The One You Feed - How to Shift Your Emotions: Moving from Chaos to Clarity with Ethan Kross

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

In this episode, Dr. Ethan Kross discusses how to shift your emotions and move from chaos to clarity. Ethan delves into the complexities of emotions, challenging traditional views that label them as obstacles to overcome. Instead, he presents a fresh perspective, suggesting that emotions can be valuable tools when understood and managed effectively. This conversation explores how our thoughts often skew towards negativity and how conscious effort is required to cultivate a fulfilling life. Key Takeaways: 00:02:30 – Introduction to Dr. Ethan Kross and His Work 00:03:30 – The Parable of the Two Wolves 00:05:22 – Emotions as Valuable Companions 00:06:07 – The Complexity of Emotions 00:07:51 – No One-Size-Fits-All Solutions 00:10:21 – The Metaphor of Physical Fitness 00:12:25 – Variability in Emotional Tools 00:13:34 – The Complexity of Human Emotions 00:16:35 – The Control of Emotions 00:18:43 – The Serenity Prayer and Emotional Control 00:27:00 – The Role of Self-Experimentation 00:30:34 – Tools for Shifting Emotions 00:31:00 – Attention as a Tool 00:34:28 – The Role of Avoidance and Approach 00:38:12 – Perspective Shifting 00:44:11 – Shifting Your Environment 00:48:07 – Using Environmental Cues for Emotional Regulation For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I could elaborate on the dark thought that's running through my mind and question why I'm having that thought in ways that might really send me down the rabbit hole. Or I could shift my perspective and realize, hey, this is part of how the brain works. It sometimes simulates worst-case scenarios that are unlikely and dark, but it does that to help us feel better. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.

We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

What if I told you that everything you've been taught about emotions, how to control them, avoid them, or even embrace them might be too simplistic. Today I sit down with Dr. Ethan Cross, author of Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You, to explore a different way of thinking about emotions, not as enemies to conquer or burdens to bear, but as tools that when understood can actually work for us instead of against us. I've spent years trying to navigate my own emotional landscape, sometimes avoiding, sometimes over analyzing, often caught between the two. And if you've ever felt like you're either suppressing emotions or drowning in them,

this conversation will give you a more nuanced, more effective way forward. We'll talk about the myth of one size fits all emotional solutions, why controlling your emotions isn't as simple as we think, and practical tools, what Ethan calls shifters, that help you move from emotional chaos to clarity. This is the one you feed, I'm Eric Zimmer, and if you've ever wished for a better way to work with your emotions, you don't want to miss this one. Calling all Yellowstone fans. Let's go to work.

Join Bobby Bones on the official Yellowstone podcast for exclusive cast interviews, behind the scenes insights, and a deep dive into the themes that have made Yellowstone a cultural phenomenon. Our family legacy is this rich. And I protect it with my life. Listen to the official Yellowstone podcast now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, and my latest episode is with Bill Gates. This is a world where somebody can have over a hundred billion dollars. What is that? Social networking, we're still arguing about what the policies should be. Algorithms reward outrageous things.

These fortunes are almost illegitimate unless in a very smart way given back. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This past season on my podcast, Here's the Thing, I spoke with more actors, musicians, policymakers, and so many other fascinating people,

like writer and actor, Dan Aykroyd. I love writing more than anything. You're left alone, you know, you do three hours in the morning, you write three hours in the afternoon, go pick up a kid from school and write at night and after nine hours you come out with seven pages and then you're moving on. Listen to Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Ethan. Welcome back. It's great to be back. It's been too long. Yeah, I don't remember when it was, but I remember your interview very well. And your book, Chatter, is one that I go back to

often, because there were so many really useful ideas in it. And your new book lives up to it, right? It's great. It's called Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. And your new book lives up to it, right? It's great. It's called Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. And we're going to get into the book in a moment, but we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, think about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent and they say, well which one wins? And the

grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. You know, the parable is so relevant to the theme of shift that we're going to talk about today. It's really remarkable. When I hear the word, which wolf you feed, what it raises in my mind is the importance of being really deliberate about how you engage with those different forces in your lives,

and not just haphazardly, you know, kind of shoving nutrients down either one's throat, depending on what's available, but being pretty careful about what you shop for and how you interact with them, because one theme of shift, and a general point that I believe very strongly in, is that

when it comes to our emotional lives, the two wolves, they're both valuable companions throughout our lives. And we don't wanna get rid of one. We wanna make sure that we are in their presence for the right amount of time and in the right circumstances. And so I don't actually want one wolf to win. I want each wolf to know when they're supposed to be there with me, protecting me. And protection I think is relevant here too because I think of emotions, all of them,

as tools we use to navigate the world. All of them are useful when they're triggered in the right proportions, not too intensely, not too gently, not too long. They don't last too long, they don't last too short. But in the right proportions, all of our emotions serve a vital function. And I think the real challenge we all face is to figure out how to keep our emotions in that sweet spot zone where they're working for us rather than against us. I think that is a big, big problem we face on this planet for most of us.

And I think we've learned a lot about how to solve that problem. Yeah. And I think most people who've thought about this very much, and I don't mean scientists like you, I mean just average people who've thought about this very much, and I don't mean scientists like you, I mean just average people who've thought about this very much, realize that we can go to two extremes, right? We can go to one where we're trying to push away any emotion we don't want. Like, you know, this is a bad emotion, don't have it, avoid it, leads to all kinds of problems. And the other extreme where we just let whatever emotion there is drive our lives, neither

of those are ways that are useful. And your book is a really good way of walking through what are some strategies that allow us to take the best of what emotions have to offer without getting the worst of what they can offer if we let them completely run the show. That's exactly right. Great characterization. We should have contracted you to write the book flap copy. Yeah, I mean like we have this bias to think in terms of categories, in terms of like white

and black boxes, right? Good and bad. It's easy to make sense of the world in that way, and we apply that way of thinking reflexively to our emotional worlds too. There are good emotions, there are bad emotions. You should always strive to be positive and not negative. Avoidance is always toxic. Be in the moment all the time.

No, no, no, no. It's a whole lot more beautifully complex than that, and I don't think that should scare us away. I think we should embrace that beauty that is in the complexity. I was just talking to someone else about our wonderfully diverse emotional lives. I mean, Eric, do you doubt for a second that your emotional experiences on this planet are unique from every other human being in the sense of the unique combinations of emotions you've experienced, when and how you've experienced them and so forth and so on?

No, I think it's obvious that there are ways in which you have an emotion, I can understand it because I've had it and vice versa, but varying degrees. And when we get into talking about that there's more to an emotion than just a feeling, that there are cognitive pieces that go with it, there are behavioral pieces that go with it. Once you start introducing that level of complexity, you're right, we're all different. And that's one of the things that I love about this book and that you say it early and you say it often,

which is there are no one size fits all solutions to our emotional problems. And I think that is really so important. And something that took me while to fully really understand. I think it is critically important and I think it is liberating. It is liberating for me to know that if the tools that are working well for my buddies don't work well for me, no problem. There are lots of other things that I can do to manage my emotions. I think it takes a lot of us some time to understand that because there's a seductive appeal to thinking

that there are one size fits all solutions because that would make things really easy. I mentioned this in the book, but we're governed by this law of least effort. Whenever possible, we're looking for the easy way out in life because in terms of being an organism, it's easier for us to conserve our resources. So easier is better. But I think Einstein said this, we should fact check it.

So we'll give it to Einstein, but we'll allow for the fact that someone else may have said it. It's this wonderful quote, you should make things as simple as possible, but no simpler. I mean, that's a deep, deep statement. Yep. Right? We should make it as easy as possible to manage our emotions, but let's not oversimplify to the point

where we're actually doing harm. I love using the metaphor of physical fitness and exercise to really hammer home why this no one size fits all solutions idea can be a lot more intuitive than we think. Nowadays, lots of people exercise. It's kind of normative to stay in shape for one's health. If I look in my social circle at the different ways my close friends exercise, all of us

have different routines. We're all doing different kinds of things. And even within the kinds of exercises that we are engaged in, let's say it's weight training, there are lots of different exercises that we utilize. I don't go to the gym, Eric, and curl dumbbells to make my biceps bigger for 45 minutes straight. That would not make any sense, right? That would be silly. But that's using one exercise to achieve the goal of being mentally fit. Why would we think that one exercise, meditation, being in the moment, talking to other people, whatever it is, choose your favorite, would likewise help us be emotionally fit?

Given how complex our emotional lives are. It doesn't make sense to me, and the data demonstrate that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. So I say embrace it, and embracing that should be liberating. I agree. I've been thinking about this idea recently of the sort of testimonial. I'm from a 12-step program, right? And you know, the'm from a 12 step program, right? And you know, the testimonials part of it, right?

I got sober, I did this, this is what worked for me. Or I had emotional problems and I started meditating and boy, it did all these things for me. There's benefit in that. But I've been thinking lately about the people who hear that message and that thing didn't work for them, right? And what does that do to them? And if you don't have the mindset that you're saying, which is simply, oh that thing may not work for me, it may have worked for Eric, but it may not work for me, but something else will,

we go searching for it. If we don't have that mindset, we can profoundly discouraged and begin to think there's more wrong with us because well, it works for these guys, it's not working for me, what's wrong with me? And I think our desire to share what worked for us comes from a good place because it worked for us and we're excited about it. But we've got to be careful because it doesn't land on everybody in the same way. You got it 100% I mean, you perfectly characterized it.

I mean, let me give you some data that's hot off the presses, so to speak, even though I guess it will be published in an actual physical journal soon. So we did these studies during COVID. Took us a while to finish analyzing them. But what we wanted to look at was what are the tools that are helping people manage their COVID anxiety from one day to the next? What are the tools that are really moving the needle on people's anxiety? And what we found was, I think, phenomenally interesting.

So each day we would ask people to rate their anxiety and also to indicate which of a slew of different healthy and unhealthy tools they use. And we covered a very broad space. It in some ways scaffolds onto the tools I talk about in Shift. What we found was there were tools that help people, but there was enormous variability. So number one, most people in general didn't do one thing to help them feel better. They did like between three and four different tools each

day, right? So they're not just curling dumbbells for their biceps, they're also doing chest press and running and sit ups. But what we also found was there was a lot of variability between the tools that work for one person and the tools that work for another person. So much so that it was like virtually you couldn't predict the unique combinations of tools that would work for any one person. We also saw variability across days. So the three or four things that worked for you on day one were different from the four or five things that you did on day two. And so this just makes this point that, gee, if we're looking for single shot solutions that are working for everyone across the board, we're very likely to not be successful.

I remember this conversation clearly in a 12-step meeting. And people will get fundamental or dogmatic about anything. And people get fundamental and dogmatic about 12 steps. And somebody was saying like, look, it's like a recipe. You follow the 12 steps, you get this, you know? It's like cooking brownies. You get the thing, you find... And I said, people are not brownies for God's sake. Like, I think we're a little bit more complex than a brownie. And even a brownie, I could give you five variables

that could play into how that brownie comes out on the hardness of your water and the temperature and the humidity and is your oven calibrated? And even on a brownie comes out on the hardness of your water and the temperature and the humidity and is your oven calibrated and even on a brownie. So I clearly feel strongly about this. Let's pull that thread a step further because I feel strongly about it too and I think this is just such a critically important issue because I think if we get this part right, learning about the different tools, you know, comes easy. You're motivated to do it. You're talking about a brownie, and I think most people who are brownie connoisseurs,

of which I consider myself to be one, and by that I mean I love brownies and I've sampled many. There's huge variability. There sure is. In how tasty a brownie is. And that variability is determined in part by the ingredients that compose the brownie and how skillfully they are assembled,

as well as the taster and the unique taste buds that they have and how they process those brownies that they're trying. You wanna tell me that an emotion is on the same level as a brownie in terms of complexity? Right. Like, come on. Yeah. Right?

Think about how unbelievably distinctive our emotional lives are. It's not just that we are experiencing the anger and anxiety and sadness. Those labels that we're using capture a whole different slew of different emotions of various gradations that differ from one another and in slight ways that may be meaningful. We also often experience emotions that are blending together. Yesterday some good news came in and there was this opportunity that I was really excited about.

It came out of nowhere and I was initially elated. Then the elation was there and then I had this recognition of what I had to do during this engagement. I was like, oh no. And now I'm like overcome with dread, right? And then I go back and forth. So now we're having a mixed emotional response. Like there's such complexity here.

So yeah, it just doesn't make sense I think when you when you break it down, that there'd be this single solution. So let's embrace it. And once you do, it naturally motivates you to try to understand, well, what are the different tools and how do they work? And let me start trying to figure out what are the regimens that work best for me? You go to a gym, step one is you learn about

how all of the different apparatus work, right? One of my daughters, my youngest daughter, like first time she comes with me to a gym in a hotel on a holiday, she's like, what is this? You know, you look at it, you have no idea. Step one, learn how everything works. Step two, now let's see how you can start incorporating these different exercises into your life in a way that allows you to achieve the goals that you have.

That's what this is all about. Wonderful. I think that's a good segue for us to move on to getting us closer to what those tools or as you call them shifters are. But before we do that, I do really think we need to talk a little bit more about what emotions are You reference in the book that there's no shortage of theories on this right? There's well over at least half a dozen Different theories of what emotions are but you do go on to say here's some things that we can sort of agree on Walk me through when we're talking about emotion, what you're talking about. So when I'm talking about emotions, first thing to recognize is I think that emotions are tools.

They are responses to things that happen in the world around us or in our minds when we think about the world, that we think about things that are meaningful. They elicit these different responses. And those responses that are elicited, these emotions, are typically activated to help us manage the situations we are in. You can think about emotions like little software programs that are getting loaded up to help you deal with the situations you're in. And emotion's an umbrella term because when you experience an emotion, it activates what

we call a loosely coordinated set of responses. So your body starts to react in a certain way. When you're anxious, you might experience this fight or flight response. Your attention narrows on the threat at hand, so you could zoom in on it. You may have a particular kinds of motor behavior. So if we stick with anxiety as an example, clenching is often an example of that. And that's also visible to other people. Why might that be?

Well, we're a social species and it can be useful to learn how other people are feeling that gives them information so that they can respond accordingly, maybe to approach or avoid you. So if the emotion is calibrated properly, not too intense or shallow and not too long or short, they can be very helpful, even the bad ones. And so I like to point out how the bad emotions

can be useful. Anxiety helps you prepare for a threat. Like, you know, when I think about the misses in my life, professionally, they're usually engagements where I wasn't at all anxious before. I had nothing motivated me to prepare for them. Anger, we experience anger when we perceive some violation of our understanding of how things should be,

and there's an opportunity to fix the situation. That elicits an anger response. So if I see my daughters do something dangerous, I'm gonna get angry, and that's going to motivate me to approach this situation and make sure it doesn't happen again. Sadness. Sadness is one that some people often struggle

to think about how it can be adaptive. I think sadness is kind of beautiful. We experience sadness when we encounter some irrevocable loss in our life. There's some threat to our way that we make sense of the world and we can't change this situation. So you lose someone you love, you're fired. That has implications

for how you think about yourself and the world. And you can't fix it. There's nothing you could do to get that person back. And so what sadness does is it motivates us to turn our attention inward, slow down physiologically, turn our attention inward to start trying to do the difficult cognitive work of now making new meaning given the circumstances at hand. We often withdraw to do that so that we can spend time kind of reflecting on the situation. That can be a little dangerous though, right? You're in a negative state, you're going off alone.

And so what evolution has also gifted us with this sad response is typically a facial display that acts as a kind of lifeline or alarm or signal is the word I'm looking for to other people to say, hey, you know, check up on me and don't kind of leave me hanging here by myself. And what does that look like? Whenever I see my daughters who strategically display that facial expression when I'm like, you know, mad at them. It's amazing. Like it doesn't matter if I know they're being strategic, I feel bad. I want to help them. Yeah.

And that's what that's doing. It's drawing other people in. So those are three ways that those negative emotions can be helpful. And that's what emotions are. One little bit of editorial there. One question people often have is what's the difference between a feeling and an emotion? A feeling is the subjective component of an emotional experience. It's a part of the emotion that we are aware of. When you're experiencing an emotion, lots of things are happening in your mind and body

that you have no awareness of. The feeling is what rises to conscious awareness. It's akin to when you are physically ill. Let's say you've got the flu. There are lots of things happening with your immune system and your organs and you have no awareness of that. But you are aware of the lethargy and maybe the fever and chills you're experiencing.

The feeling is the equivalent of the fever and the chills. That's how I think about emotion. And so really what you're describing is, it sounds like there's a few things. There's the what's going on in my body. There's what's going on in my mind, what I'm thinking about, right? Another myth that you bust is despite common thinking,

emotion and thought are not necessarily separate things. They're intertwined, right? They're intertwined, yes. And then there's a behavioral expression. So those three things. It sounds like you almost just added a fourth, which is the received sense of what all this constellation is. Yeah, like how it all comes together

often is part of our awareness. Yeah, I didn't have as good a terms, but I used to teach this idea of what I would call sort of an emotional storm. And the point was, you're gonna have physiological feelings. There's gonna be drive to do a certain thing. You're going to have a physiological reaction.

And then there's the thing that you typically might call the feeling itself, what you call sad, what the meta experience of all that together is. Yep. Yep. Very compatible. So let's now move on to control of emotions because that's often where people go, right? I have negative emotions that feel really strong and either I really don't like how they feel or I'm following their push and I'm behaving in ways that are not really good for me. So the answer is I got to control my emotions. Let's talk

about that word control. Is it possible? Why or why not would that be the goal? Critically important topic to address because you've got to think it's possible to control your emotions because if you don't think you can, you're not going to take efforts to do so. Right, and I don't think that's a controversial piece of logic. If you don't think it's possible to lose weight by going to the gym, why on earth would you pay for a membership fee

and do these very hard things? It doesn't make sense. This is an issue that is particularly relevant to the topic at hand because a lot of people don't think you can control emotions. I tell a story in the book about how several years ago I came across an article that indicated that 40% of participants sampled when asked

if they could control their emotions said they could not. In some ways, when I first read that I was taken aback. Like I'm the director of a lab called the Emotion and Self-Control Lab. Like embedded in the whole enterprise of what I do is the idea that you can control your emotions. So what's going on? And because I don't dismiss these accounts, like trying to understand why people might think this way. Here's how I make sense of it.

We cannot control a lot of the emotions that are automatically triggered in our lives. Remind me where you're filming right now, Eric. Columbus, Ohio. Columbus, Ohio. Oh, boy. I know. I know. You're in Ann Arbor.

Yeah. Okay. Well well that's all right. We'll move on. See, there was an automatically elicited emotion, but we'll get back to that. Exactly. Disgust, was that it? You are so pleasant to counteract that, but I can't predict when you're going to say Columbus, Ohio and what association that is going to automatically elicit. If I'm in New York riding the subways and then someone comes by and they don't smell too good,

like that's going to elicit a negative reaction automatically. Sometimes I experience some dark thoughts as all people do, some intrusive thoughts, and they elicit negative reactions. I don't have control over those experiences, but what I do have control over is how I engage with those emotions once they are activated.

I can impact the trajectory of my emotional experience. I can make a decision to lean into the smelly scent that's causing me distress and maybe change my behavior, or I could try to distract myself. I could elaborate on the dark thought that's running through my mind and question why I'm having that thought in ways that might really send me down the rabbit hole. Or I could shift my perspective and realize,

hey, this is part of how the brain works. It sometimes simulates worst case scenarios that are unlikely and dark, but it does that to help us feel better, and so forth and so on. And so there's room in this world for both those believe that you can't control your emotions and those that believe you can. And what I would love is if we could both embrace the idea that it's not either or.

It's that there are parts of your experience that you cannot control, but then a whole lot that you can't. And the territory of shift is in the latter. It is embracing that complexity of our emotional lives and saying, I want to commit to understanding what are the tools to modulate my emotional experience once it's activated. I once forgotten who runs this valley. Time to remind them. Yellowstone fans, step into the Yellowstone universe. Our family legacy is this rich. And I protect it with my life.

Hosted by Bobby Bones, the official Yellowstone podcast takes you deeper into the franchise that's captivated millions worldwide. Action! Explore untold behind-the-scenes stories, exclusive cast interviews, and in-depth discussions about the themes and legacy of Yellowstone. You know the first studs to settle this valley fight was all they knew. Whether you're a longtime fan or new to the ranch,

Welcome to the Yellowstone. Bobby Bones has everything you need to stay connected to the Yellowstone phenomenon. I look forward to it. Listen to the official Yellowstone podcast now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go to work. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty,

and my latest episode is with Bill Gates. This is a world where somebody can have over $100 billion. What is that? These fortunes are almost illegitimate Gates. This is a world where somebody can have over a hundred billion dollars. What is that? These fortunes are almost illegitimate unless in a very smart way given back. One of the biggest names in business tech and philanthropy. Exploring and investing in innovative solutions to some of the world's toughest problems. Bill Gates. Starting with Microsoft where I had monomaniacal focus, giving up weekends and

vacation wasn't some big sacrifice. I loved it. I've always underestimated how incredible my father was. He would say, hey, I'm sorry I worked so hard. And I'd say, no, no, that was fine. I feel lucky that he lived as long as he did. It brings tears to my eyes because he was incredible. Do you remember one of the final conversations you had with him? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ever wonder what it's like to be on the phone with an NFL general manager as you finalize the biggest contract in NFL history? I'm AJ Stevens, vice president of client strategy at Athletes First, where we've negotiated $1.4 billion finalized the biggest contract in NFL history, I'm AJ Stevens, Vice President of Client Strategy at Athletes First, where we've negotiated $1.4 billion in current NFL quarterback contracts, introducing the Athletes First Family Podcast, the quarterback series. Along with my co-host Brian Murphy, Athletes First CEO, we're pulling back the curtain on how these historic deals come

together. You'll hear directly from the agents who shaped the NFL's financial landscape, the ones who negotiated Justin Herbert's extension and Deshaun Watson's fully guaranteed contract that sent shockwaves through the league. This isn't just about the numbers though, it's about the untold stories behind these massive negotiations and the relationships the NFL superstars like Dak Prescott, Tua Tunga-Valliloa, and Jordan Love have with their agents at Athletes First. For the first time ever, the agents who orchestrate these deals are sharing the details of the

negotiations and everything that led up to their clients signing on the dotted line. Listen to the Athletes First Family Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's that old famous serenity prayer. We accept the things we canity prayer. We accept the things we can't change, we change the things we can. You know Epictetus talked about it the doctrine of control and he made it sound like well you can change it or you can't change it. And that's not the reality of a lot of things in life. A

lot of things in life you can have influence on parts of it, you may not be able to control the final outcome. But if it was just that simple, either you can or can't control your emotions, or you can or can't control the situation, it'd be easy to figure out what to do. But as we've talked about, things are not that simple. That's exactly right. You know, and some emotional experiences are more difficult to modulate than others. And there's a hefty amount of self-experimentation and trial and error that we have to engage with to become emotional jujitsu experts, if you will.

I think what science has done a fairly good job at doing is identifying different individual tools that are out there for managing emotions. And I talk about a bunch of them in the book You can think about these as specific exercises Specific tactics what we have not yet done is figure out how these tools optimally combine To help different people struggling with different situations. I wish we had this knowledge base. We do not we're looking at this in my lab and several others and you know, I hope in five or 10 or 15 years, we've made some progress there. It's a really exciting

scientific question. But until we get to that point, there are things you can do. And what they involve doing are familiarizing yourself with the tools and then start experimenting with what works uniquely for you. Right, and I think that's so important is that it can be useful to know what the tools are. For example, we're going to get to some of these tools. One of the tools is cognitive. You change how you think about the situation. And sometimes that's magic. It's the classic example of what was used in Buddhism. You're walking at night and it's dark and you see something on the ground You think it's a snake you're terrified you shine your flashing like oh, it's a rope problem solved motion gone So cognitive is sometimes it but we also know like my experience is if my emotional temperature is really high

I'm past cognitive right like I'm a little bit past cognitive now So I need strategies that help me lower that temperature enough that maybe I can move back into cognitive. And so I think that what you're saying makes a lot of sense. Well, let me just say, Eric, cause you said that so beautifully. Those are precisely the kinds of decision rules

that we want to help people discover for themselves. Like, so, you know, if my intensity is above a certain level, like I'm not going cognitive, I'm going another route, because there's no point. For me, it's not that I don't go cognitive, I go to someone else when that happens. And the someone else is often capable of helping me go cognitive.

So we're both similar in that there's a tipping point where a tried and true tool no longer is useful for us temporarily, but then where we go from there might differ. And those are the unique profiles that we want to help people discover. That should be a fun enterprise. Yeah. I made an attempt years ago and promptly stopped attempting, although I think it's what you're talking about,

it was sort of like a flowchart. It was like, you know, try this and if that doesn't work, go here, but if this does this, go there. And suddenly I was like, hang on a second, like this flowchart is getting out of control. You know, and like you said, sometimes the flowchart goes a completely different direction. But let's make sure we get to tools here. So we've sort of set up what works, some of the things that don't work, some ways of thinking about it. Let's get to offering people some actual tools that allow them to shift. So I think the first one maybe and maybe we can make it through each of them if we're quick enough, which is not my strong suit, but we will try. And the

first one is attention. So attention, think of attention as our mental spotlight. It's what we're focusing on and what we become aware of. And things that are in your attention activate emotional responses. And once you get things away from your attention, the emotional responses tend to turn off. Now what's interesting about attention is it's been extensively studied and there are strong beliefs that people have about the role it plays in managing our emotional lives. In particular, there's a very strong belief that we should not avoid the big problems in our lives.

We should instead approach them and face them head on because if you avoid them, they're just going to linger and metastasize. When you come back to them, they're just going to be just as big, if not bigger, and they're going to blow up. This was interestingly one of the first lessons that I remember my parents teaching me about coping. You know, our parents are some of the first educating agents about emotion regulation in our lives.

And it's a message that was then reinforced when I got to graduate school and I came across tons of research and professors who talked ad nauseum about the perils of chronic avoidance. I think we've over generalized though because avoidance at times, research shows, can actually be quite helpful. Being strategic about when we approach and avoid turns out to be a really useful tactic for dealing with big emotional experiences. Let me give you a couple of examples. You know, for a long time I used to think that if I ever got into an argument with my wife and I was to blame, I'm really good at not being defensive and taking blame, maybe almost to a fault, but you know but I do it. And I remember I would screw up in some way

and it was really my fault. And I would try to, okay, well, let's just fix the problem and work through it. And my wife, who is exceptionally regulated, but at times if I screw up bad, gets upset, she wouldn't wanna talk to me about it for a while. She needed some time to recover. But my temptation was always to just immediately work through and fix the problem it for a while. She needed some time to recover, but my temptation was always to

just immediately work through and fix the problem and find a solution. It took me a while to realize that actually avoiding the problem for a while, sometimes even a few days, and then coming back to it at that point, it was like a godsend of an intervention for our relationship. Because when we came back to it later on, we were able to deal with it more effectively. So that's an example of how avoidance in the right dosages can actually be quite helpful. I'm not advocating for chronic avoidance. The data showing that that is harmful across the board

is pretty definitive, but such a seductive allure to wanting to just nip that problem in the bud right away. I feel this really strongly in my own life. Counteracting that by drawing away can be quite useful. I'm really good at drawing away. I mean, avoidance just comes natural to me. If there's an emotional situation going on between me and another person, I'm happy to avoid it indefinitely.

And this gets to kind of what we've talked about, right? Knowing yourself. I know myself. If I'm in a situation and I'm not sure should I approach or avoid, it's not always this way. But I know that my tendency is to avoid. So if I'm in doubt, maybe approach is the right thing. But when you were telling that story about you and your wife, it made me think of that old marriage advice, like never go to bed angry.

I'm like, that is such bad advice. I love the fact that you brought that up, Eric, because we got that advice at our wedding from a lot of people. Lots of elder statesmen and stateswomen said this to us. And I have thought about that on several occasions. I consider myself really, really happily married. I'm in a wonderful relationship with a magical woman,

and we go to bed angry with each other at times. And I've thought about that, and sometimes I feel bad about the fact that, well, there are other couples that don't do that. And this is the toxicity of the one size fits all solution. Right? This is exactly the phenomenon you were talking about earlier. I never put it together before.

But that just doesn't work for my wife and me. And that's totally OK. So what I do in this chapter on attention, though, is I break down, I give some guidelines for how to know when to avoid and when to approach and when to go back and forth. And there are some general principles out there that people can follow, and I won't walk you through all of them, but the basic point here is that we want to be flexible

with the role that attention plays on our lives. It is a tool that can be strategically deployed, and the mistake that I think people often make is to be too rigid in how they deploy their attention, either always approaching or always avoiding. The sweet spot is often in between. Give us an idea or two of some guidelines for how to know when to do which. Okay, so let's say something happened and you take some space away and you find that you come back to the problem and it ceases to be a problem, great.

Nothing more to approach. Just keep going with your life. Oftentimes, things happen that feel really big in the heat of the moment and once you take some time away and let what we call your psychological immune system do its work, let time to pass, you come back and you realize this was nothing. It's not actually worth your effort. That's one indicator that avoidance is, is working just fine. Let's say you avoid something and you find that you just can't avoid it because

every time you try to take your attention away, thoughts keep bubbling up about this experience and it's pretty disruptive. Well, then recognize that avoidance is not the right solution in that context and maybe you need to approach and try to work through the experience or use a different kind of coping tactic. It goes without saying that unhealthy forms of avoidance, I'm not an advocate of, so certain kinds of substance abuse and risky behavior, although those are often linked with temporary reprieves, they have a lot of other negative outcomes linked with them that I think you just don't

want to get into. Approach can sometimes get you into trouble too though. I gave you one example. If it's an interpersonal problem and one person isn't ready to talk about the issue and you want to, it can create huge amounts of friction if you keep trying to work through it. You may also be overcome with an emotion to the point where approaching and trying to work through it cognitively isn't going to serve you well and instead lead you to just start spiraling into a chatter episode.

I had a whole book on the perils of chatter. That's an indication of an approach not working either. So there are some, here's when approach is working, here's when avoidance is working, and here's when you should go back and forth between the two. And I love that you point that out, that there is a place for tactical avoidance. Not everything has to be faced in the moment. We don't always have to be present. There's a time and a place to just lick your wounds for a few minutes and figure out the

next steps. All right, let's move on to next perspective, one of my favorite topics. Talk to me about the role of perspective in shifting emotion. Well, let's try to just make clear to folks who are listening how attention and perspective fit together in our worlds. If we think of the mind like a camera, attention is where we point the lens, but then perspective is how we adjust the lens, how we filter the incoming information. And we have this remarkable capacity to

filter and distort in lots of different directions whatever's incoming. And that's a really important skill because although deploying our attention away from things can sometimes be really helpful, sometimes we can't. We're in a circumstance where we have to face the things that are bugging us. What's interesting about perspective, and the reason I call this chapter perspective shifting, not cognitive shifting, is because of the following. We're often told to change the way that we think, to change the way we feel. This is a mantra of the cognitive approach,

the cognitive movement in psychology. But one of my favorite memories of talking about this issue with friends, we were driving home from dinner one night, my wife and I and another couple in the backseat. The husband was experiencing some difficulties at work with other people. And he was getting kind of negative

and down about the situation. And his wife said frustratingly, well, you know, just change the way you think about it. Just reframe it and be more positive. And he looks at her with a pause and this kind of snare goes, yeah, easier effing said than done, which I think captures something really powerful for most of us that in that heat of the moment, we

know we have a capacity to reframe something, but it can be really hard to do it. And this is where perspective comes into play, Because what we have found is that in those situations, taking a few steps back, getting some psychological distance from our problems, often makes it a lot easier for us to effectively reframe what we are going through. So what do I mean by distance? I mean adopting a more objective perspective,

thinking about yourself like you or someone else to some degree. We know that, you know, it's a lot easier for us to give advice to other people than it is to take that advice ourselves. When you have distance from the problem, you can think about it more flexibly, more objectively. We can build on that insight to figure out how to help ourselves reflect on our own problems more effectively because there are things we can do to get some mental space from our problems to broaden that perspective. One tool I talk about in this book, I talked about in Chatter too, it's one of my personal favorite tools, Distance Self-Talk.

Use the word you to coach yourself through a problem. How are you going to manage this? What should you do? If you think about when we use the word you, it's a word we use to think about and refer to other people. When you use that part of speech to refer to yourself, it's automatically shifting your perspective. It's like now you are talking to someone else. And we have these scripts for talking to someone else. We don't put them down typically, like we give them good advice. And so that can help you reframe things more effectively. Mental time travel is

another big one for me. I use this quite a bit, right? It's so easy to get zoomed in on a problem where you just magnify it. Well, I've experienced emotional episodes that I've not enjoyed throughout my life, as I'm sure has everyone on this who's listening to us speak, right? Our life is filled with these negative experiences that are triggered too intensely and for too long. Well, guess what? Virtually all of them, in my case, have dwindled with time in their intensity.

Time is a way of taking the edge off these experiences. Some hang around longer than others, and there are some experiences that are resistant to the effects of time, but a whole lot of them do wane in intensity as time goes on. So I jump into my mental time travel machine, and I'll ask myself how I'm going to feel about something a year from now, two years from now. And it instantly makes accessible this idea that what I'm going feel about something a year from now, two years from now. And it instantly makes accessible this idea that what I'm going through is not gonna last. That's really anxiolytic.

That really takes the temperature down in my response. I'll also go back in time. I'll put my experience in perspective by imagining or thinking about how I've dealt with adversity in the past or how other people have dealt with adversity. I'll think about my grandmother trying to escape Nazis and surviving. And then, you know, I'll juxtapose her experience, have seen her family slaughtered in World War II, surviving. And then I'll think about how that compares to the rejection I may have just, you know, received from a journal or from a periodical.

That's a powerful way of putting things in perspective to change my emotions. Those are just some of the tools. There are many others, but one real asset that I think I have, I'm often asked if I ever struggle with emotions. Yeah, of course. At times, I'm a human. Pinch, right, like everyone else. I am good though, at reigning those responses

in when they're triggered, because I know what to do. I know I can strategically travel in time this way or that way, or talk to myself this way, or deploy my attention, and that is a gift I'm really grateful for, and it's something that I hope readers take away from this book. I wanted to pause for a quick Good Wolf reminder. This one's about habit change and a mistake I see people making. And that's really that we don't think about these new habits that we want to add in the context of our entire life, right? Habits don't happen in

a vacuum. They have to fit in the life that we have. So when we just keep adding I should do this, I should do that, I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't really thought about what we're not going to do in order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for you to think about where is this going to fit and what in my life might I need to remove. If you want a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits

that feed your Good Wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. Everyone's forgotten who runs this valley. Time to remind them. Yellowstone fans, step into the Yellowstone universe. Our family legacy is this ranch. And I'll protect it with my life.

Hosted by Bobby Bones, the official Yellowstone podcast takes you deeper into the franchise that's captivated millions worldwide. Action! Explore untold behind the scenes stories, exclusive cast interviews, and in-depth discussions about the themes and legacy of Yellowstone. You know the first stunt is to settle

this valley fight and it was all they knew. Whether you're a long time fan, or new to the ranch, Welcome to the Yellowstone. Bobby Bones has everything you need to stay connected to the Yellowstone phenomenon. I look forward to it. Listen to the official Yellowstone podcast now

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go to work. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, and my latest episode is with Bill Gates. This is a world where somebody can have over $100 billion. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty and my latest episode is with Bill Gates. This is a world where somebody can have over a hundred billion dollars. What is that?

These fortunes are almost illegitimate unless in a very smart way given back. One of the biggest names in business tech and philanthropy. Exploring and investing in innovative solutions to some of the world's toughest problems. Bill Gates. Starting with Microsoft where I had monomaniacal focus, giving up weekends and vacation. Wasn't some big sacrifice, I loved it. I've always underestimated how incredible my father was.

He would say, hey, I'm sorry I worked so hard. And I'd say, no, no, that was fine. I feel lucky that he lived as long as he did. It brings tears to my eyes because he was incredible. Do you remember one of the final conversations you had with him? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Ever wonder what it's like to be on the phone with an NFL general manager as you finalize the biggest contract in NFL history? I'm AJ Stevens, vice president of client strategy at Athletes First, where we've negotiated $1.4 billion in current NFL quarterback contracts.

Introducing the Athletes First Family Podcast, the quarterback series. Along with my co-host Brian Murphy, Athletes First CEO, we were pulling back the curtain on how these historic deals come together. You'll hear directly from the agents who shaped the NFL's financial landscape. The ones who negotiated Justin Herbert's extension and Deshaun Watson's fully guaranteed contract that sent shockwaves through the league. This isn't just about the numbers though.

It's about the untold stories behind these massive negotiations and the relationships the NFL superstars like Dak Prescott, Tua Tunga-Valalloa, and Jordan Love have with their agents at Athletes First. For the first time ever, the agents who orchestrate these deals are sharing the details of the negotiations

and everything that led up to their clients signing on the dotted line. Listen to the Athletes First Family Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think you're right. Having those tools and the more you use them, the more that you automatically turn towards them. I seem to have an automatic, like the time travel one, this question that I heard it years ago and I was like, oh my God, that's brilliant, which is, is this going to

bother me in like five hours, five days, five months? And I just now think of that question pretty whenever I start to get bothered. And the answer is that most of the time the answer is no, it's not going to bother me in five hours, probably not five weeks, five months. But if it is going to bother me in five months, that is a pretty good indicator to me that this thing deserves my time and attention. So the answer isn't always that you go out to cosmic view and you see that everything is a speck of dust Sometimes I go. Oh, it still does matter. Okay, good Yes, then then this is worth thinking about I could talk about perspective the rest of the day

But I'm not going to because we have some other things to get to that I think are important So let's move on to shifting your environment. So environment. I love this work There are tools for manager emotions like sprinkled in the world around us. They're kind of like Easter eggs. You just got to know where to find them. There are a couple of ways that I zoom in on in the book on how you can be more strategic with how you engage with your environment, your betterment. One thing I point out is that a lot of us, I think, take for granted that we attach to certain people in our life, either in a secure way or maybe a less positive way. But other people can be sources of resilience. They're mere presence.

These are security figures. Being around them provides us with a source of resilience. Well, it turns out we can attach to places too, in both the positive and negative directions I might add, but thinking about places in our lives where we find restorative, where we have these positive attachments, they can be a source of resilience during times of stress. And so if I think about the neighborhood I live in, there's the Arboretum, there's the tea house where I wrote my first book. There's my office on campus. Every time I'm in those spaces,

they fill me with a sense of positivity that is comforting. And that can be another kind of regulatory tool. You can of course, you know, take this even further. I've just pointed out ways of navigating one's immediate environment that are accessible to most. You can also travel. I think it's not surprising that people travel to different destinations.

Like travel is what a lot of people do on vacation to restore, right? And so there's certain places you go to to have that kind of emotional experience. More locally within your home, there are also ways of interacting with your environment. You can either add features to your space or take features away. Add features to your spaces to elicit desired responses or remove features to get rid of

undesirable responses. So photographs, I talk about some research we've done which shows that glancing at pictures of loved ones, actually, if you've had a bad experience, you micro-glance at those pictures and it speeds up the rate at which you recover emotionally. What's happening there is you look at that picture and it activates mental representations, thoughts and feelings you have of those people

and the positivity that is linked with it helps you feel better. So, you know, after we did that science, I went on a shopping spree, got lots of picture frames, printed out pictures, and now they're all around my offices. Plants, we know that green spaces are a source of restoration. They gently draw your attention away. You find them restorative. They capture your attention.

I typically have plants in my offices and windows that face green spaces. If I can't get windows, I put up pictures of trees. I also have tried to remove triggers from my environment that elicit undesirable responses. So for me, I tell a story in the book. Some people think I'm joking. It's a true story of however when we have parties, like football watching parties, we get pizza. It's my favorite food in the world. If I see a slice of pizza, I turn into like a rabid animal. Cookie Monster? Oh my God. Hungry Mungry. Are you familiar with the Shel Silverstein poem?

I don't know Hungry Mungry, but I do know Cookie Monster. Yeah, well that's me. If I see pizza, it doesn't matter what form it's in, what style, like I'm there. And it becomes paradoxically even more attractive as the minutes of the day pass. So past eight o'clock when I shouldn't be eating anymore, it's like, oh, even better. The colder, the better. Not good for me. So I get rid of it. I try to give it away. I throw it out. I'll admit, right? I throw it out because I don't want to have that cue. My cell phone right here is sitting face down, not face up because I don't want to be tempted if a notification comes in to look at my email

while we're talking. These are little micro moves, microwaves, not microwaves, little ways of interacting with our spaces that can push us. And there are lots of other ones like that. Yeah, I said a couple times lately, like, if you were to get a group of behavior scientists all in one room and ask them to agree on one thing, I think they would all agree on the fact of like, you can't do too much in setting up your environment in ways that are conducive to you doing or not doing the thing you want.

Like to miss something that basic is very problematic. And I think the fact that it is so basic though, we often overlook it. I mean, I have overlooked these things. Like, why does cleaning and organizing your space make you feel better when you're upset? Like it does, the research shows it helps you give you a sense of control.

There are such basic things that we can do. We take them for granted. You know, one other shifter we haven't talked about is sensation, sensory shifters, right? Like music, sense, sound, like these are powerful modulators of our emotional lives that we've all had so many experiences with our emotions being shifted by those sensory experiences. But if you look at what people do when they're really struggling, they often don't avail

themselves of that very easy to implement tool. Not to say it's the only tool we should use, but it's a tool and it's there. Yeah, yeah, I somehow skipped right by that because that's a really big one for me, music. And I figured this out years ago for myself. I'm glad I did, because I use it all the time. I sometimes get, I don't know what to call it anymore.

Is it just anedonia? Is it a low mood? I don't know. But I get it. And one of its characteristics is that unfortunately everything that I'm normally interested in, it doesn't register as interest. So my brain will go, oh, music. And I'll go to my music and I'll start looking through it.

No, no, no, oh, music. And I'll go to my music and I'll start looking through it. I'll be like, no, no, no, no, no. So what I've done is I've just built a playlist in advance that I know has music that helps me. So I don't have to go figure it out. I just go to the positive playlist, hit shuffle, and I know that what's going to come is going to be helpful because I'm designing for the fact that, like you said, a lot of times we just don't think of these things. Or even if I do think of it,

I don't think it's gonna work. There you go, and I've done the same with playlists to push my mood in whatever direction I want, pump up or calm down. And the beauty of having a playlist is I don't have to stumble on, oh, I'm feeling good and the music, a song just happens, come on and pushes me

out. I can be really strategic and deliberate about how to activate it to get me to the desired state. Okay. Now we have covered sensory, we've covered emotional, we've covered attention, perspective, environment. You did hit a little bit on relationships and connections. So let's go to what I think is the last one, which is culture. Yeah, so culture, you know, I think is an often overlooked shifter of our emotion,

in part because it's invisible. It's been compared to the air we breathe. But guess what? Air we breathe is pretty important. And you want your culture, ideally, to be one that is helping you when it comes to your emotional life. What does it mean when we talk about culture?

Well, cultures are beliefs and values. So, do you believe, for example, that you can manage your emotions? Are you part of a family or a friend group or an organization that emphasizes, yeah, you can manage your emotions. Do we believe it's important to manage our emotions? Beliefs and values, what are the tools that we think are important?

Culture's given that to us. Culture's also giving us norms. Norms being the rules, the unspoken and spoken rules for how to conduct ourselves. Organizations have norms about emotions and emotion regulation. In my house, we have a norm where you don't actually call each other stupid. I don't know why and it just really rubs me the wrong way. And no judgment to other families where, you know, oh, don't be stupid. I don't don't, you know, judge it, just it doesn't work for me in my family. And you know, if my daughter, one daughter calls the other one that there's a

intervention where they apologize and so forth and so on. So that's just a belief in a value that's shaping the way we relate to each other emotionally. Culture also gives us tools. So I model tools for my kids. I explicitly teach them about some of these tools. I do that in lots of different, sometimes I talk about research that we're doing at the dinner table. That's usually not a very popular conversation, but I try to slip it in there. How old are your daughters? They're now 15 and 10.

Were they more receptive to it when they were like, you know, seven and two or is it getting worse? It's getting worse. I'm becoming just a perpetually embarrassing organism on this planet. But here's what I tell people and here's what I do in deep practice. You say things to your kids and they roll your eyes and they tell you that you're the most annoying human being on the planet. Leave me alone.

Great. They're normal kids. and they tell you that you're the most annoying human being on the planet, leave me alone, great. They're normal kids. Keep on saying the stuff to them because it does penetrate their awareness. I've seen my daughters, begrudgingly they admit it, but they use the tools that we give them and they benefit from it. My oldest daughter is a diver and at one point she was a little concerned about like elevating up to like this what I think of as a death-defying height, you know, jumping off and doing stuff. And I said, hey, why don't we talk about it?

You know, like I do research on this. Leave me alone. And then a couple of weeks later, she succeeded. She fought through the fear and she rose to the occasion. I said, oh, what did you do? And she just spouted off like a bunch of the different tools that we've talked about to the occasion. I said, oh, well, what did you do? And she just spouted off a bunch of the different tools that we've talked about over the time. So that was a major parenting victory

that I will take with me. Absolutely. Hang on to that one. Yeah. But that's culture, right? Culture, beliefs and values, norms, and practices, tools. Here's the interesting thing about culture. Sometimes we find ourselves in cultures that are just humming for us, they're resonating with us. They have the

same values that we as individuals have when it comes to how we think about our emotions and our emotional lives are giving us tools, it's working well. Sometimes we find ourselves in toxic cultures that are not leading us to feel the way we want. They don't value emotions and emotion regulation. And in some cases, you might wanna leave that toxic culture if it's really affecting you very powerfully. But the other thing you can often do is you can work to change the culture. And once you understand how to break culture down,

beliefs, values, norms, practices, it becomes, I think, more manageable to think about how to do that. And so culture is a powerful tool for your day-to-day emotional life, but it's also a really powerful tool for how to affect other people that you care about. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I thought maybe we would end. I really wanted to talk about from knowing to doing, but we're running out of time. So I wondered if you could just walk us through bringing some of these tools together. You do it late in the

book where you talk about your kids' school getting canceled because of a threat and how you sort of brought a couple of these different tools together to sort of manage your emotions or work with your emotions and maybe as a way of sort of putting everything we've talked about desperately into one Sort of story with the threatening. Yeah. Yeah, and how you kind of work through that Yes, I tell the story at the end of the book about how there was a threat you know called into one of my kids schools and it was just you know, a terribly frightening experience and I used a lot of the tools that we're talking about to manage my emotions in that situation.

So I resisted the temptation to co-ruminate endlessly about what was happening with some of the other parents. I diverted my attention by thrusting myself in my work. I sought out some comfort by talking to a friend who was also an expert in this space who could help broaden my perspective about the probability of a bad thing happening. I also went out for a walk in nature to just kind of draw my attention away from things as well. engaging in that blend of using those different tools didn't wipe away the concern about what might happen, and fortunately nothing did, but it did make it a lot more manageable to deal with. And I think that is the opportunity that we all face,

is to find practices that don't get rid of the negative experiences altogether because it's not really possible but find tools that just make these negative experiences a lot more palatable in our lives so we can swiftly move on from them and to have other kinds of emotional experiences and so you know I live and breathe this stuff every day and and that's why it's easy for me to talk about it not just as a scientist, but also as a living, breathing, emoting human being.

Yeah, I really loved the way that you sort of set that up in the book because you said this doesn't turn school shooting threats into birthday parties, right? And I think there's something important there because we often think that what we need is to feel way, way better. And a lot of what you were talking about, I often refer to and I've jokingly referred to some of what I teach sometimes is like, well, you know, what I'm teaching you is how to not make it worse. And sometimes that's a real accomplishment, right? Because the ways that we can spin out emotionally and the ways we can deepen our emotional holes and the way we can Lash out to other people or act in ways that aren't helpful if we can just be with the thing that is in some sort of reasonable

Way by using these tools. That's a victory Absolutely. I mean, I think that's exactly the messaging behind this book, right? Like life's gonna continue to throw curve balls at us. And if we use the baseball metaphor, we're not expecting anyone to bat a thousand. Like in baseball, 280 and above is an amazing, almost Hall of Fame-like career. So we're talking about getting better at

harnessing these emotions and that is something that we all have the ability to do. We just need to know how to do it and that's why it's exciting to talk about this stuff. So I really appreciate the ability to do it with you. Thank you, Ethan. The book is wonderful. We'll have links in the show notes to where you can get it. It's called Shift, managing your emotions so they don't manage you. It's a really good one. Thank you, Ethan. Thanks so much. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation

to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community, we wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to OneYouFeed.net slash join.

The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. Calling all Yellowstone fans. Let's go to work. Join Bobby Bones on the official Yellowstone podcast for exclusive cast interviews, behind the scenes insights, and a deep dive into the themes that have made Yellowstone a cultural phenomenon. Our family legacy is this ranch. And I protect it with my life.

Listen to the official Yellowstone podcast now on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty. And my latest episode is with Bill Gates. This is a world where somebody can have over 100 billion dollars. What is that social networking? Gates. This is a world where somebody can have over a hundred billion dollars. What is that? Social networking, we're still arguing about what the policies should be, algorithms reward

outrageous things. These fortunes are almost illegitimate unless in a very smart way given back. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This past season on my podcast, Here's the Thing, I spoke with more actors, musicians, policymakers and so many other fascinating people, like writer and actor Dan Aykroyd. I love writing more than anything. You're left alone, you know, you do three hours in the morning, you write.

Three hours in the afternoon, go pick up a kid from school, and write at night. And after nine hours, you come out with seven pages, and then you're moving on. Listen to Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.