A neuroscientist's guide to managing our emotions

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1:10I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, managing our emotions so they don't manage us. But we start with a story about a violin. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Not long ago, Sotheby's in New York held an auction for a Stradivarius. The Joaquim Ma Stradivarius, a masterpiece of sound. And we can start the bidding here at $8 million. At $8 million.

1:40At $8 million. The bids rose quickly. At $8,500,000. Some from anonymous clients phoning in. $9 million. I have Ella at $9 million. At $9 million already. The numbers went up and up until... Sold. $10 million. So, what makes a Stradivarius so valuable? Well, for one thing, they're very rare. Only about 600 Stradivarius violins are believed to exist today.

2:12But perhaps more important are the sounds that they produce. Musicians swear by their exquisite craftsmanship and say no other violin can match their rich tones. A Stradivarius is this instrument that is capable of creating this magical music that transports us and creates beauty in the world for those who listen to it and for the person playing it as well.

2:42But here's the thing. Even a Stradivarius can sound terrible if it's played poorly. Have you ever heard someone play a violin the wrong way? Oh, yeah. It's painful. Please stop. Painful is the perfect word, right? Because if you don't know how to play that instrument, it can cause pain. And that's true of our emotions as well. This is Ethan Cross. He is a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Michigan who specializes in emotional regulation.

3:17His latest book is called Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. And he compares regulating our emotions to playing an instrument. Our brain is like our very own Stradivarius. When our emotions are triggered out of proportions, that's akin to me trying to play a Stradivarius violin. It can cause enormous pain for both the player as well as those around us.

3:47Now, we can all learn to play that instrument effectively. It takes practice. I genuinely believe that the same is true when it comes to our emotions. We can all learn to manage our emotions more effectively. To do that, though, we need to know what tools are out there to help us achieve that goal. And the big problem I think that so many of us face is that we're never given that blueprint,

4:19that science-based blueprint for steering our emotional lives.

4:25Emotions can feel overwhelming. For some of us, they overpower our common sense and ability to make decisions, sending us spiraling into feelings of doom and despair. So how can we modulate our emotions to help us make better decisions in stressful situations, become more in tune with what we need? Today on the show, Ethan Cross shares the latest tools and research from his Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan.

4:58So what we do in the lab is we try to understand the nuts and bolts of the human mind. So in other words, how can you think, feel, or behave the way you want to think, feel, and behave? And sometimes that can be kind of tricky to do. And so we really get in there and just try to figure things out. What's happening in your brain and the patterns of thoughts that are streaming through your head and your bodies? Can we create interventions to help kids and adults manage themselves more effectively?

5:28I'd love to put sort of an asterisk here or conversational footnote, if you will, because there's a lot of self-diagnosing going on on social media. Help us understand, is there a line? What is a normal part of being human and what is an illness? Because we live in an era where we pathologize each other's behaviors a lot. Well, one thing I would love listeners to know is that if they experience negative emotions at times,

6:01welcome to the human condition. We all do. And there's nothing wrong with you. In fact, there's everything right with you. I am of the belief that all of the emotions we experience are useful when they're experiencing the right proportions. I have found that when people hear that, when they realize that if they're experiencing anxiety or anger or sadness or envy or regret or guilt, that there's nothing wrong with them, in fact, that this is how they should be operating to a large degree,

6:36this is something that people really find liberating. And I think for really good reason, because we're often told we should constantly strive to lead a life free of all negative emotions. We should just yearn to be totally happy. Look, I love being happy, but I also recognize that the quote-unquote bad emotions are my friends. They are not de facto toxic. They can be useful as long as they're not triggered too intensely or not intense enough, too long or too short.

7:12So there's an example you give in the book, when you're talking about emotions, getting the best of you is a lot of times how we think of it. There's an example you give in the book about a woman named Louisa. Can you share what happens to her in terms of her emotions? Yeah. She's this mom. She's taking a flight home with her young child. They were 35,000 feet. It's a pleasant flight. And all of a sudden, she sees her kid begin to stir a little bit.

7:42And then she looks down and sees that her kid took a bite of this granola bar. And in the ingredient list, she sees peanuts. And so her child had a pretty severe peanut allergy and immediately begins to go into this allergic shock reaction. First thing she does is reach for her bag. She does what she had practiced in her mind countless times before. She reaches for the EpiPen that she carried with her and jams the EpiPen into her daughter's thigh.

8:14And after a few minutes pass, her daughter begins to recover. Everything was fine after that scenario. Her daughter walked off the plane. She felt totally fine. But Louisa did not feel fine because she kept on thinking after this incident about what we call counterfactuals. What might have happened? What if she didn't have the EpiPen? And then she also started projecting herself into the future and finding additional ways to worry about her experience.

8:47What if her daughter goes to a birthday party and the parent serves cake that was prepared in a facility that had peanuts? What if her daughter's at school and another kid gives her a taste of a snack that has peanuts in it? And these thoughts begin to really consume her. All true, right? I mean, those things could happen. Manoush, our minds are unbelievable hypothesis generating machines. We can generate all sorts of hypotheses.

9:18Many of them are actually quite feasible and not outlandish. We are also sophisticated at generating the outlandish variety of possibilities for things that might occur, too. But yes, these are all possibilities that begin to consume her. And as a result, she begins to lead a life that is not the kind of life that she wants to lead because she finds herself continually overcome with anxiety. To the point where she begins to question whether she can actually control her emotions at all.

9:55Right. That is the big question. And I think, you know, we assume that some people are more prone to negativity. And if you are a person who's always struggled with that, you think, well, that's just the way it is. This is who I am. But is there research into what we can do or if that can change? So there was this remarkable study that was performed in Dunedin, New Zealand, back in the early 1970s that began. And it's actually still going to this day.

10:28What happened in this study is the researchers started tracking about a thousand kids right around the time that they were born. And they measured these kids periodically over the course of their lives. And every few years, they assessed the kids' ability to control themselves, which also includes how we control our emotions. And they looked at how does a kid's ability to exert control when they're young predict different outcomes later on in life. And what they found is that kids who were really good at self-control, they progressed further in their careers, they saved more money, they planned more conscientiously for retirement, and they were physically healthier.

11:09So one's ability to manage themselves has implications for lots of really important things in our lives. The other thing that we learned from the study that was so interesting was as time progressed, some kids got better at self-control and some kids got worse, just quite naturally. And the kids who improved in self-control, their progress on all these different outcomes also improved. The kids whose self-control success went down over time, they started faring more poorly.

11:39And so the reason I like to mention that last finding is because what it really demonstrates is that how we manage our emotions is malleable. It can change. If you're not good at it at one point in life, whether you're a child or an adult, that doesn't mean you're destined to always be bad at it. We have the capacity to get better or worse. And that's where I think understanding how self-control works, familiarizing ourselves with the tools that are out there, that's why that's such an incredibly important thing for all of us to do.

12:10And so back to Louisa, it wasn't until an experience she had with her daughter that really helped break her out of her funk, she realized that when she was stuck in one of these doom loops, her daughter came in just rushing into the room, you know, had a problem she wanted to talk to her about. And then they did a behavior together, an activity. And after the activity was over, Louisa realized that she wasn't stressed anymore. And so she had the epiphany there that if she distracts herself by engaging in something that is really immersive and a positive experience, that turned the volume down on the intensity of her anxiety.

12:53And that ended up really renewing this belief that she had that she actually could manage her emotions. What I love about her story is it demonstrates just how important believing that you can manage your emotions is for bringing that outcome to fruition. When we come back, more with Ethan Cross on the tools that can help us in moments of anxiety or crisis, including the strategies of the world's youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

13:25Today on the show, managing our emotions. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. This message comes from Schwab. With the new Schwab Teen Investor Account, teens can gain hands-on investing experience. It's co-owned by you and your teen, so you can monitor the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money.

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15:04Learn more at capella.edu. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, we are spending the hour with psychologist and neuroscientist Ethan Cross, talking about how we can shift our perspective on our emotions so that they don't overwhelm us and our lives. And Ethan says that there are many tools that we can use that a lot of people don't. One of those tools, he says, is language.

15:34In particular, the way we speak to ourselves. One person who's very good at this, he says, is Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. Here's Ethan Cross on the TED stage. Right before Malala Yousafzai became the youngest person to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize for advocating for the rights of young girls to receive an education, she was invited onto The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to talk about her experience. At one point during the interview, she begins to explain what went through her head

16:07when she first discovered that the Taliban were plotting to kill her. And I used to think that the Taliban would come and he would just kill me. She's talking to herself in the first person the way we typically think about our lives. But the moment she gets to this part of the experience, right, the Taliban, they're on my doorstep. Once she gets to that part, she does something kind of strange. But then I said, if he comes, what would you do, Malala? Then I would reply to myself that, Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.

16:39But then I said, if you hit a Taliban with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Taliban. You must not treat others that much with cruelty and that much harshly. You must fight others, but through peace and through dialogue. So she starts off in the first person, but then she switches. She's coaching herself. She's giving herself advice like she would someone else, using her name and the word you. In this instance, what Malala is doing,

17:09she's using a tool that we have studied. It is called distanced self-talk. And it is useful because we human beings are much, much better at giving advice to other people than we are taking our own advice. There's even a name for this phenomenon. It's called Solomon's Paradox, named after the Bible's King Solomon, who was famous for being able to give great advice to other people. But when it came to his own affairs, he stumbled mightily. Using your own name and you shifts your perspective.

17:39It gets you to relate to yourself like you were giving advice to someone else, and that makes it much, much easier for us to wisely work through our problems.

17:49It's funny, though, because I was talking to my producer, Rachel, about this, and she said that she often refers to herself in her head as young lady. When she really needs a talking to, young lady, get it together. And you actually did a study that showed that people who did this referred to themselves with this distance self-talked, they experienced less negative emotion within seconds of doing that. And she said, well, that makes sense. It really works for me. Yeah. The reason this is one of the first tools that I use is

18:21it's a remarkably simple tool. We've done some neuroimaging studies to demonstrate that when you tell people to use this tool in the context of an experiment, you see reductions in the amplitude of their emotional responses that occur within seconds. And you don't see any concomitant increase in signs that people are really exerting a lot of effort to rein their emotions in. And that's noteworthy because oftentimes the tools we use to manage our emotions

18:53do feel really effortful. And I should say there's nothing wrong with that. Effortful things can be really good for us as anyone who ever goes to the gym knows. Like sometimes physical exercise takes a lot of effort to see gains. Some of the tools that are out there require more effort than others. What I like about the low effort tools is the easier something is to do, the more likely one is to do it. And that's because we're all lazy to some degree.

19:23And yeah, that's all of us. That's human beings. We're always trying to conserve our resources. So, you know, the low effort stuff is often my first line of defense. And then I'll ratchet it up and bring in some more heavy hitting tools if I find that I need to do so. But that often isn't the case. I mean, one of those easy things to do is, you know, put on a good song, a like hype up song to make yourself feel like you're ready to go do something hard. Or, you know, my daughter's very much

19:54in a stinky candle phase right now in the evenings when she wants to chill out. And you say like that you were surprised there was no research in to this using the senses to control our emotions. So you've been doing some of that. Yeah, so I find the senses as a tool for shifting our emotions both really powerful and just super interesting, right? Like sight, sound, touch, smell.

20:25We've had those experiences since before we were born, right? Touch develops in the womb. Think about what is the first thing we do with babies that are born into this world screaming their head off. We engage in skin-to-skin contact to soothe them. And yet, I think we often overlook the potential of the senses to help us manage our emotions when we're struggling. And maybe I'll start with the personal experience, actually. I've been listening to music my entire life, and it has always been a fundamentally emotional experience.

20:58And yet, if you ever ask me, like, when I was struggling with a problem, anxious or angry or sad or needed to be lifted up, did I strategically put on music to shift my emotions? No, the answer would be to that question. This is true of people more generally. So if you ask people in the context of studies, why do you listen to music? Close to 100% will report they like the way it makes them feel. If you then do studies where you ask people, hey, the last time you were anxious or angry or sad, what did you do? Between only 10% and 30% report

21:29using music to shift their emotions. And so that's just an example of low, low-hanging fruit for pushing our emotions around. And now that I know how this works, on my phone, I have a playlist. It has songs in that playlist that consistently shift my emotions, my positive or negative emotions, up or down. And I use it when I need to. And music and sound is just one example. Scent is another.

22:00You know, think about perfumes and cologne. Think about the scents that hotels pipe through their ventilation system to make you feel a particular way. Vision. Think about art. Think about beauty. These are all shifters. And if you think about them with that lens on, it gives you the possibility to start incorporating them into your lives more strategically. That brings me to my favorite. It's experiencing awe.

22:30About 10 years ago, scientists at Berkeley tracked a group of military veterans and first responders as they paddled down Utah's majestic Green River. They measured participants' levels of PTSD and stress both before and after the rafting trip. Not surprisingly, they found that most of the participants, their stress and PTSD levels declined from the beginning to the end of the experiment. But what was surprising was the factor that predicted those declines in PTSD and stress.

23:01It was participants' experience of awe. Awe is an emotion we experience when we are in the presence of something vast and indescribable. Lots of people get it from an amazing sunset. I'm a science geek, so I get it when I contemplate outer space and interplanetary travel. We have an SUV on Mars right now sending us footage back of that terrain. That is awe-inspiring to me. When we experience this emotion of awe, it leads to what we call a shrinking of the self.

23:31We feel smaller when we're contemplating something vast and indescribable. You had a study come out just very recently. It was called Managing Emotions in Everyday Life, Why a Toolbox of Strategies Matters. This was absolutely fascinating. Thousands of people who you had keep track of what tools they were using, whether they knew to call them that or not. I'm curious. Tell us about that, the research that you just put out. So in short, what we did is

24:02we ran these studies during the COVID pandemic and the question we were interested in was really simple. Lots of research up until this point or up until relatively recently has looked at how individual tools work. What we've begun to do as a field more recently is begun to look at how different kinds of tools work together. And so what we wanted to do in the study is we wanted to see what, if anything, were people doing each day to manage their COVID anxiety? And importantly,

24:32did any of the tools that they used actually move the needle on their anxiety from one day to the next? So it didn't make a difference. And so we tracked people for several days, a couple of weeks, and each day we gave them a checklist at the end of the day, which of the following, I believe it was 18 tools did you use to manage your COVID anxiety? And we had them rate how anxious they felt each day. So let's go through, like what, we are Swiss Army Knives. What are these tools? That's a big toolbox.

25:03Yeah, so we asked about talking to other people and going out in nature, journaling, positively reinterpreting things, thinking about that this won't last forever. We looked at some harmful tools too, like substance abuse. We asked people whether they were suppressing their emotions. We looked at whether people exercised, spent time outside, whether they interacted with someone, sought out physical touch and comfort from another person. So we looked at a very broad collection of strategies, and the strategies

25:33also varied in terms of how quote-unquote healthy or unhealthy they were according to a group of experts in this area. Now, what we found that was really interesting was number one, most people used multiple tools each day to manage their emotions between three and four. Number two, and this is really the finding that hits home for me, there were many combinations of tools that made a real difference

26:03in terms of how anxious people felt. When people used these three or four tools, they ended up experiencing a decline in their anxiety from one moment to the next. But there was tremendous variability in terms of the combinations of tools that worked for different people. the way I like to think about this is that it's not unlike going to the gym and exercising. We all have our unique ways of physically

26:34exercising to meet our health goals. And what I take away from this study is that the same is true for people who participate in our studies. Each person had their own unique way of managing their COVID anxiety. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions when it comes to managing our emotional lives. I wish I could tell a person who comes to me with a particular problem what three or five or seven tools

27:05they should specifically use to manage that problem. I cannot make that type of prescription. What we can do in the absence of that data is give people individual tools. Invite them to learn about what these tools are and then encourage them to start self-experimenting with those tools. Try a tool out. If it works for you, great. Keep using it. Layer on another one. See if a combination helps. If it doesn't work for you, move on to something else.

27:36Can I ask you a question? One of the tools that you mentioned, this might surprise people, but you have found actually we think it might be useful, but it's not, venting. Yeah, so venting is a really interesting phenomenon. There's a very strong cultural belief that when you are struggling with a big emotion, you should just vent it, get it out, express it to someone else. And there's been a lot of research on this, and what we've learned is that venting your emotions to someone else can be very helpful for

28:08strengthening the friendship and relational bonds between people. It's good to know that there are other people who care about you. The problem is if that is the only thing you do, you often leave that conversation feeling really good about the person you just communicated with, but all the negative feelings are still there. Sometimes they're even more activated because you've just spent however long you're with that other person talking about this experience, just going over all of the things that are stoking your emotional response.

28:38What we've learned is the best kinds of conversations when it comes to managing our emotions actually do two things. First, it is important to express your emotions to some degree. We do have these needs to connect with other people and feel validated and empathized with. But after those needs are met, ideally you speak to someone who helps you broaden your perspective. It's a person who is adept at allowing you to look at that bigger picture in

29:09ways that helps you generate a solution to what you're going through, helps you reach a sense of closure. You describe this in the book as well. You say that there's an exercise that people can do to help them pinpoint the right people to talk to when you're dealing with negative emotions. Can you walk us through that exercise? Yeah, let's do it. We're going to do an emotional advisor audit and we're going to do this exercise to help you build your emotional advisory board which I think is a

29:40critically important asset in all of our lives. So here's how it goes. I'd love for you and everyone who's listening to take out a piece of paper and draw a table with two columns. All right, I'm doing it now. I want you to label the first column personal stuff, use a technical term, and the other column work or school stuff, problems. Then what I want you to do is I want you to take a minute to list all

30:11the names of people that you go to to talk about the problems you experience in those two important domains of your life. Now some of you may have the same names in both columns. So you talk to the same people about problems regardless of where they come from. others may have totally different names in each column. Still others may have no names. There is no right or wrong way to complete this

30:41exercise. Okay, so now what I want you to do is I want you to circle the names of the people who do two things for you when you come to them with a problem. First, they let you express your emotions. They listen. They empathize with you. They validate what you're going through. They normalize it. But then after they do that, they start working with you to broaden your perspective. They help you work it through. They help you problem solve. They help

31:11you reach closure. Circle the names of the people who do both of those things in that order. Okay, so do you have any names on your list that you did not circle? Yes. Okay, get out your thickest red sharpie and make a cathartically put an X through their names. And what I mean by that is they're not on your advisory board. This doesn't mean you need to sever your connections with these people. There are many people

31:42in my life who I'm exceptionally close to. I don't talk to them about the problems I experience in those domains. I talk to them about lots of other things. But they don't help me work through my problems. They don't follow those two steps. And that's totally fine. And improvement is absolutely possible. I am an example of that. Prior to me knowing about how this all worked, prior to me knowing about the science, I remember distinctly when people would come to me with really big problems

32:12like they'd lose a loved one or something really bad would happen at work and they'd call to talk to me or they'd come over and I just wouldn't know what to say. Intuitively I would try to empathize. I'm so sorry. It sounds terrible. I can understand. But beyond that I had no compass to steer the conversation. What the science does here is it gives me a compass to steer those conversations that I have with people who come to me for support and it also helps me

32:43identify who I should talk to and that is an invaluable tool that I possess, that science-based compass. So these are people who are constructive in your life. Constructive absolutely in steering you the right way. Other people are a remarkable asset when it comes to manage your emotions because in those moments they can help us find those tools that we already possess and activate them to our benefit. In a moment

33:14more from Ethan Cross on that little voice inside your head that can often get in your way with all its chatter. On the show today, managing our emotions. I'm Anoush Zomorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

33:40This message comes from Schwab. With the new Schwab Teen Investor Account, teens can gain hands-on investing experience. It's co-owned by you and your teen, so you can monitor the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at schwab.com. This message comes from Grainger. For the ones who get it done, Grainger offers the professional grade products you need to get the job done. With fast delivery and access to technical product experts ready to help you meet any challenge. Call, click

34:11grainger.com or just stop by. This message comes from LinkedIn Ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? For marketers, that's impressions. When ads don't create revenue, that's a tough conversation with the CFO. Instead, invest in results your CFO will love. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. So advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit.

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35:21It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, a conversation with psychologist and neuroscientist Ethan Cross on managing our emotions better. These days, many people are bringing in an expert. They're seeing a therapist to work through their problems and learn to coach themselves in tough situations. There are lots of different therapeutic approaches. We know that different kinds of therapy work for different people.

35:52Having said that, I do think the science here is pretty clear in the sense that the emotional connection, the rapport in therapy talk that's sometimes referred to as therapeutic alliance, the alliance between the therapist and the client, you want to have that, but you also want to help people ultimately reframe an experience so it ceases to be an active source of distress. There are lots of ways you