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Emotions are tools that are useful, all of them, even the negative ones. So many of us, I think, strive to live lives free of all negative emotion. I think this is both impossible and also undesirable.
Ethan Cross is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. He says we shouldn't see emotions as good or bad. They're valuable signals, but when they become too intense and start to take over our lives. We can learn to turn down the volume.
I think it's so easy for us to look at someone as a kid or an adult and say things like, oh, you're terrible at self control, you have no self control. But evidence suggests that this is malleable. This can change. If you're not good at managing your emotions, now you can actually get better.
On today's show, how to Escape an Emotional Spiral, I'm Maya Schunker, a scientist who studies human behavior, and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. Last time Ethan was on the show, we talked about our inner voice and how to manage it when it gets a bit too critical. Today, he joins me for an in depth conversation about our emotions.
Ethan says, emotions are information. We may not like feeling envy, but it can push us to work harder or signal to us what we really want in life. Sadness can slow us down and invite support from others. Regret can help us learn from our mistakes. All of these emotions are useful, but sometimes the emotions can overwhelm. Us Ethan's new book is a guide for managing that overwhelm. It's called Shift, Managing your emotions so they don't manage you.
He explores what we can do when emotions become more harmful than helpful. We started off our conversation by talking about how we can learn to tell the difference.
When your emotions are interfering with your ability to live the life you want to live. Right, they're getting in the way of you achieving your goals rather than actually helping you achieve your goals. That's an indication that some regulation is needed. Let's be concrete about this. So when anxiety is getting me to work hard on something that is coming up, and then like actually putting in the work,
my anxiety goes down, that's anxiety working really well. Anxiety not working well is when the anxiety is so high that I can't actually even sit down to get the work done, or even when I do start doing the work to prepare, the anxiety sticks with me in ways that are interfering with my sleep and putting me on edge. That's a kind of miscalibration. The emotional response is out of sync with the situation.
That I'm in Yeah, I'm thinking of another example, which is, you know, when we feel just indignation at injustice for example, right, we might ask ourselves, is that indignation and anger motivating us to do something about it? Or are we feeling so oppressed by that negativity that we are we're stuck in bed right, like we're unable to act. So that's another context where that would be relevant.
It's a perfect example.
Well, the good news is that in those instances where our emotions are overwhelming us, when they're counterproductive, when they're eroding our well being, we do have this ability for regulation. So let's start with what you mean by emotion regulation.
So emotion regulation quite simply is the capacity to turn the volume up or down on the emotions we're experiencing, lengthen or shorten their duration, and in some cases, switch from one emotional response to an entirely different one. I use the term that you know, the title of my book is shift. It's about shifting up or down, long
or shorter, or to a different response altogether. And I find it kind of beautiful that on the one hand, we evolve to experience all of these different emotions, but also this remarkable set of capabilities to rain them in.
So what is the research show, I mean, other than like intuitively feeling like it would be a very good thing to better regulate our emotions, what does the research show about the well being outcomes associated with better emotion regulation?
So you have goals?
What are your goals in life? Are they to think and perform well, to have good relationships, to be healthy.
If you can.
Manage your emotions, they're going to help you achieve all of those goals. And that's what the research supports. So people who are better at managing their emotions, they tend to do better at school. They can delay gratification longer, which is often important when you're studying for things.
They have improved.
Relationships with other people because they can manage their emotions, which are often triggered by others, more effectively, and so they don't end up having as much friction in their relationships. So really, this is a kind of master aptitude that should benefit people across the board.
There's this one study that you reference in your book Ethan from the nineteen seventies, and I'm wondering if you can talk about it a bit. It looked at emotion regulation in people over a long period of time.
So basically a cohort of newborns were followed over the course of their lives and every few years with their ability to manage their emotions. Their self control capacity was assess by putting them through a series of tasks and having other people rap their capacity. And then the researchers patiently waited and just every few years they kept on checking in on this group of participants to see how they were doing across the board, from their health to their achievement levels at school.
And in life.
And what they found that was notable were a couple of things. Number One, the ability to manage one's emotions early on in life predicted a lot about how the kids fared once they got older.
So kids who were adept at.
Managing their emotions earlier on they advanced further in their careers. They saved more money, they planned more for retirement, they were physically healthier, and perhaps for me most mind blowingly, yes, that is a phrase. They're like. Brain scans showed that their brains and other full body scans and their organs actually aged more slowly, so across the board, this capacity to manage one's emotions is predicting really positive outcomes.
Later on in life.
But the other really important finding in that study was that it wasn't the case that if you were a young kid and you were bad at self control, you were consistently bad at And the reason I love that finding is because I think it's so easy for us to look at someone as a kid or an adult and say things like, oh, you're terrible at self control, you have no self control? Oh, absolutely right, and we
make these blanket judgments about how people fare. But what the finding suggests, along with a slew of other evidence, is that this is malleable. This can change. If you're not good at managing your emotions, now you can actually get better. How do you get better, I would argue it's by familiarizing yourself with the tools that are out there and then start practicing them in your lives.
It's such a hopeful message embedded in this study, right, which is that for those who struggle with emotion regulation, or for those parents who see their kids struggling with emotion regulation, there's hope for us all. So that's very exciting.
There is this notion out there and is quite prevalent that it is very important, actually crucial for us to quote feel our feelings right, to sit in them and marinate in them, and if we avoid them, we're actually doing a disservice because those negative emotions will rear their ugly head in the future with even more forcefulness, like with the vengeance. Right for the sake of everyone listening, please please please tell us what the science says.
Well, there's this widespread assumption, and I bought into this hook line and sinker for a very long time that when you're experiencing something bad, you should just deal with it right then and there, approach it, work through your feelings. That was a message that was taught to me growing up in my family. That was a common message that was delivered. And then when I got to grad school, there's lots of research which showed that chronically avoiding things
is bad. And the research on chronic avoidance is rock solid. So if your coping tactic is to across the board, just avoid thinking about any kind of negative thing that happens to you and just distract endlessly and sometimes even do it with illicit substances or other unhealthy behaviors. That doesn't predict good things. But what is missing from the way we often talk about this concept of avoidance is you don't have to pick between only approaching or only avoiding.
You can actually be flexible and strategic and shift back and forth with whether you focus on something that's bothering you and whether you take some time away. And it turns out research shows that being flexible in that manner can be very helpful. So sometimes strategically avoiding a problem for a certain period of time can be useful. And I'll give you a couple of examples of how that might work. So, first of all, sometimes when we get triggered by an emotion, it feels so amazingly big and
we just want to dive in. But if we take some time away from it and then you come back to the problem several hours later or even a day later, time has taken the steam out of the emotional response. And this is a well known finding that as time goes on, the intensity of our emotions fade. That's true of most of our emotional responses. They get triggered, they jack up in their intensity, and then as time goes on,
the intensity goes down. So if you take some time away by avoiding strategically and then return you're coming back to the problem and it's not as intense and it's
a lot easier to work with as a result. One of my favorite studies that demonstrates how being strategic in this way, being able to both approach and avoid emotions can be useful, was done by a psychologist named George Bonano who who was working at Teachers College at Columbia right around the time that the nine to eleven attacks occurred.
And what he did is, in the immediate aftermath of those attacks, he was really curious about what are the factors that allow people to be resilient in the face of a collective tragedy. And so what he did is he brought participants into the lab who were living in New York City, and he had them engage in a task where on some trials they were explicitly told to express their emotions powerfully, so really immerse yourself in them in a certain sense and just show them to someone else.
And on other trials they were told to suppress their emotions, so really conceal these things, try to push them away to the point that no one else can even see that you're experiencing these things, and then he tracked those
participants over time to see how they fared emotionally. And what he found is that the participants who fared best, the participants who showed the most resilience in the face of the attacks, where the participants who were able to both express their emotions when they were asked to do so and suppress their emotions when they were asked to do so. So it was being really good at both of these skills that predicted the most success.
Yeah, and one of the things I've read in Banano's research is he says, you know, it's not strictly necessary for every person to have to quote work through their grief. For example. Right, there are studies showing that those who show more positive emotions following a traumatic experience actually show better long term outcomes. And I like this research overall because there's this broader lesson that emerges from it, which is there is no one size fits all approach to
emotional well being or to processing difficult situations. And I do feel like there is so much judgment of ourselves and of others in terms of how they process challenging events. Right. I've I've been in situations where someone did seem very avoidant, and it was like you're a little alarmed. You're like, oh no, what's going to happen. This is going to be terrible. They actually turned out fine.
I cannot reinforce enough the message that you just articulated, Maya, there are no one sized solutions when it comes to managing your emotional lives. Forget avoidance. Let's take something even more innocuous. Let's take like mindfulness or meditation. Lots of people advocate that as a solution as a panacea to our emotional distress, and it helps tons of people. And if that's you, great, keep meditating, be mindful. This is fantastic.
But I've also come across lots of people who say this doesn't work for me, and they actually feel bad, like, well, what's wrong with me that this isn't helping me. There's nothing wrong with you again, there's everything right with you. You're a human being. There are reasons we don't quite understand yet why some people acclimate to some tools more than others.
Yeah, no, I really this is very freeing. We're so often met by prescriptions around you know, how to do grief the right way, or how to process anger. The right way. And I love what you said about mindfulness and meditation. Like I've spent a total of ten minutes during my time on planet Earth meditating and like that is my max. Like I don't think I'll ever be able to do it or commit to it. It just
doesn't work for me. A quick walk outside has always been a better antidote, you know, for whatever distress I'm feeling. So I think that's a wonderful message.
We did this these two large studies.
This is research that just came out where we track people during the COVID nineteen pandemic, and each day we measured people's COVID anxiety and we also asked them which of eighteen different tools did you use to manage your emotions? And some of them were healthy tools and others were
less healthy, like alcohol usage, things like that. What we found was Number One, on average, people use between three and four tools each day to manage your emotion, so it was seldom the case that people just did one thing. Number Two, there was remarkable diversity in the combinations of tools that people.
Used to manage their circumstances.
When I say remarkable, that is an understatement. We were floored there are no one size fits all solutions when it comes to managing your emotional life. Just embrace that, and I think you'll naturally look for the tools and combinations of tools that work best for you.
After the break, Ethan shares some of these tools and explains why your favorite perfume might be one of them. We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans. We've been talking about how there's no one size fits all approach, but there are tools that we can be experimental with, right that everyone who's listening can try out and see how well they work in any given context. So let's start by digging into some techniques that we can use to strategically shift our attention away
from our negative emotions. Yeah.
So, I think it's helpful to have a few different categories of tools so that you can know on the fly where to look when you're struggling with an emotion and want to ring them in.
And so in the book, I.
Provide three categories of tools that are things you can do on your own inside you. Those are internal shifters, and then there are things outside of us that I call external shifters. For internal shifters, one category, or what I call sensory shifters. Our senses are remarkably efficient tools for pushing our emotions around.
And we all know.
This intuitively because we've experienced some triggered in response to sensory experiences throughout our lives. But we often fail to activate these sensory shifters strategically when we need them. So let me zoom in on one of my favorite sensory shifters.
Music.
In one study, participants were asked, why do you listen to music? Almost everyone in the study ninety six or ninety seven percent of participants. So, I like to listen to music because I like the way it makes me feel. It's an emotional experience. But then, we've done studies where we ask people to think about the last time they were angry, anxious, or sad, and you said, what did you do when you had those emotions and you tried
to rain them in? Only between ten and thirty percent of participants report going to music to push their emotions in a particular direction.
You mean being proactive about it, proactive and strategic, and like, I've listened to music my entire life.
MC hammer, you can't touch this. This is like my first cassette followed by Madonna The Immacuate Collection. Let the judgment of my music tastes begin now.
I was just going to say, I'm really enjoying this.
Yes, yes, it gets worse, Yeah, don't worry. But I've loved music. I've listened to it throughout my life. And yet have I been strategic about putting on certain songs to push my emotions in different directions when I've struggled with things Until recently, The answer to that question is no. But now that I'm aware of this, it's on my radar, I'm incredibly strategic about it. I have a playlist designed to amplify emotional responses like get me revved up when
I want to feel that way. I also have songs that I go to that calm me down and take the edge off. Music is such a powerful to One more example of this is sent We are spritsing ourselves with these chemicals to manipulate the way other people feel about us and the way we feel about ourselves all the time. I was just in an airport yesterday, I was traveling internationally, and I walk through the duty free shop. That's not a duty free shop. That's an emotion regulation store. Right,
there's like perfumes and colognes all over the place. Why are we wearing those? Why is it that some hotels, when you walk in there, they smell so unbelievably good you never want to leave. It's because they are harnessing what we know about senses and emotion regulation. They're piping certain sense through their ventilation system to make the place
smell great. So once you're aware of this stuff, now you've got access to tools to push your emotions around right in the heat of the moment, and they work really, really fast.
I also love music, and it's occurring to me in this moment that I too, have never strategically turned music on to shift my emotions. What are your thoughts on finding music that is congruent with our emotional state versus music that's incongruate. So if I'm feeling like, really really sad, don't I just want to play adele.
Yeah, commiseration and someone understands me. And so whether that's good or bad depends on your goals. So if we stick with sadness, I'm a proponent of the idea that sadness is functional in the right dosage. Right, my worldview is challenged. I can't really fix what's going on. I just lost my job or I just lost someone I love. I've got to now reframe how I think about myself in this world so I can get back out there and persevere. And so sadness helps me do that hard
cognitive work. And if the music is going to facilitate that, keep that emotion active to help me do that rethinking and reframing, that could well be a good thing. Here's where that becomes a problem. If you're feeling sad and you don't want to feel sad anymore, but you find yourself listening to the music, then the music is going
to be counter to your goals. And that's where you want to resist the temptation to go to Adele and if it's me, you go to Journey insteads although it depends on the Journey song.
But right, right, do you mind talking a bit about the neuroscience behind the senses and why this is such a powerful tool for us to leverage.
Yeah, So your sensory apparatus is linked to your capacity to experience emotions in the brain. In some cases the networks are overlapping actually, and What that means for our everyday lives is different sensory experiences can trigger emotions automatically. They can trigger those emotional experiences super super fast. The reason why that's so important is sometimes emotion regulation feels like it's really really hard to do, and it sometimes is hard to do. When we try to, for example,
reframe how we're thinking about things. Sometimes that can be challenging, like take a lot of effort. Sure, the sensory ways of pushing our emotions around don't have the same effortfulness.
There.
In fact, effort list to some degree, and that's in part where their power resides.
It's so funny that you talk about the sensory stuff,
though I don't know if you know this. So during my postdoc and cognitive neuroscience, we actually we took an old factometer, which is this machine that delivers sense to people, and we installed it in the fMRI machine, so into the brain scanner, and as people lay there and we're faced with decisions and expressions of risk preferences and whatnot, we fed them different sense, right, like calming sense and nostalgic sense and comfy cozy sense like cookies or whatever.
And we looked at how that sensory information affected, often outside of awareness, right, their willingness to take risks, or their willingness to delay rewards and things like that. So anyway, this is such a fascinating topic.
I think we just don't appreciate it enough. I mean, and there are simple things you could do, think in sense. I mean, it's just once you are alert to this link between sensory experience and emotions, it will change the way you view the world. Like awareness of this gives you agency to push it around.
So we talked about one internal shifter, right, which is our senses. Any other internal shifters that we should keep in mind.
Attention is another one. And this is what attention refers to. Is you've got this spotlight in your mind. It's where are you focusing it. Sometimes you want to focus on the thing that's bugging you because you want to work through it. Sometimes you want to point it elsewhere, you want to get a break. You have a distraction, then come back to it. If it's a positive experience, sometimes focusing on the source of positivity can help you amplify that state. So the key is you want to be
flexible in how you wield that attentional spotlight. And then the final internal shifter is what I call a perspective shifter. The idea is, sometimes you can't afford to look away from something. You have to stare right at it, and so we can also reframe it, think differently about it.
And one key to doing that is.
This ability to step back and look at the bigger picture, get some distance from the problem. And once you get some distance, it's often a lot easier to reframe how we're thinking about things. It can be hard to reframe when you're standing right in the middle of the fire, so to speak. So there are lots of different ways you could shift your perspective.
One of my favorites.
Not to say this is for everyone, that would violate what I genuinely believe no one size fits all solutions. But one tool that works for me is called distance self talk. It's trying to work through a problem, but using my own name to try to think it through rather than the first person. I so, all right, Ethan, how are you going to manage the situation? That gives me some mental space. It helps me think about myself like I'm someone else, which makes it easier for me
to think more objectively about the circumstance. Temporal distancing is another tool that is immediately accessible in my toolbag. So another way to talk about this mental time travel. If I'm struggling with a problem it feels really big, I could jump into this time travel machine and ask myself, how am I going to feel about this five days from now, five weeks from now, five years from now. I know from a lifetime of experience is that I experience lots of big emotions all the time, but as
time goes on, they wane in their intensity. I forget about that when I'm in the midst of something. So those are the three internal shifters, sensation, attention, and perspective. The key is that these are like simple shifts that we can engage, and they're like psychological jiu jitsu moves that can alter the trajectory of our emotional responses ever so slightly. But that ever so slightness, I would argue, is sometimes all you need to get back on track.
I love that. Okay, So we talked about these internal shifters. What about external shifters? So situations in which we actually are capable of changing aspects of our environment.
So other people can shift our emotions. And when we find the right people to talk to you about our emotions, people who are skilled at both letting us express our emotions if we want to, but also helping us work through.
Them as well.
That's a really powerful asset that we possess. One of my favorite findings in social psychology is a great way to make yourself feel better when you're not feeling so good is to do something good for someone else.
Helping others know my favorite insight, Yeah.
Yeah, helps ourselves.
That's another way that other people can shift us. You mentioned going.
Outside for a walk.
That's great, but there's some other powerful space shifters out there that I don't think we always have top of mind. We often get attached to places. I'm attached to the tea house where I wrote my first book in ann Arbor. Every time I go into that teahouse, I'm filled with a sense of warmth and comfort. The arboretum is another source of warmth and comfort for me, and so whenever I visit those places if I'm not feeling great, they
make me feel better. When my kids were young and they get upset for any reason, I remember them often saying and at the time. It was just so curious to me. They just wanted to go home. They wanted to go to their rooms. That was a place that they were safely and securely attached to. And so think about the spaces in your environment that provide you with a source of resilience. We all have those safe places, but what are they and do you actually strategically visit them when you're struggling.
We've been talking about how helpful emotion regulation can be and how it's correlated with all sorts of positive health benefits and better outcomes for society. Even and I say this as someone who with a very practical orientation, sometimes I feel like our emotional reactions need not be evaluated based on whether they have utility, right, like whether they lead to some productive ends. Like sometimes we just want to feel things for the sake of feeling them, because
it's vindicating, it's therapeutic, there's some catharsis in it. I'm thinking about the awful atrocities that we've witnessed all over
the world in the last year. And you know, Ethan, sometimes I just want to feel like really insert expletive mad like and you know, I just want to feel that and So what do you say to people like me in those circumstances where we might feel powerless to change something, and where having that strong negative reaction feels necessary because it is just like the most human response to have in the face of that information.
One thing I think that is important is to not overthink things too much when it comes to our emotional lives and the way you just describe that, I just want to be angry for a while. If that's your goal and you're capable of achieving it, embrace it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But if you want to feel differently, you should also know that there's tremendous potential for you to do that. There are lots of tools available for you to rain those responses in or amplify them if you so choose.
Yeah, it's almost like I'm seeding in that moment, like this is not the most productive response and it's actually serving no one to feel this way. But I just given to that impulse, because again, there's something cathartic about having just embracing human empathy, right Like when you feel outraged on behalf of someone else, you know that's just a rich part of the human experience.
I would say that's probably for you.
There's a you're in the functional zone for a while. Experiencing those emotions give yourself the permission to feel those emotions, and that's a gift to yourself. Emotions, all of them serve a function. You know, if you experience negative emotions, welcome to the human condition. This is a good thing.
Hopefully listeners find that libera.
Hey, thanks so much for listening. And just a reminder, I'm starting a newsletter. I'm so excited to have another place to connect with all of you, and I'll be sharing personal updates and links to things that I'm interested in and exciting new science, also takeaways from conversations on this show. It's totally free and you can sign up using the link in our show notes. Next week on the show, why It's so hard to stand up for what you believe in.
We have been so trained in compliance from a young age, and we've become so socialized to comply onto obey that we don't have the skill set for defines. We don't know how to do it, and so is that training that's missing from all lives.
Psychologist Sunita Saw walks us through the art and Science of Saying No, That's next week on A Slight Change of Plans See Again. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change Family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our producers Britney Cronin and Megan Luvin, and our sound engineer Erica Huang. Louis Scara wrote our delightful
theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker, See you next week.
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