Mastering emotions: Tools for better mental health and well-being

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In this episode, Dr. Elizabeth Harry welcomes Dr. Ethan Kross of U-M’s Department of Psychology and Ross Business School and author of several books about emotion and self-control. Harry and Kross discuss the importance of emotional regulation and self-control, focusing on their impact on mental health and well-being. 

Kross explains that emotions are natural responses to meaningful events and serve adaptive functions, but when experienced too intensely or for too long, they can interfere with work, relationships, and health. He emphasizes the importance of managing emotions to maintain focus, resolve conflicts, and protect physical well-being.

Kross shares that different tools work for different people and situations, highlighting the value of flexibility in emotional responses. For example, sensory tools like music can shift emotions, while perspective-shifting techniques like "distanced self-talk" can help reframe emotional experiences. He also mentions "mental time travel," where thinking about the future or past can put present struggles into perspective.

The conversation touches on the challenges of emotion regulation in high-stress fields like academic medicine, where professionals may need to detach emotionally during work but risk emotional disconnection in personal life. Kross advocates for exposing people to these emotional management tools, as they can provide hope and reassurance that emotional regulation is achievable, ultimately improving one's ability to cope with life's challenges.

Episode guest:

Ethan Kross, Ph.D.

Transcript

Elizabeth Harry:

Welcome to the Wellbeing at Michigan Medicine Podcast. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Harry and I'm thrilled to have Dr. Ethan Kross with us today. Dr. Kross is a renowned professor at the University of Michigan's Psychology department and the Ross School of Business. He directs the emotion and self-control laboratory and has gained wide recognition for his research being highlighted in outlets such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New England Journal of Medicine. I am just so excited to have you here. Thank you for joining us. Can I call you Ethan?

Ethan Kross:

Only if I could call you Liz.

Elizabeth Harry:

Perfect. And so, could you start by just introducing yourself and tell us a little bit about your work?

Ethan Kross:

Well, you've got my professional credentials down very well. I do research on emotion and I try to understand in the lab what makes emotions tick and in particular, what we can do to understand the mechanisms that explain how you can manage your emotions if you want to, when you want to. And then I also care deeply about taking that research, whatever we discover and our colleagues discover and not keeping it buried in our lovely journals. Though we all like to read them very much, the rest of the world does not necessarily. And so, care a lot about sharing what we learn about emotion regulation with folks outside of academia so they can benefit from it too.

Elizabeth Harry:

And you've done that through a couple of books. Can you tell us a little bit about those?

Ethan Kross:

Sure. So my first book was called Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters and How to Harness It. And that was really about, what do you do when you find yourself getting stuck in a negative thought loop? A negative thought loop about the past. Maybe you're ruminating about something or maybe you're worrying about the future. When that happens, that can contribute to a host of negative outcomes ranging from performance and concentration deficits, to friction in relationships, to problems of well-being and physical health. So what can you do about it?

And it turns out, there's a lot of science that offers tools that you can use to nip those chatter experiences in the bud, so to speak. And so, wrote that book in the late part of the '2010s, came out in 2020, spent a while talking about it. And one of the interesting experiences I had when I was promoting that book was people would come up to me after talks and say, "Hey, this is really interesting and I didn't know about this. Thank you. What about A, B, C, D and E? What about emotions more generally? What is an emotion? Why do we have them? What do you do if you're angry or you're anxious?" And so forth and so on.

So that really motivated me to go a little bit deeper into the science to throughout my second book called Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You, which is really about, you could think of it as welcome to your emotional life. Why do we have those emotions? Are they all good for us? How do we know when they're not good for us? And what do we do when that happens?

Elizabeth Harry:

It's such an important topic that many of us weren't taught as kids. Now, you think about the movies Inside Out and things like that that are really trying to help our kids understand that. And so, for those of us that maybe didn't have that education as kids or haven't read your book yet, could you share with us how you do define emotion and self-control in the context of your research and why is it so important for both mental health and well-being?

Ethan Kross:

So emotions are responses to events in the world or things we think about in our minds that are meaningful to us. So when you encounter something meaningful, you typically have an emotional response and that is a loosely coordinated response. And what I mean by that is, when you experience an emotion, your cognition, the way you think is channeled in particular ways, your physiology begins to respond in a particular matter. Even our expressive displays in our face begin to take a particular shape. And all of those different responses are geared to help you deal with a specific situation you find yourself in. That's why we evolve the capacity to experience different emotions. So let me make that really concrete for folks.

Let's take a situation which will be familiar to, I'm guessing every listener here, you experience a moment where your sense of what is right or wrong is challenged and there's something you can do about it. When you experience that kind of situation, either in the real world or when you imagine it in your head, we experience the emotion of anger. Anger hijacks our thoughts, it zooms us in on the problem at hand. It also often leads us to approach the situation so we can rectify it. We often can see anger on other people's faces. We're communicating that we're upset to someone else. And again, all of these different changes are occurring in our physiology, in our minds to help us manage our circumstance.

All of our negative emotions serve an adaptive function when they're experienced in the right proportions. This is true of anxiety, this is true of sadness, this is true of envy. The big challenge that we face as a species, and I think this is a historical challenge as well as a contemporary one, is we don't often experience those emotions in a proportional manner. Meaning, we don't just experience a little ping of anger and anxiety, or anxiety, fix the situation and move on. The emotions are experienced too strongly or they last too long. Those are the two telltale signs that your emotions need management. Your negative emotions, too loud, too long. And when that happens, if you don't intervene, turns out those big emotional responses can undermine us in, I would argue, the three domains of life that most of us care a great deal about, they make it really hard to think and perform. Have you ever had trouble concentrating on work when you were really anxious about something?

Elizabeth Harry:

Oh, sure.

Ethan Kross:

Okay. This is not going to be like... You can't think about what is in front of you. And the reason for that is our ability to focus carefully is limited. We call these our executive functions which are subserved by the prefrontal cortex. If you want to geek out on these things. Those are a limited commodity and your emotions, your emotional experience often consume those resources leaving very little left over to do the things we want to, need to do. Emotions cause problems in our relationships with other people. They create friction. We become more irritable often and they can damage, sometimes quite powerfully, our physical health and well-being. So, work, relationships, health and well-being, those are the three biggies that we care about. And we know from hundreds if not thousands of studies that emotion dysregulation impacts those three domains. So, focusing on our emotions, teaching people how to manage them, I think, is one of the most important challenges that we face as scientists and communicators.

Elizabeth Harry:

Well, and I love the way that you break it down into those areas of work relationship and our well-being. As I think about those even coming together in the high stress environment of academic medicine, it seems that you see a couple of things happen. You see a lot of potentially high emotional situations, but you also see adaptive responses where people have been able to, and I'm curious if you think for better or for worse, but been able to shut down the emotional response to things that might typically generate strong emotions. And so, I'm curious how you think about applying this in the setting of academic medicine, whether it's research or clinical.

Ethan Kross:

So there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to managing emotions. And if there's one point I hope people take away from my book, it is that no one-size-fits-all solutions. Different tools work for different people in different situations. Some people can be really effective at detaching themselves at work and adopting a really distance objective perspective. And I think in academic medicine and also practicing medicine, that can often be a useful skill because you are confronted with deeply, deeply emotional circumstances and you need to maintain your objectivity and resolve. Now, the real question is, are the folks who are doing that also able to allow themselves to experience emotions fully in other circumstances like when they go home and see their partner and their kids? If they are, great. If they're not, then that might be a signal that you want to get more flexible with how you manage your emotions.

As a general rule, single solutions don't tend to work very well as I just mentioned. So take for example, attention. So I spent a chapter in my book talking about attention as a way of shifting our emotions. This is going to come as no surprise to folks. If you stare something that is bothering you in the face, it's probably going to exacerbate how you're feeling versus if you're able to avoid that for a little bit, that can reduce how negative you're going to feel. That is, if you can truly avoid thinking about it, out of sight, out of mind.

Now, there's been a lot of research on the consequences of what we call chronic avoidance. Chronic avoidance as a general rule tends to not work out very well for folks. There's a huge amount of data showing that coping styles is linked with negative outcomes. What tends to be more effective is the ability to be flexible. So something's really big and bothersome and it's right in front of you. Take some time away. Engage in a healthy distractor, not an unhealthy one like substance abuse and other unhealthy risky behaviors, but dive yourself into work or have a great conversation with someone else. Go for a walk in the arboretum if you're in Ann Arbor and then you come back to the problem later. What people often find is that the time that they took away from the problem at the outset, it gives them greater perspective and the problem is often diminished in intensity. That's an example of flexibility. Being flexible is a tremendously important skill when it comes to emotion regulation.

Elizabeth Harry:

I love the way that you're highlighting too, the tension between using a coping skill and overusing a coping skill. And we do see that, right? Where people become, particularly in health care delivery, disassociated and then in this chronic disassociated state. And it really is then harder to engage at home or in other areas where you'd want to be emotionally present or you want to be able to be aware of what your emotions are, how you're feeling with your loved ones.

Ethan Kross:

And that example is such an interesting one for me because as you said before, most of us are not taught how to manage our emotions. And so, what we end up doing is stumbling on tools that work some of the time, but we're not using them in an optimal way. So when you described association for example, there are probably some situations where that can be quite useful. You really need to maintain objectivity in the operating room or in the ER to just execute, execute, execute. But then what happens after?

The analogy here is to think about a carpenter's toolbox. So my grandfather was a carpenter. I have visual images of his toolboxes and I think of like a hammer. A hammer is a tool that can be useful in many contexts, but if you wheel that hammer inappropriately, it can be quite damaging in a few different ways. Number one, if you don't pound it hard enough, the nail doesn't go in. If you do it too hard, you make a hole in the wall. Likewise, if you take out a hammer not only to pound nails into the wall, but also, when you're trying to put a screw into the wall, you're going to get into lots of trouble. I've unfortunately exhausted my knowledge of home improvement context scenarios.

Elizabeth Harry:

Your metaphor here.

Ethan Kross:

So, yes, the metaphors' goodbye. But you get the point, right? You need to learn how to use the hammer and all the other tools in that toolbox. Now, here's what really gets me. We know what the tools are. We have discovered. When I say we, scientists have discovered dozens of tools. We've profiled how they work mechanistically, we've validated how they work experimentally. We don't share those tools with other people. And what I love about a lot of these tools, like decades of research has gone into their identification. But the take homes that illustrate how they work are very, very simple.

Elizabeth Harry:

And so, what are some of your favorite tools that you'd like to see people use more of?

Ethan Kross:

Okay, so I'll give you some of my go-tos and with the caveat that these are ones that work well for me, they may not work as well for others. I'll start off most simply, one of the most underutilized tools that we see out there are sensory tools. And I was blind to this for up until relatively a few years ago when I had an experience with my daughter before a soccer game. I was really looking forward to the game. She was not. She was in a bad mood about waking up early in the morning and I drag her into the car and we start heading over to the field and all of a sudden, Journey's Don't Stop Believin' comes on the radio and I get happy. I start singing out loud and I look in the rear-view mirror, and to my surprise, she's not embarrassed and cringing at the fact that I'm singing, but she's bopping along with me. In that moment, that was an example of how a sensory experience can shift us really effortlessly and powerfully.

So all of our senses, the way we take in in information about the world, have the potential to shift our emotions, sight, sound, touch, smell. We know this intuitively, but we don't act on it strategically. If you ask people, as scientists have done in the context of studies, why do you listen to music? Almost 100% of people will say, "I like the way it makes me feel." But if you then look at what do people do when they're struggling, how many people avail themselves of that tool? It's between 10 and 30%. So, music is one thing I do. I have playlists programmed up that if I'm feeling sad or maybe a little bit stressed, it can turn me in the other direction. Journey's on there. I won't tell you about many other songs because it'll diminish what no doubt, listeners think of me.

Another one, touch and affectionate embrace. Obviously have to be careful about how that works in a professional context. But I think physicians are used to this. The power of healing touch with patients has been written about extensively. And we know that in personal relationships, a hug, an embrace, there's an automatic release of stress-fighting chemicals when those tactile sensory experiences are registered.

So I have a couple of sensory tools I use. I also have a few favorite, what I call perspective shifters. Oftentimes, when I'm struggling with things, I know I can think differently about it, and if I change the way I think about it, it's going to change the way I feel. But it can be hard to do that when it's a really suffocating type of experience or I perceive it to be. So what I do in those instances is, I try to give myself the advice that I would give to a close friend. I'm much, much wiser when I give advices to my close friends than I am to myself. And there's a tool that we've discovered that can help people switch their perspectives in this way. It's called distanced self-talk. And what it involves doing is using my name and you to coach myself through a problem. All right, Ethan, are you, what should you do here? What do you think you should do?

We use names and words like you when we think about and refer to other people. So when you use those parts of speech to refer to yourself, it's automatically switching your perspective. It's getting you into this, advice-giving mode, which often results in us giving better advice to ourselves. I'll just rattle off a few other tools I use that are very easy and are my first line of defense towards negative emotions run wild. I'll do something that I call mental time travel, and I'll use this in two different ways. Number one, I'll think to myself, how am I going to feel about this a year from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now? Most of our experiences, our emotional experiences, they get triggered and then as time goes on, they fade in their intensity. You know this to be true because you've experienced this millions of times in your life with each emotional episode. Yet, in the moment, we lose sight of that because we focus in on the awfulness of what we're experiencing.

So I will often think, all right, Ethan, I'll use distance self-talk to do this. How are you going to feel about this 15 years from now, when your kids have kids and you're doing other stuff? That highlights the impermanence of what I'm going through. Turns the volume down. I'll also mental time travel into the opposite direction. I'll go into the past. So, I actually start my second book with a story of my grandmother who was living in Eastern Poland when the Nazis invaded, and she had one of these just terrible devastating experiences of seeing her close family be killed. And then she moved from ghetto to ghetto, lived in the forest for years, homeless, didn't know if she'd survive. She did. And ultimately, moved to this country, had a wonderful life.

When things are going rough for me, I jump into the mental time travel machine. I go back to the '1940s and I spend some time with her. That is a really powerful way of putting what I'm experiencing in perspective. I think we all have, if not personal experiences that we can cling to in those ways, experiences that are linked to our culture or society more generally, that we can reference to mental time travel to help us feel better.

So that's probably my first line of defense. Those strategies probably help me with 60% of the curve-balls that life throws at me. And if the curve-balls have a little bit more heat on them, they're coming in a little bit faster and I'm really striking out, then I'll elevate and I'll go to another set of tools. What I really value is, I'm never stumbling for solutions. I have solutions that I can try, tools that I can implement in any given context. They may not always work immediately, but I always have another plan that I can implement and eventually, they do work. And that's a set of resources that I think anyone can benefit from. They simply need to get exposed to what those tools are. And as I just described, they're pretty simple.

Elizabeth Harry:

Well, and it sounds like too, there's probably something about even just knowing you have the toolbox that is reassuring as well, and that takes the velocity down because it doesn't feel like this is something you can't control or that you can't weather or get through.

Ethan Kross:

Couldn't agree with you more. It gives me, and I think anyone who has access to these tools, hope that you can actually get better. And when you're dealing with a problem, and we know from lots of research, that hope is a powerful, powerful tool that we all possess, right? And if you can activate it when times are rough, that's what can get you through to the next point. I tell the story in the book of coming across an article several years ago that asked adolescents, can you control your emotions? And about 40% said that they could not.

That finding stopped me in my tracks. I've devoted my life to understanding how people can control their emotions. I believe that you can. And here, 40% of people, kids, are saying no, they can't. That finding is worrisome to me in the sense that if you don't think you can control your emotions, then why would you make any effort to try to do so? If you don't think there's anything you can do to lose weight and get in shape, why would you sign up for a gym membership? It just doesn't make any sense. So really understanding that it is possible to manage your emotions, is I think, a critical first step in this journey towards emotion regulation. And hopefully, we convince folks with this recording if they're out there in doubt, that they can.

Elizabeth Harry:

Well, it seems to me too that part of this process is accepting the emotion you're having first. You have to start with an acknowledgement of I am angry.

Ethan Kross:

That's right.

Elizabeth Harry:

Or some degree of acceptance. And one thing I'm curious about is your thoughts on does accepting either the situation that is related to the anger or the emotion of anger equal condoning it? Because I feel like sometimes people conflate the two and then feel like if I tone this anger down, I'm somehow condoning the thing that caused it.

Ethan Kross:

No, I don't think it's the same as condoning. I think it's accepting reality. And sometimes, you may make a... So let's say when you're angry, so you experience the emotion of anger, often, automatically, when your perception of what is right versus wrong is challenged and there's something you could do about it. You may take stock of the situation once you're feeling angry and make a decision, it's actually not worth escalating further for a variety of reasons. I'm going to just move on with things because I've done a cost benefit analysis in my head. It doesn't make sense. At other points, it may be something that you do want to engage in, and that's perfectly fine. That is what we call life.

So, on this point of acceptance, I think there is a distinction that is important to point out. It's one that really helped me understand that finding I mentioned earlier, about 40% of adolescents not thinking they can control their emotions at all. I've come to believe that they're not wrong. Many of our emotional experiences in this wacky world that we live in are automatically triggered. We can't predict when they're going to happen. They just happen. Lots of ways they're triggered. You walk by someone, you brush up against someone as you're walking to the gym and they smell really bad, you're going to have an automatic emotional reaction. You come by someone who smells great, you're going to have an emotional reaction.

Let's see, what's another good example? We all experience what we call intrusive thoughts at times, unwanted thoughts that come out of nowhere that lead us to feel a particular negative way that we wouldn't want to share with another person. Have you ever experienced an intrusive thought?

Elizabeth Harry:

Oh, sure.

Ethan Kross:

Right? This is a universal feature of the human condition. We all do. We don't have control over when those intrusive thoughts are going to pop up, when we're going to brush up against the person who activates a certain kind of feeling. But what we do have control over is how we engage with those responses once they are activated.

So there are parts of our emotional experience that are out of our control, but then a whole lot that is, and recognizing that should be empowering for folks. Because it means if you... Before I knew about this, when I would experience an intrusive thought at times, I would think to myself, what's wrong with me? Why am I thinking this? This is terrible. I don't want to give you the impression that I always experience these dark thoughts.

Elizabeth Harry:

Sure, sure.

Ethan Kross:

I don't. But they happen on occasion. Now, I understand that this is just a byproduct of how the human mind operates. We're constantly simulating different kinds of scenarios, some of which are dark. I don't get down on myself. I don't beat myself up if I have that negative thought. What I make sure to do though, is I don't elaborate on it. I push myself in a different direction and I use the tools that we're talking about to help me do that.

Elizabeth Harry:

Well, what I love so much about your work, and you commented on the focus on attention as well, is that one of the things that we think about a lot in the well-being space is, particularly at Michigan Medicine as we're trying to do this work, is how do we create space for people to focus their attention where they want to? Right? On the research they're doing, on the grant that they're writing, on the patient who's in front of them or the student that they're teaching at the moment. What you're giving us is a way to avoid the hijacking that can occur when those negative emotions maybe come in.

And so I'm curious, a lot of what we've talked about up till this point is around a single moment, something happens and you have an emotion and react to it. Can you talk a little bit more about what if it's a little more chronic? What if it's something about a grant deadline or trying to get funding or just general ambiguity or uncertainty? How do you continue to apply these tools in those scenarios?

Ethan Kross:

Well, you can come back to these tools and continue to apply them. So take the case of uncertainty. I've been asked before, how do you create what I would call a chatter storm? What are the ingredients that give rise to just-

Elizabeth Harry:

I love that term.

Ethan Kross:

Right? Just turbulence in our emotional lives. Well, it's create a situation that is filled with uncertainty. You're not sure what's going to happen and take away control from people to intervene in that situation. So uncertainty and a lack of control. Now, we've experienced many situations like this as a species, the most notable recent one was the COVID pandemic. Initially, we didn't know what was going to happen and we didn't have a whole lot of control. And if you look at the levels of emotion dysregulation in the form of anxiety, depression, stress through the roof as you well know. So those kinds of situations will continue to occur, hopefully, not to the same degree, but life is uncertain. Recognizing that first and foremost, and realizing that, hey, guess what? If you get anxious when you're in an uncertain condition, welcome to the human condition.

Most of us do, and that's not necessarily a bad thing in the sense that that anxiety response, what that's telling you is, "Hey, pay attention. Let's just think about what lies ahead. Are there some things that we might want to do to prepare for this?" Now, if you can keep the anxious response at that level, which sounds pretty manageable, that's not the thing where you're not sleeping at night, useful. What we don't want to have happen though is have that anxious response metastasize, become much, much bigger in the way that it hijacks your attention. When that happens, reminding yourself first and foremost, look, these are uncertain conditions. Anyone would respond the way that I am. And now, you start leveraging the different tools that exist. So use mental time travel. Have you gotten through uncertain times in your past? You have? Wow, you're still here.

Elizabeth Harry:

Yeah.

Ethan Kross:

That's going to shift your framework. What about how am I going to feel once this grant goes in? The week after or four weeks after. Oh, this is temporary this uncertainty. Things will eventually get better. What would you say to the person that you care the most about on this planet if they were really struggling in this situation? What would you say to your kid or your partner? Say that to yourself. Ethan, here's what... Now, we are armed with all sorts of tools to shift our perspective, help us feel better and do all of these things with Journeys, Don't Stop Believin' playing in the background for added effect.

Elizabeth Harry:

Well, and what I love is that you started this with the concept of self-compassion too, right? Just starting with normalizing this is a human experience. You said that so many times. Nothing's gone wrong here. There's nothing wrong with my brain. My brain is doing what human brains do.

Ethan Kross:

That's right.

Elizabeth Harry:

And I'm just like everybody else, and that's okay. And what can I do next? What can I do next to support myself? So, I love that. We've talked a lot about how to keep emotions from hurting us, how to keep emotions from harming us. How do they help us? In what ways can they be catalysts for great things, particularly in academic medicine?

Ethan Kross:

The worst presentation I ever gave, it just fell totally flat. This happened about a decade ago. Please don't look at my CV and try to figure out what it was.

Elizabeth Harry:

Which one it was.

Ethan Kross:

I'm not telling you.

Elizabeth Harry:

Listeners call in. No, no.

Ethan Kross:

When I think back to that presentation, the reason I think it fell flat was I experienced no jitters before in the days preceding it. There was no small levels of anxiety that are the typical cue for me to start looking over my slides, maybe revising a few, getting the presentation up to stuff. I just walked in. I just gave the presentation. There was no energy behind it. That's an example of how a negative emotion can be useful. All of our emotions, when experiencing the right proportion, can be helpful.

Take another one that often gets a bad rap, envy. So we talk a lot about envy with social media, you view other people's highlight reels. It makes you feel bad about yourself. Oh my God, this person, they're just like me. And look at all the wonderful things that they're doing. Yes, that can make you feel bad about yourself, or it can be a source of motivation and oh my God, this person was able to do that. I can do that, if they were able to do that. So there's a functionality to these negative emotions. And of course, the positive ones can be invigorating too.

Managing your emotions isn't just about avoiding the negative stuff in life. It's also about accentuating the positive. When I am a master at harnessing my emotions, I'm not just not distracted. I'm more dialed in. My relationships are thriving because I'm engaged with people and I'm having flourishing conversations. My health is better too because I'm motivated to take care of it. I'm going to the gym and I'm eating properly. And so, it's not just about avoiding the negative, it's also about accentuating the positive.

Elizabeth Harry:

Well, I love that. And it's really this idea that you can lean into seeking joy. A lot of the research around gratitude, looking at the positive in your life. And it's not to say toxic positivity. We're not trying to run away from what are real opportunities. But to your point, if we're paralyzed in a chatter storm, which I love that, we're not going to be, I would imagine, as effective as we could otherwise be in trying to deal with whatever problem is facing us in that moment.

Ethan Kross:

No, not at all. And this is the real problem with a chatter storm, an emotional hijacking. It prevents you from living the life that you want to live, whether it be at work or at home, or when it comes to your health and wellbeing. And this gets back to this question that you started with, that I'm now realizing I never answered about self-control and how does this fit into everything we're talking about? The way I define self-control is your ability to align your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with your goals. So, if you want to live a particular life where you are thriving at work, have great relationships that are healthy and your emotions are getting in the way of that, this is when we need self-control. And that's something that I think anyone can improve on.

Elizabeth Harry:

What I love about what you're saying too, though, and implicit in that is this idea that in order to get there, we have to take responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and actions. And that means that as you pointed out, that there can be external stimuli for sure, that trigger it. And there's a component at the beginning that I might not have control over, but what happens after that, I actually do have control over. And I'm curious what your recommendations would be for people to identify where they have agency and where they don't when it comes to these things.

Ethan Kross:

Well, I think being self-aware is really important. Being honest with yourself about what are the areas of your life where you struggle with emotionally? And where do you succeed? Right? Identify the areas where you're struggling and that's where you focus your spotlight. This is where we're going to start self experimenting to see, hey, which are the tools that work for me in these situations?

And the other thing is, I mentioned, think about the areas where you succeed, because I think you want to applaud yourself for being really good at managing your emotions in other contexts. Another myth that is out there about emotion regulation is that you're either good or bad at it across the board, this is not true. We each have our own vulnerabilities. We can be really good at managing our emotions or other people's emotions in some contexts, but really bad in others. And so, the key is to identify what are your triggers, your vulnerabilities, and that's where you put your efforts.

Elizabeth Harry:

That's fantastic. So, as we wrap things up here, what are you excited about in this field moving forward, and where can people look to see new information coming that can help support them managing some of these emotions in academic medicine, in high-pressure environments?

Ethan Kross:

Well, if people want resources, they could check out my website. There are links to lots of the tools that we've talked about as well as lots of research articles to back it up. If you want to look at those at my lab website, and that address is www.ethankross.com.

In terms of what I'm really excited about, the next frontier, if you will, in the research space, much of the work in my lab is devoted right now to understanding how you can personalize these different tools that scientists have discovered. So I think we've done a pretty good job at identifying individual tools, dozens of tools that have been carefully profiled, mechanistically. We know how they operate, and we could teach people about how these tools work.

What we know, however, is that most of the time people don't use one tool. They use several tools. In one study, be found between three and four, to deal with any experience of anxiety and wildly different combinations of tools work for different people. Sometimes, different combinations of tools work for the same person from one day to the next. And what we do not have any scientific roadmap to steer us is, I cannot... Liz, you come to me and you're dealing with this problem. I can't tell you, "Oh, because I know this about your biological genetic background and your life experiences in this circumstance, do these four things and you'll be just fine." I can't make that prescription. I don't know of any scientist who can. The reason for that is we have not studied the complex interactions yet, between people, situations, and tools. And that's what we're devoting lots of our attention towards right now.

Elizabeth Harry:

I love that. And it speaks a lot to what we're trying to do in the well-being space for Michigan Medicine as well, because there is no one-size-fits-all for professional fulfillment at work either. And that's part of why we're targeting this from so many angles, because there's different people that will benefit from different things.

Well, this was really helpful and very exciting, I think, and I hope gives our listeners really tangible tactics that they can use in their everyday lives, both to help mitigate and deal with stressors that they may be experiencing either professionally or personally. But beyond that, think about how to take their emotions and really use them to thrive and to enjoy joy and all the positive emotions in their life experience. So, thank you so much for joining us, Ethan, and to our listeners, for tuning into another episode of the Well-being at Michigan Medicine Podcast. Until next time, thank you.

Ethan Kross:

Thanks for having me.