other tools there.

And this is a really nice transition to the third shifter that you mentioned in your book, the fact that we can get a little bit of perspective when we need to regulate our emotions. Now, this is something we've talked about on this show before, but explain again why perspective can be so important to shifting our emotions. Well, the reason perspective is so useful is we all have the capacity to reframe how we think about our circumstances,

but it can often feel really hard to do that when we are totally immersed in the situation and the emotions are flooding us. Actually, the name of this chapter, it's named after an anecdote with one of my close friends. I don't know how I can actually say this. I was driving back from dinner one day with another couple and the other couple was talking about a difficult experience that my friend was having at work. And his wife said to him, well, why don't you just think differently about it? And his response was, easier bleeping said than done. To convey,

I think this very common experience we have, which we know that we can think differently and we should think differently, we should reframe how we're thinking about this, be more optimistic, but we just have hard time doing that in the moment. And so what we've learned is that in those situations, taking a step back, thinking about our circumstances from a more distanced perspective, almost like we're giving advice to someone else, can be really helpful for allowing us to do that. And you've come up with a super easy way

we can do that linguistically, just how we use different pronouns, right? That's right. So using your own name and you can be a useful tool for allowing us to do this. So we usually use the word you when we give advice to other people. So when you use the word you to refer to your own problem, so, Ethan, why are you doing this? And what do you think you should do? What that does is it automatically switches your perspective. It puts you in this frame of mind where now you're giving advice to essentially another person. It's another person who happens

to be you. So you have full access to everything that's happening inside that person's mind. But it's just easier to do so because you're doing it from that more objective standpoint. So that's one really simple distancing tool that you can use. Another powerful way of broadening our perspective is to do what I call mental time travel. So you jump into this mental time travel which we all possess, you could go into the future and think, so how are you gonna feel about this next week, next month, next year?

When you ask yourself that question and notice I'm doing that still maintaining the linguistic distance, right? How are you gonna feel about this down the road? What that does is it makes clear to you something you've experienced your entire life, but we often lose sight of it in the moment, which is as awful as our emotions are, as time stretches on, they typically fade. It's a very common trajectory that characterizes emotional

responses. As time moves on, they kind of peter out. And so how am I going to feel about this next year? I'm going to feel better about it. I've lived through that countless times in my life. So mental time travel machine into the future helps you with that. You could also go back in time. It's another way of broadening our perspective. It works a little differently. If I'm struggling with a really difficult situation at work or in my personal life, I could jump into the mental time travel machine and go to the Polish

woods in the 1940s with my grandmother. Now I'm thinking about the adversity that she experienced back then. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, if she was able to get through this, I can handle what I'm dealing with now. So that's time travel to the past. Those are some other distancing tools. Self-talk and mental time travel are great ways to put your emotions in perspective. But if big feelings are still dragging you down, Ethan has a more radical suggestion for getting some distance between you and whatever's bothering you. That radical suggestion is coming up right after the break.

Of all the tips Ethan Cross outlines in his new book Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You, the one that resonates with me most is the strategy of putting some physical space between you and your problems. What I didn't realize was that his insights about the power of physical distance were partly inspired by me. It's funny you bring that up, Lori, because it was you, Lori, who I talked to about this. And so maybe I could turn the t, who I talked to about this. And so maybe I could turn the tides here and ask you about this. So, you know, as I was researching the book,

I was struck by the power of spaces to push our emotions around. I think spaces like our senses are often a tool for manager emotions that we see literally every day, as long as our eyes are open, but we totally take for granted. And you have a really powerful story about how changing your spaces powerfully modulated your own emotional response. So would you mind telling folks what you told me? Yeah, yeah, well, it's in the book now.

So I guess everybody's gonna read it anyway. Yeah, I know this was around the time that I was experiencing a lot of burnout in my role as a head of college, working on Yale's campus, where it was just after the pandemic, I was feeling incredibly burned out and I made the tough decision to leave that role. But when I left that role and had some time off, I had to face the question of like, okay, well, where do I want to be?

Right. I have a house in my hometown in Connecticut. I could have moved there, but my husband and I weren't tied to anything and so I said well Why don't I go to a different place a place that's really far away from the physical place where I was experiencing burnout but also a place that had Certain memories for me or certain associations and so I decided to move back to where I went to grad school in Massachusetts, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

And I moved from my huge head of college house into this smaller apartment. And honestly, I think it was the thing that wound up making me feel much less burned out, right? I was just in a completely different place with totally different sensory experiences than I was in before. It was a nice way to distract myself from some of the things that were tricky during my life at Yale and some of the stresses I was facing.

It allowed me to focus my attention more on running this podcast rather than worrying about my lab and some of these other things. And within like weeks, I was feeling completely better. And I thought that this was just kind of an accident of my little burnout story, but you wanted to use the story to explain a deep principles about the importance of place

for shifting your emotions. Well, I think it's such a powerful story. And you know, our spaces, the spaces around us often impact multiple shifters that exist inside us. So like you were talking about, they certainly impact our attention, like what we're exposed to. And, like what we're exposed to. And by impacting what we're exposed to, they have implications for our senses. We also

form connections to places. And what really stood out to me about your story when I think about it is when you moved back to Cambridge, Cambridge had these warm associations attached to it. This is where you were a student and you had these formative experiences and what we've learned in the science that I think doesn't get as much attention as it deserves is we routinely form attachments to places in a way that is similar to the way we form attachment to people, to other people. So we talk a lot about attachment to other individuals in our lives, attachment figures who, when we're in the presence of those figures, this provides us with a sense of safety and support. Parents, caretakers, partners, friends.

Well, we also form attachments to places. And when you're in the presence of a place that you are positively attached to, that likewise gives you this sense of safety and security. I'll bring this back to my kids. I did when I, you know, it's, it's funny when you learn new material and you filter it through the lens of your own experiences. I remember when my kids were upset, they always used to do this curious thing when they were

little. And just, they just wanted to go home. And when we got home, they'd want to go in their room and that just provided them with a sense of security. And so it turns out that's not just true of little kids. It's true of all of us. And I think the invitation that extends to us is to do some thinking ahead of time before the triggers ignite.

What are the spaces in our lives that have those restorative properties that make us feel safe and secure? I have several of these positive spaces located around Ann Arbor that I've marked on a map figuratively, and I know where to go. It's like in the movies, where there's a safe house for the CIA agent when they need to escape, people who are going after them. I've got my safe spots. There's the law school quadrangle here, which is just this magnificently beautiful space. There's the Arboretum. There's my home.

Those are places I can go to and they, they are managing my emotions without me having to do anything by just being in that place. But you've also talked about ways that we can manage our spaces in more local ways, right? Like my situation is a case where I literally move cities. Not everybody can do that. You're talking about kind of within your town specific spaces you can go to. You've talked about how we can take our local spaces and make them more emotionally regulatory.

How do we do that? Yeah, this is I think a really important point because changing your space is a luxury. We don't always have the ability to engage in. You can think of that as like a macro way of moving our emotions around via spaces. But then there's a more micro way you could do this. There's a way of harnessing your immediate spaces. And there are lots of things you could do here. There's research that we and others have done where you put pictures of attachment figures in your surroundings. So pictures of loved ones. Research shows that when you glance at a picture of a loved

one after thinking about something negative, it speeds the pace at which you recover from emotional turbulence. Right? So, you know, after I did that research, I went on a picture frame shopping spree and I put pictures of loved ones all around my offices. So that's putting something new in your environment to push you in a direction where you want to go. Another example of that would be plants. We know that looking at images of green things, so plants and trees, flowers, this also has restorative calming effects. So you can imagine decorating your space in that way. You can also modify your space though by removing things that are pushing your emotions in the wrong direction. Lots of ways you could do this. We're talking right now and I have my cell phone turned over. So I've now modified my space to reduce a distractor which would get in the way of our

conversation. I tell a story in the book, true story, this is true, I've done this many times, I tend to over order pizza whenever we have people over to watch football. And I know that if I don't give every single slice of pizza away before our friends leave the house, I will come down to the kitchen at between 10 and 12 at night, and I will eat the cold pizza. And I will have such a positive emotional experience while doing so that will then end the second I finish consuming it, and then I won't be able to sleep at night. So the solution, I'm modifying my space to remove that

as a distractor, as a temptation. So you can modify your spaces and really architect your surroundings to help you achieve the emotions that you want to achieve. And that gets us to the final shifter that we'll talk about in this episode, which is something that exists in our space and definitely something that I tried to do

when I physically moved spaces, which is I wanted to surround myself with different people. Our relationships can also be big shifters. Explain this idea of emotional contagion and why it could be a powerful tool for changing our emotions around. So other people, we are a social species and our emotions are powerfully calibrated

against other people and how we think about them and interact with them. And emotional contagion is a great example of this. There's lots of research that shows that when we are not sure of how to respond in a given situation, we reference other people because other people are a rich source of information. Now, that can push us in good or bad directions, right? So, you know, one frowning face in a room can quickly lead to many other frowning faces. Smile and joy can spread as well. I do this exercise often with

groups when I when I lead workshops to demonstrate the power of emotional contagion where I break people up into groups. Then I ask each member of the group to volunteer a leader. As I take the leaders out, and then I count off 121212. And there's all right ones, I'm going to go back into the room with you in a few minutes, and they give you a really hard problem to solve. I want the ones to be an ultra supportive cheer leading leader. And then I turn to the twos, they kind of know what's coming. They're kind of nervously laughing. As I write twos, you know who I want you to be. I want you to be the a-holes. I want you to be stoic, disapproving, don't give much positive reinforcement. I assure them that I will debrief everyone the moment the exercise is over.

And then they go back into the rooms, they work on this problem, and the leaders follow the orders I've given them. It is remarkable, Lori, to see how these different groups respond within seconds. The groups of the positive leaders, they're brainstorming out loud, they're giggling, they're laughing, they're having fun. In the other groups, no one is talking. They're just looking at the piece of paper, right? Because the emotion of the leader has then spread throughout the rest of the group.

We see this, of course, playing out, not just in person-to-person context. It happens on social media a lot in ways that can have really consequential effects. So this is often how moral outrage spreads. There are also instances in which you see positivity spreading within networks too. So simply being aware of this, I think can be very important for all of us. Number one, if you are in a leadership point of view, whether it be in an organization, in a friend group, in a family, recognize that the emotional tone that you bring to a situation

directly impacts other people, often without any explicit direction. If you're a leader, you might also wanna be aware of the fact that if you want this group to be pushing in a particular direction and there's one voice or one person there that maybe isn't abiding by that, you want to be sensitive to that too and nip that reaction in the bud right away. But emotional contagion is a really powerful illustration of how other people can affect us. It also really gives us an opportunity. You know, sometimes we can think about emotional contagion as this sort of terrible thing of like, oh,

I'm just at the mercy of everybody's emotions on my team or whatever. But I think you also can recognize that that's an opportunity. You can see the emotions that you really want to see in the group, like through your own actions. And in some ways, this is what you were doing as the leader of your family with your daughter in the car with don't stop believing, right? You could have kind of caught her glum emotion and felt bad, but you're like, nah, if I shift myself, it's going to shift her too. And I think this is the real opportunities that we can use ourselves as these pivot points to not just shift our own emotions, but emotionally regulate for the people we care about too. Couldn't agree more. And you know, that's a really profound and eloquent way of summarizing how a lot of these shifters come together because they have implications for not only

the way you manage your own life, but how you affect those around you. And ideally, you're motivated to affect those around you in a positive direction. But you can also mushroom up even further because our understanding of how these principles of emotion regulation work, they also have the opportunity to shape the cultures of the groups that we belong to. So, you know, I belong to a bunch of different groups characterized by different cultures, and I'm constantly trying to be explicit

about the values and beliefs I have about emotion and emotion regulation. These are states of being that I think are really important, but I think we need to spend more time investing in because doing so is gonna help people think and perform more effectively at work. It's gonna improve the quality of relationships and their health.

So I'm being really clear about what my beliefs are for this culture. And I'm backing that up. I'm not just saying that, I'm interacting with folks in ways that establish norms that reinforce my values and beliefs. And I'm even giving people some tools to try to hone these abilities to shift. And so that's the way you go from knowing about something to try to actually shift

a culture around a topic, which I think is a really important challenge we all we all have in front of us. That's great. We've come a long way from holes in the head, I think. Just kidding. We thankfully have come a very long way from putting holes in our head. And I think, you know, look, there's a lot more we have to learn,

but we have amassed a pretty compelling set of insights regarding how we manage this wacky thing called emotions and our emotional life. And I think we'd all be a whole lot better off informing ourselves of what we've learned and using it to help us live the emotional lives we wanna live. I'm so grateful that Ethan and so many other scientists have given us practical tools for regulating our big feelings.

Between work stress and life stress, not to mention politics and the state of the planet, I experienced big feelings like fear, anxiety, and overwhelm a lot these days. I'm so happy I've gotten Ethan's tips for helping me find peace. They're much better than having someone drill a hole in my head. Let's quickly recap. First up, prepare a big emotions playlist. If you're scared or sad, dispel that mood by hitting play on some feel-good music. Personally, I think some dad rock like journey is definitely the way to go.

Ethan's second tip? Divert your attention. There are plenty of quick ways to distract yourself away from big emotions. Try going for a run, or my favorite, solving the wordle. Tip three is to take a step back and view your problems as a stranger might see them. Are things actually so bleak? What would a coach or a mentor say about what you should do? The fourth way to regulate your emotions

is to get some physical distance from what's upsetting you. Get out of your home or workplace. Remember that escaping the environment that's stressing you out can work wonders. And Ethan's final strategy to tame big feelings is to surround yourself with positive people, just like getting away from a location that's upsetting you. We can benefit by taking a break from the friends,

coworkers, or loved ones who are spiking our negative emotions. But above all, a meta tip, if you will, is to remember that your emotions are functional. If you're feeling lonely, or if your boss says something that upsets you, or if a politician enacts some policy that gets you red with anger,

that's a signal for you to take action. But once you've figured out what your big feeling is there to teach you, that big feeling has done its job. And it's time for that big feeling to move on. It's also time for our how-to season to move on. Next up, we'll be looking at something that's super useful in small doses, but can prove very harmful when it's allowed to rule our lives. We'll be exploring how to fight stress. That's next time on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Lari Santos.