The Science of Managing Emotions with Author Ethan Kross

The Ask Lisa Podcast does not constitute medical advice and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have concerns about your child’s well-being, consult a physician or mental health professional.

The following transcript has been automatically generated by an AI system and should be used for informational purposes only. We cannot guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the information provided.

Reena Ninan:
Episode 209, The Science of Managing Emotions with Author Ethan Kross.
You’ve been excited, Lisa, about this new guest that we’re having on today, an author who is a friend of yours and has a new book about emotions.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I am so excited and we will talk more with our wonderful guest when he joins us, but let me just say there are a lot of books out there about emotions. There are very few that are excellent, and I can tell you the book we’re going to talk about today is really a remarkable contribution and I am so, so glad that it is available to people now.

Reena Ninan:
You were really psyched about it. When you read the book. There’s so much research that I think parents will really love, but research that’s accessible and easy to understand. So let me introduce Ethan, Dr. Ethan Kross. My mom gets very upset when I don’t say doctor in front of people’s names. She says they work very hard to get that title.
Ethan’s the author of the international bestseller “Chatter” and his new book just out in February “Shift”. He’s one of the world’s leading experts on emotional regulation and award-winning professor in the University of Michigan’s top ranked psychology department, and also its Ross School of Business. He’s the director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory. Maybe we’ll get a chance to visit that laboratory one day. I’d love to see what goes on there, but the book is called “Shift Managing Your Emotions so They Don’t Manage You”. Ethan, welcome.

Ethan Kross:
Thanks for having me. Thanks for that incredible, incredibly kind and generous introduction. That means so much coming from this team whose work I so admire, so it’s just a delight to be here.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, you are welcome and I actually want to say more. I want to say more. I was just getting started, so here’s the thing,

Ethan Kross:
Here we go. This is what they do, Lisa, this is what the journal reviewers do. They start off with, they say really nice things, but then they come down with a hammer. So I’m going to brace myself, myself right now.

Reena Ninan:
It’s all’s true. This is true.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s all good. No, no, no. As I remember one of my clinical supervisors saying there’s no bloody knife in the drawer. It’s all good. It’s all good. Okay, so here’s the deal, Reena, I want you to have this context. I want our listeners to have this context. There are people who work on the academic side who are in labs generating incredibly valuable research studies. There are people who speak to broad audiences who are very, very good at it. You almost never encounter somebody who does both of those things well and does them both well at once. That is why I’m so excited about Ethan and his work. In addition to him being a lovely human being and a friend and somebody who I am thrilled, thrilled is out there doing this work. As I was reading this book, I was just, I mean like literally covered in goosebumps as I was reading it with just like, you know how I love the science and you know how I love bringing it to people who are not steeped in it all the time and just the skillset that Ethan brings to this is so critical.
Okay, one other thing I have to say by way of context and then we’re diving in. Part of what I love so much about what Ethan has done in this book is gives us a way to think about emotion that is not all about talking and thinking about and expressing emotion. And Ethan, I’m not going to say more. I want you to be the one who unpacks this, but the last thing I will say, you could tell I’m so excited is at a time in our culture where there’s a really strong emphasis on mucking around in feelings, which we as psychologists know is not always to the benefit. Ethan is giving us so many other alternatives that are science backed and wildly effective. I’ll leave it at that. And we got to turn to Ethan now. I just could talk about him all day.

Ethan Kross:
Geez. Wow, you guys are setting the bar super high. So all right, Ethan, let’s get to this. Okay, let’s see. I’m using a tool right there that we’ll talk about later for motivation. Well, I can’t agree with you more, Lisa. I think I got into this business of trying to understand how we can manage the emotional curve balls that life throws at us. For two reasons. I was just genuinely fascinated by the fact that we have these emotional experiences throughout our lives and we don’t really get a user’s manual on how to skillfully navigate them and they can often steer us in directions where we don’t want to be, and trying to understand why that happens and what you can do about it was just always a fascinating puzzle to me. But the second motivation really came from an experience I had with my dad growing up where he just drilled down within me. Whatever you choose to do when you get older, make sure you help people, but let’s get into it. Emotion. What do we know about it? We got questions, so you want to pepper them at me? How do

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yep, we’re going to toss ’em at you. I’m going to start.
So this book is about the concept of shifters or shifting and it’s about using internal and external cues to help us redirect our emotional states. Give us sort of an opening understanding of how parents can identify and use these shifters in daily life.

Ethan Kross:
So first I want to give the disclaimer at the outset, which is all emotions when they’re experiencing the right proportions are useful and there are really two things I hope parents take away from this discussion, lessons that they can take with them for how to better manage their own emotional lives, which of course is a critical piece of being a good happy parent. We’ve got to lead ourselves if we want to lead others, but then also tools you can use directly to manage your kids’ emotional lives. So all emotions, even the bad ones can be useful. They serve a function. I think if we embrace this notion that all of our emotions are useful, even the bad ones, the quote unquote bad ones, this is a gift that we can give to people. It is liberating to know that if I’m not happy every second of the day, that doesn’t mean something is wrong with me. So I just want to put that out there from the outset and I think that’s a message that resonates with you both.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Absolutely, absolutely.

Reena Ninan:
I’ve got the book right here and one of the things that I’d love is that you referenced this fascinating study from New Zealand where scientists really wanted to look at the connection from birth and the problems in child health and development, and among the things they found was your ability to kind of manage emotions actually ended up predicting a lot about their lives. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Ethan Kross:
Well, this was a study in which children were followed from a very young age and they were followed over the course of their lifetime and they’re now quite a bit older, middle age and beyond. And what they learned is that these kids, their ability to manage their emotions throughout their childhood and adolescence ended up being a potent predictor of their ability to excel in their careers, their health and wellbeing more broadly. And that’s a finding that gels really well with what we know from lots of other research that this capacity to regulate our emotions. What I mean by regulating is turning the volume up or down on our emotions, lengthening or shortening the duration of our emotions and sometimes even switching from one state to another. That capacity, which I call shifting for short, it is not a game changer. It is the game changer because if you look under the hood at what happens when our emotions take over, you find number one, they consume our attention so they leave very little attention left over to do the things that we often want and need to do, whether that be focusing on the material we need to study for our upcoming exam or listening to someone else like a teacher when you’re in a classroom or at the dinner table when your parents are talking to you or when your kids, or vice versa when your kids are talking to you as a parent.
I’ve had experiences where sometimes if I get swept away with a stressful experience, it does happen every now and again. I get out of it, I shift, but it does happen at times. Sometimes I’ll have this experience of asking my kids about their day and I love asking them that question because what ensues in the next few minutes is like a blood sport to determine who can first contribute. They all want to go. It’s like who can get the attention? And I magically all powerful dad in Dao, you’ll go first today and then they start talking and then sometimes I’ll just drift away. I’ll just go back to the thing that’s on my mind and five minutes later after I’m finished chewing, I’ll turn to the same daughter and I’ll go, so what happened today? And then she looks at me with frustration. So you could begin to see here how the inability to manage my emotions well in that circumstance actually has interpersonal implications, right? I’m not present. The flip side is also true. Sometimes when we get carried away with our emotions, we want to get it out so much we start talking to someone and we keep on talking about it over and over and over again and that could push other people away too. And then we can shift to our health and wellbeing.
We know that getting swept away by our emotions doesn’t necessarily feel great. We also know that it can have pretty significant negative implications for our physical health. It can delay the pace at which we recover from different kinds of stressful experiences in ways that exert a wear and tear in our body that is physically damaging, predicts things like problems of cardiovascular disease, inflammation. I won’t go down the list because it’s not fun to be there.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So then along those lines, we asked our listeners for some questions to run by you. A parent asked, what do I do when my child’s self-esteem is so low and I don’t know what to do or say that will make a difference?

Ethan Kross:
That’s a great question and I love the you don’t know what to do or say part of it because I think that really captures how so many parents often feel when it comes to instances in which these entities, these beings that we love more than anything else in the world are struggling and we don’t know what to do because no one has actually taught us what to do. No one has actually laid out the scientific cheat sheet, if you will, for pushing another person’s emotions around in the direction you want to push them around.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I just want to stop for a minute on that language. I love that language. I think the idea of thinking about emotions as concrete and outside of us and you can shift them one way, shift another. It’s not a language I’ve heard a lot or I think ever, and it just immediately puts us in a different way of thinking about this instead of feeling at the mercy of them that they’re out there and they can be pushed one way or another. Okay, keep going,

Ethan Kross:
But thank you for that actually because it actually takes us to point number one, which I think is chapter number two. Can you really control your emotions? I think one thing we want to really convey is what are the facets of our own emotions and other people’s emotions that we can push around and what can’t we push around? There was a study that sent chills down my spine when I first confronted it several years ago. It basically asked adolescents a series of questions designed to assess, can you control your emotions? About 40% of kids said they didn’t think they could control their emotions. That is to me a disheartening finding on the one hand because if you don’t think you can do something, are you going to take any efforts to actually do it?

Reena Ninan:
No. Good point.

Ethan Kross:
Right. This is basic, basic motivation. If I don’t think there’s anything I can do to lose weight, to get in shape, I’m not signing up for the gym. I’m not doing an hour every morning. So this is something that really we need to address and it’s a somewhat nuanced question, can you control your emotions? It’s nuanced because there are parts of our emotional experience that I don’t think we can control, and then there are parts that we can, so what do I mean by that? Couple of months ago, I’m in the gym and it’s a group class and I’m walking from one side of the gym to another and I’m carrying an astronomically heavy dumbbell, just to be clear, it’s a big dumbbell. I’m joking here. I’m carrying a dumbbell and there’s a woman doing exercise on a yoga mat kind of adjacent to where I have to put the dumbbell.
And as I begin to walk, I have this thought that elicits a very strong emotion. And the thought is, what if I just drop this dumbbell on the woman’s face, right on her face square in the middle, like, oh my gosh, exactly. Now you’re Lisa. You might change your introduction to me now that you learn about me. So I’ve experienced this terribly dark thought, what is going on? And I’m admitting it to all of the listeners of this podcast. We experience thoughts like that automatically trigger dark thoughts like that. This is universal. There’s a lot of science on this. We experience this quite frequently and there’s a story you could tell that might lead you to think a little bit better of me, which is this could be your mind’s way of simulating worst case scenarios to prepare you for them. So I experienced that thought I felt terrible.
I squeeze the dumbbell a lot tighter as I walk by. Parents often report when they have new kids, they have these images of really terrible things happening to their kids, dropping them off the second story of a building and yada, yada yada. There’s a rationale for why this happens, right? We don’t want that to happen. So we’re preparing ourselves. I don’t have any control over when I’m going to experience those dark thoughts when I pass by someone on the street and I don’t like the way they look at me and I have an emotional reaction like I can’t control that. What I can control, what I am a jujitsu expert at controlling is what happens once those emotions are triggered. That is the playground that we can hang out in. And I think that’s one really important thing for parents to know. You can’t always control the emotion when it’s activated, but once it becomes activated, you can control its trajectory.
So I think what this parent should do, number one, is familiarize themselves with all of the shifters that are out there because one of the things we know is that there are no one size fits all solutions for shifting ourselves or other people’s emotions. Different tools work for different people in different situations, and the sooner we can embrace that, the better for all of our emotional wellbeing. That said, let me tell you what I would do if I was in this circumstance, I would use some sensory shifters. I’d go over to my kid and I would affectionately embrace them. I would give them a hug, I’d rub their back. We often overlook the power of sensory experiences to shift other people. We are a tactile species, and so affectionate and touch is one thing you could do if you want to stay on the sensory bandwagon.
You might also just put on some music in the background that you know your kid is going to resonate with and see how that affects their mood. Music is a very powerful tool for automatically shifting other people’s emotional experiences. They often can, at least in my case too, when I try to resonate with my children and embrace the music that they like, that often also elicits some cringe factor on their behalf, which further enhances the emotional experience. Other things you can do, you can be the agent that reframes the situation for them. We often struggle to think really rationally and clearly about the circumstances that we ourselves are facing because the emotions we’re experiencing when they’re really potent, sometimes they make it hard to access that rational mode of thought. But as parents who are a step removed from the situation, we can put that bigger picture in perspective for our kids.
I would first make it clear before you take that step to reframe how they’re feeling, that you love them, you care about them, empathize with them, resonate with them. The two steps that I typically follow, and this is research based for having conversations with my kids about their emotional lives, is step one, just connect with them socially and emotionally. Establish those empathic connections, validate what they’re going through. And then once those emotional connections are really made potent, that’s when you start working to broaden their perspective. So that would be the first line of intervention, a little sensory intervention connect emotionally resonate to make it clear that there’s unconditional support and love and then work on that bigger picture.

Reena Ninan:
This is great advice. I get back to the book also as well, and I love the tangible stuff that parents can use from that example. You’ve got this great passage in the book that I just absolutely love. It’s called something like what Dennis Rodman and my grandmother had in common, Rodman, of course NBA Chicago Bulls superstar. Many of us, I remember him from my childhood, wild outfits dated Madonna, even married himself. The coaches of the Chicago Bulls seem to give him some space on this, but you say that he actually used distraction and avoidance to regulate his emotions. Tell me more about that.

Ethan Kross:
So my grandmother was exceptionally tall. You should know, just joking. She didn’t break five feet. One of the first things that I learned in childhood from my parents was just never, ever avoid anything, approach, confront, fight your fears, don’t run away because if you do it, you’re going to rebound and the problem will still be there and it’s just going to affect you even worse down the road. And then I got to graduate school and that message was just reinforced even more strongly. Avoidance is toxic. It was as close to a universal truth as I encountered Lisa, I’d be curious if you learned the same, but it was just received wisdom of the ages. And what I’ve since learned both personally, but the science backs this up as well, is it’s not that simple. There is a time and place for strategically avoiding things, not engaging in harmful distractors like abusing drugs and things like that.
But taking a break from something really challenging, allowing time to temper the intensity of our emotions can be a very, very useful emotion regulation intervention. And this is something that Dennis Rodman, at least by my observation, seemed to be really good at. He would be in the cauldron in incredibly high stakes environments, super high pressure trying to win an NBA championship and he would work, work, work, but then he would take a break and entirely get his mind off of the intense stressor that he was having to deal with and he’d come back recharged. I have benefited from this personally time and again in my own life, although my intuition is once a problem arises, let me just respond right now to work through it. Taking time away from it hours, sometimes a few days and then coming back to that problem is often a game changer.
What we are doing here is we are allowing our psychological immune system to shine. We all have these psychological immune systems. The physical immune system is a system that helps us deal with physical threats in our environment. Our psychological immune system is often described metaphorically for helping us deal with the emotional curve balls that we’re struggling with. And an important mechanism in your psychological immune system is time, emotions fade with time. Just let that happen to some degree. And so that’s the Dennis Rodman story and in the book I talk about the circumstances under which you may want to avoid or not avoid or be flexible. Flexibility is a theme of this book. Again, no one size fits all solutions.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I love it. I agree with you. I think the dogmatism around avoidance, I remember it. I still think we stick by the idea that avoidance, if you have something that you’re anxious about, the more you stay away from it, the worse it gets. But I agree with you, there’s so much to be said for time and space and I’m surprised by how often parents are surprised when I say, look, if your kid has had a hard day and they want to come home and play video games for 20 minutes to let the feelings die down and that lets them get their homework done, that’s great. I think that that’s not what people expect psychologists to say.

Ethan Kross:
Completely agree.

Reena Ninan:
That’s a strategy we use at our house every single day.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Let it die down. All right, Ethan, we got this question that I think so many parents will resonate to and it’s both about emotion regulation in the child and the parent. And I want to run it by you. And basically the shape of it is parent with a daughter who’s 17 and the daughter had gone through a hard stretch. She went through a hard time, had therapy, things got better, and what the parent shares is she’s doing great now, but every once in a while if she hits a bump, she has a disappointment. The parent is thrown back into panic mode, worried that this is going to set her kid back. So the parent’s question is, how do I handle this? Usually the kid’s fine, but I am now undone with worry that she’s going to backslide. How do I handle it in the moment and how do I keep my reaction from affecting my kid so that I can be present for her?

Ethan Kross:
This is such a great question. It’s an incredibly common experience and it is one of the reasons why I think there are really two key types of takeaways that I hope parents leave this book with. One is how to manage your own emotional life better. Parenting is not just about managing your kids’ emotions and giving them lessons, socializing them into how to be great shifters or emotion regulators. You can only do that to the extent that you are also managing yourself well, and there are a couple of reasons for that. If you’re not managing yourself well, number one, kids learn observationally. They’re like sponges.
My kids, I’m sure this is true for you, that whenever I fail to practice what I preach, the kids call me on it and they take great delight In doing so, they would like to hold Instagram live sessions in which they broadcast my flubs. So they’re constantly observing us and learning from us as a result. That’s a very powerful learning mechanism, observational learning. But if we’re becoming emotional in ways that are hijacking us, we’re not there for our kids in the way that we ideally want to be. So back to getting tactical, what do you do here again with the caveat that there are no one size fits all solutions, different strokes for different folks. Let me tell you what I would do here. I would first and foremost try to broaden my perspective. I would jump into the mental time travel machine. So we often hear that we should always strive to be in the moment. This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Being in the moment can be great at times, but being able to travel in time in our minds, wow, what a tool we possess for shifting our emotions.

Reena Ninan:
Tell me more about that. What do you mean by travel in time?

Ethan Kross:
So you can travel in time in your mind, you could project yourself into the future or the past. Now oftentimes we think about doing that and we think that gets us into trouble because we’re worried about the future or we’re ruminating about the past. And one of the directives is, okay, well when that happens, we refocus on the present. That makes sense and is useful for a lot of people. But you can also time travel to your benefit, and I’ll give you a couple of ways to do this. One thing you can do is you can imagine how you’re going to feel about something that you’re struggling with sometime down the road, a day, a week, a month, a year, 10 years from now, you have lived through at least millions of emotional experiences, maybe even billions of micro emotional experiences in your lives, and they all take the same basic form an emotions triggered. And then as time goes on, it peters out. You know this to be true because you have lived it time and time again. Yet when you find yourself overwhelmed by emotion, we zoom in on the awfulness of the experience, we lose sight of that bigger picture. When you go into the mental time travel machine into the future, it automatically activates this understanding that as awful as what I’m going through is things will eventually get better. And that does something very powerful to a person who is wracked with emotion. It turns the volume down just a little bit, which is often all we need to do to get back on track. So that’s time travel into the future. But you could also go into the past and I think this might be particularly relevant for this parent, think about other moments in which you’ve been through these kinds of experiences and survived, thrived, endured.
So you could think about other instances in which your child faced a challenge and it didn’t all go to hell. They actually are doing just fine and then apply that logic to the present, right? So that’s a way of going back in time to kind of help you through the moment. So I would do that. I would also use sensation to give me a bit of a lift. I’ve got a wonderful playlist designed to counteract any big kinds of stressful emotions. I would rather not get into the details of the artists that populate that playlist. There’ll be a lot of it can be of judgment, but boy oh boy, is that playlist effective? That’s a tool. Music is powerful and underutilized.

Reena Ninan:
That’s one of the big things I think I walked away from your book is the power of music. And I hug my kids quite a bit and we read somewhere that if you hug for eight seconds, it really helps as opposed to like a four second hug. So they literally will wait eight seconds before I let go.

Ethan Kross:
I love that.

Reena Ninan:
But it’s these little things that you can shift that your book teaches I love. But I’m just curious, how has the book changed the way you manage your own emotional life? There’s so much great research in there. Was there anything that really you hold onto in managing your emotions?

Ethan Kross:
This is the second book I’ve written and both deal with emotion regulation in different ways. But I can say that both have allowed me to widen the repertoire of tools that I use to manage my emotions. People often ask me, do I ever get overcome by unwanted emotional states? And inside I think to myself, are you kidding me? Of course I struggle with emotions at times. I’m human. We all do at times. But what I am really good at is the moment I detect myself slipping in that direction, I’ve got a wonderful arsenal of tools to implement and I don’t have to stop and think, what should I do? Or just stumble on a solution that sometimes works but maybe doesn’t. I immediately have these action plans for what to do. So in some instances it may involve just going for a walk in a green space and mental time traveling, trying to talk through the experience like I would give advice to a friend and then maybe call up a few of my emotional advisors, people who I’ve specifically singled out in my head as being adept at doing both of those things we talked about earlier.
First listening, validating, empathizing, but then also working with me to broaden my perspective. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. So I’m really conscious about what tools I bring to the table. I guess the second take home is I use these tools with my kids. So I spend a chapter in the book talking about the final shifter, which is something I call a culture shifter.
And I think we often overlook the power of culture to teach us how to relate to our emotions and how to manage them. Culture is like the air we breathe. It is all around us and it is teaching us about what are our beliefs and values, how should we think about emotions and whether to manage them. Cultures also give us norms and practices. Culture gives us tools for managing our emotions. And every single family, I would argue is a kind of microculture where we have the opportunity to be shaping the beliefs and values of our kids when it comes to their own emotional lives and how to relate to other people’s emotions. This culture that we have at home, we also have the opportunity to give our kids tools. So I am giving my kids those tools. Often I think they find it somewhat irritating.
We don’t have these formal lessons, but I will put it out there, put these tools out there into the ether culture is the air we breathe, populate that air with these tools, talk about it at the dinner table. When you’re on a road trip, you don’t have to be obnoxious about it, but hey, did you know that doing this could actually make a difference? I had no idea. There are ways of slipping that into the conversation, and I think what parents will find is the more they do that, the more their kids will uptake this information and potentially benefit from it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Ethan, thank you so much for the work you do for joining us, for sharing it so generously. We’re really, really glad to have you here.

Ethan Kross:
Well, thanks so much for being here. It was a true delight. So appreciate both of you.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Thank you.

Reena Ninan:
The book is called “Shift Managing Your Emotions So They Don’t Manage You”. Ethan Cross, thank you so much for joining us, Ethan.

Ethan Kross:
Thanks for having me.

Reena Ninan:
Lisa. I get it. I see why you wanted to have Ethan. You were talking about him for months and the book arrived and I really think what parents will like from this book, what I really enjoyed was they’re studies, but they’re not wonky. They’re easy to understand studies, Lisa, that really make the point. You guys have the psychology basis and you understand why it works. But for us parents having that extra link and also the strategies, I think parents will really love learning the strategies that are in there.
So, Lisa, what do you have for us for Parenting to Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, I mean there’s so much I could say, but I’m just going to pick up one piece of what Ethan said about the time travel piece. He talked in that context around a parent using that as a strategy to manage in the moment. I have learned this from Ethan. I think it is so useful and I actually cited it in the emotional lives of teenagers in terms of using it with kids. And I have used it often with kids I care for clinically and my own children, where if they’re having a moment saying to them, how do you think you’re going to feel about this in a couple years is almost magical because it’s got this wonderful combined effect of staying with the feeling. You’re not trying to talk them out of it, you’re not trying to disagree with them, you’re actually increasingly interested in their feelings.
But like Ethan said, moving it into a different time place and his research has shown that it causes sort of an instant sense of relief to actually think about, well, in a couple years this isn’t going to be that big a deal. Suddenly the kids feel like, well, maybe right this minute. It doesn’t have to feel like such a big deal. So I don’t think you can use this every day. I think you can probably use this twice a year, but it is effective. And I will tell you it as a clinician and a parent has gotten me through moments where I wasn’t sure what else to say.

Reena Ninan:
So when it is like five alarm fire and you know it’s a big thing from the norm, giving them the ability to think outside of this moment is perspective that they might not otherwise have.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And it just, the mind has that capacity and it’s a great thing to call on when a kid feels stuck in something that’s really lousy and they’re having an intense moment, you can actually bring it under control pretty quickly in a loving, empathic, connected way.

Reena Ninan:
It was great. He was a wonderful guest and it’s a great book. Again, it’s called “Shift Managing Your Emotions So They Don’t Manage You”.
Absolutely fabulous.
So Lisa, next week we’re going to talk about a subject that I’m dreading already with Kids in middle school, the college admissions process. We are going to have the latest every year since we’ve launched this podcast. I feel like the college admissions process has changed drastically, right? Drastically from year to year. So we’ll get the latest on that next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Alright, I’ll see you next week.

Reena Ninan:
I’ll see you next week.