Emotion Regulation: Top 10 Neuroscience-Backed Tools | Ethan Kross & Emma Seppälä

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25:01Plus, you can take home the small stuff that day and get the big stuff shipped fast and free right to your door. Shop Wayfair's Memorial Day Sale, May 11th through 26th at the Wayfair Store at Edens Plaza in Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home. But Emma, let me just stay with you because you just talked about tip number three, which is to stop chronically suppressing. Tip number four is the thing to do instead, which is the counterintuitive and sometimes difficult, but better than the alternative. Feel the thing. I think that a lot of times we don't want to feel bad. Maybe especially in American culture where, you know, we're supposed to be for the pursuit of happiness.

25:40And there's a sense that we don't ever want to feel bad ever. You know, in certain cultures like in China, there's this Chinese quote that is eating bitterness is good fortune. the idea that even difficult moments are a gift because you grow from them, you learn from them. And in other cultures, like in Germany, for example, condolence cards look really different than here. Condolence cards in the US, this is a research study run out of Stanford as well, those cards are more like, hey, you know, I hope you feel better soon. Whereas in Germany, they're more like, I'm with you and you're suffering, right?

26:12This idea that in American culture in particular, we won't feel bad ever. And there's a plethora of ways we can distract ourselves constantly, whether you're on your phone or you're busy or you're doing a million things, pleasure, watching movies, whatever. I mean, we have so many things to choose from that this can distract us from how we feel. But at the end of the day, if we're not processing what we're feeling, it's there waiting for us. But we're just more beat up from whatever it is we've been doing to try and avoid it, if that makes sense. But if you look at a child, the child will feel that emotion 100 % the little kid be so mad.

26:46And like two seconds later, they're best friends with the brother they were so mad at. They've let the emotion go through them. You can think of emotion as energy in motion. It's this big energy that's moving through. Are you letting it move through? Are you trying to push it down? I've had this experience recently, and I'm going to come to you on this, Ethan, where I've had a very unpleasant resurgence in some anxiety and depression. And I really see even after, I don't know, 16, 17, 18 years of being a meditator, like I don't want to fucking feel it. It's very unpleasant. And I'm my first instinct is to do 75 other things instead of just feeling it.

27:27And so my question for you, Ethan, is if we all can agree that it is better to feel it than suppress it, what are the modalities that you recommend for allowing yourself to feel it?

27:39Ethan Kross:accepting the fact that, so if you're motivated to feel it and you don't want to change that, we could talk about things you could do to change it. But if you do want to sit with the emotion because it's serving you well in some manner, accepting the fact that it's going to take some time for the emotion to wash over you, what we often talk about as distress tolerance can be a really, really useful tool. So just recognizing that there is a truism that characterizes the vast majority of our emotional responses. If we get outside the territory of clinical forms of anxiety and depression, which by definition hang around for a really long time, the bulk of our everyday emotional experiences, they follow the same time course.

28:28Ethan Kross:You're living life. Like here's your emotion readout. If you're listening, I'm drawing a little finger, it's going just parallel to the floor. And then all of a sudden it spikes up like an EKG heart rate monitor. That's your emotion getting triggered. And then it'll stay up for a while. But as time goes on, it gradually fades. One of the reasons one of my favorite tools, temporal distancing or mental time travel into the future works is because it makes people aware of this. So what is mental time travel into the future? Oh my God. I just had a meeting again with these two interviewees. My God, they just keep berating me endlessly, making me feel like crap.

29:11Well, you know,

29:12Ethan Kross:I've been through this before. How am I going to feel about this tomorrow or next week? It sounds so trivial, but that tiny, tiny shift in how you're thinking about your circumstance, what it does is it activates this understanding that all of us have because we've lived through millions. That's not an exaggeration. We live through millions of emotional experiences that have this time course. Yeah, it's going to be not so great for the next three hours, maybe 18, depending on who you are, but eventually you'll come down from it. And so that recognition is vital. I think it is so incredibly powerful for allowing people to sit with what they're experiencing because fundamentally it gives them hope that circumstances are going to improve.

30:06Just to call out that Ethan has moved us into tip number five, which is reappraisal or shifting your perspective on whatever emotion you're feeling. Emma, more to say from you on this strategy? Well, I just love what Ethan said. By the way, I just love hearing your voice, Ethan. It's so soothing.

30:22Ethan Kross:Well, thank you. Now we're changing the tenor of this interview. I can't use my two. I'm just joking. That's very kind of you to say. I love what you're sharing because also remembering, gosh, I've been through so many, like you said, millions of emotions like this in the past. I've survived them. I'm right here right now. I just love that point. I mean, 90 % of the time we're awake. I love this factoid. We're experiencing stuff. It means we're always basically feeling something. I don't even know what I was feeling this morning. I mean, I could go back. It was pain, actually. It was in the gym.

30:57Ethan Kross:I didn't want to be there. I'm feeling fine now. So lots of ways to harness that kind of knowledge. And apologies, Dan, for jumping the gun. Not at all. Not at all. Guns are meant to be jumped. I'm here to just eventually provide some structure, even if it's ex post facto. So let's go to tip number six. And Emma, I'll go back to you for this one. Breathe. How is breathing a tool for emotion regulation? So, you know, back when I was a grad student in James Gross' lab, and I love James Gross, he's forever my mentor, I guess I had an issue with just looking at suppression and reappraisal. So reappraisal was the big thing that the lab studied, which is basically, you know, trying to reframe the situation so it doesn't seem so bad, which works really well.

31:44It can help the emotion calm down, you know, at the level of the brain, at the level of physiology. But I guess my issue with this idea of reframing was it doesn't always work. It doesn't work when you have really strong emotion because in order to reframe a situation or think about it from a different perspective, you know, you're using your prefrontal cortex to kind of think more logically and rationally about the situation. but what research also shows is that when your system is in high stress or another very intense emotion you actually have a loss of prefrontal regulation you lose the ability you know it's like when we try to talk a child out of a tantrum it doesn't work because the kid's brain doesn't work that way we're kind of similar when our emotion is extremely strong which is why you know when someone comes up to you and they're like and you're anxious and they're like hey you should calm down.

32:40It doesn't work, right? Very annoying. Yes. So as I kept thinking about that, and I was like, there's something that you've got to find a different way because reappraisals don't always work. And as academics, we're always in the head, but mental strategies don't always work for everyone all the time, right? And I'll share a story with you. I shared this story about Jake in the last podcast, but is it okay if I share it again, Dan? Yeah. Yes. Okay. So about 13 years ago, my husband walked in the room and he was pale. And I said, what's going on? And he said, Jake was in an IED. So my husband was in the Marine Corps and Jake was one of his friends who was in Afghanistan and his vehicle drove over a roadside bomb.

33:20Hopefully none of us can even imagine how horrific that experience is, the sound, the noise, the shrapnel flying, the terror, and of course the panic and excruciating pain of very severe injury, which he had. Okay. So in that moment, usually he would fall unconscious from the trauma, but Jake looked down and he saw his legs were extremely injured. In that moment, he actually didn't fall unconscious. He remembered something he'd read about in a book for soldiers who could be entering these kinds of situations. And in that book, and it taught a breathing exercise. And so he started to engage in that breathing exercise.

33:59And because he did that, he was able to regain the ability to think clearly and to do his first act of duty, which was to check on the other service members, to do his second act of duty, which was to give orders to call for help. And then he even had the presence of mind to turn and get his own legs and to think of proffing them upward before lying down and falling unconscious. He was then urgently transported to Germany and Walter Reed. And he was told, if you hadn't done those things, you would have died that day. Now, Jake is alive and well in the US. He has three children. He's a stay-at-home dad.

34:31I just talked to him the other day. It's just so amazing. I always think if Jake could save his life and the life of the others in the vehicle by using his breath in the most stressful experience we can imagine, then what can breathing not help us with in our less stressful yet still stressful lives? And so I was really inspired to run several studies with high trauma or high anxiety populations on breathing for well-being. And I have to say that in the moment, if we live in a time when we need things that work well and work fast, breathing is probably one of the most efficient ways to down-regulate when something is happening.

35:05I think I'd be curious to hear, as an anxious person, and I suspect many listening would characterize themselves similarly, give us a breathing exercise that can help us calm down when we need it. Yeah, sure. A lot of these breathing exercises It's a stem out of India 10 ,000 years ago, the yoga tradition. But what's interesting is that different breathing practices can do different things. So some of these breathing practices are meant for people who are going to go into battle to like amp them up and others are meant to calm you down. So I always give a caveat, learn from a professional rather than a YouTube video because you don't know what that breathing exercise is going to do.

35:42But keeping things really simple, we know that when we breathe in, our heart rate increases and when you breathe out, it slows down. So if you do an exercise that's very simple where you simply breathe in, fill your lungs to a count of four and you breathe out, say, to a count of eight or six or eight, something longer, you're starting to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and calm down. So I always recommend, you know, just close your eyes and do that for five minutes and then see before and after how you feel. You'll start to notice immediately. In fact, you can play with this in the doctor's office.

36:13I sometimes do. And they're checking your heart rate and they're like, are you alive? You know, but you can noticeably see a change in minutes. Really cool. Really cool. Ethan, let me go back to you for tip number seven. Using your senses to shift your emotional state. Can you hold forth on that?

36:32Ethan Kross:Yeah. So we have sight, sound, touch, smell, taste. These are systems through which we take in information from the world around us. And part of the way they work is through emotion. these are incredibly powerful shifters of our emotion and at one level we all know this so if you ask people as an example well actually let me just do it on you dan and emma i'm going to make a radical assumption here that each of you at times listens to music fair to say yes fair to say yes okay so why do you do it why do you listen to music i definitely love music that's soothing and when I accidentally hear music that's more emotional or in a different way, like piano, then I will definitely notice it can bring tears even just hearing piano in a grocery store.

37:25Okay. But on the other hand, I'll voluntarily turn on music that is soothing when I need that. Yeah.

37:31Ethan Kross:Okay. And Dan? Yeah, I use rather aggressive music to work out to and then more soothing music when I'm driving and don't want to scream at people in traffic. Perfect. So both of you are indicating that you're listening to music for emotional purposes, different purposes, but emotional. And if you ask people why writ large they listen to music, almost 100 % will say they listen to music because they like the way it makes them feel. But then if you look at when people are struggling with anger, anxiety, sadness, how many of them actually avail themselves of music to shift their emotions? It's between 10 And then 30%.

38:11Ethan Kross:Music is one of the quickest ways to shift your emotions, to regulate your emotions in another direction. When I'm presenting to big groups, I tell people, hey, I'm going to regulate your emotions right now. And it's going to take me a whole of three seconds to do it. Are you ready? And people look at me with intense skepticism because we, of course, think it's really hard to move someone else's emotions. and then I just turn on Journeys Don't Stop Believing, boom, 90 % of the crowd is smiling and bopping their head. And the other 10 % are looking at me with scorn because they hate the song. It doesn't matter.

38:52Ethan Kross:They're both feeling something, right? So the senses are just such powerful levers and we don't always appreciate it. Sometimes we actually leverage the senses to shift us in counterproductive ways. As an example, lots of people, when they're really sad and they don't want to be sad anymore, they won't listen to the pump up music. They'll instead listen to the sad music to help them go deeper into that state. I like to tell people if that's working for you, and there's good reason to think that listening to a song that is congruent with what you're feeling may help you process an experience. But if you want to get out of that state, go in the other direction.

39:38Ethan Kross:Now, music and sound, that's one example. If we go down the list, let's go to smell. Both of you, I don't know your hygiene practices, but I'm guessing each of you have doused yourself or schlacked yourself with a substance to influence the way you feel about yourself or other people feel when they walk by you, i.e. you're wearing deodorant or perfume cologne, aftershave, something like that. Fair to say. Scented shampoo. Okay. Nodding heads. So scents, huge industries. Why do we put those things on us? Why do hotels pump scents through the ventilation systems? They want to make people feel a certain way and pair that feeling with the establishment.

40:23Ethan Kross:Food. I don't like to look at our credit card bill when it comes to the amount of money we spend at restaurants and at the fancy food shop sometimes. Why do we do that? It's not just sustenance. If it were, we'd be walking around with IV bags attached to our arms. Eating is an emotional experience. Touch. We don't have to go deep into touch. I think we all know how pleasant the right kind of embraces with people who you want to be embraced with, I'll stop there, that arouses positivity. So all of your senses are just these really, really powerful shifters of your emotion. And if you understand how this works, it also puts you in a position to use those apparatus to shift other people's emotions in a helpful direction.

41:19Ethan Kross:Putting on the right music, the right sense. My daughter's having a stressful day at school. It used to be actually pre-teen, I could just go over and a gentle kind of caress at the back was well-received. Not so much anymore. But you've got many options to choose from. So that's the power of the senses. and we shouldn't overlook them as an emotion regulation tool. I believe I met your elder daughter a couple of months ago and she's awesome. Yeah, she still reminds me how much she enjoyed. You had a real gift for actually talking to her like she really mattered. And she still reminds me of that.

41:59Ethan Kross:So I'm thankful of that exchange. I don't give myself the credit on that exchange. She's a very cool kid. And just as a side note, she was telling me how she uses AI and these really clever ways to get AI to explain math concepts in the voice of the characters from Gossip Girl. That really struck me as a really smart way to leverage the technology.

42:27Coming up, Emma and Ethan talk about how to tend your inputs and why what you consume shapes how you feel more than you might think. And we talk about something called the emotional advisor audit. Who on your list actually helps and who just keeps you stuck?

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45:09Let's get back on point here and talk about tip number eight. Emma, let me go to you for this. Your advice for one way to regulate your emotions is to, and I believe this is your term, tend your inputs. What does that mean? Yes, absolutely. So, you know, we take over 60 ,000 gigabytes of information in every day, and this is a conservative number from a few years ago. I don't even want to know what it is now, but that's enough to, you know, crash small computer in a week. I mean, it is so much input. This is an average from all of our media sources that we take in every day. So everything that we absorb, everything that we watch, everything that we listen to impact us emotionally.

45:49You know, you check your inbox, you got eight messages. Each one of those could trigger a different emotion. Your tax person says you didn't, you owe more money than you think. The next thing your boss wants something from you yesterday. You know, the next thing someone sends you their newborn baby pics. And in the couple of minutes that we spend just checking our inbox, we probably experienced more emotions than our ancestors did a hundred years ago. And knowing how we're impacted by things like, for example, that headlines the news, you know, most of the news, I would say 99 % of the news is, and Diane, you know this better than anyone, is negative, right?

46:24It's just negative. It's fear inducing. It's anger inducing. It is so important to have awareness. And I think that's been a topic we've been talking about throughout is this awareness of how am I feeling, but also how are things making me feel like Ethan so beautifully just spoke about? And am I consciously choosing or letting others choose for me. For example, if I just go ahead and just sit down and watch whatever or scroll through whatever, because every single one of those things is input that has an emotional impact on you. So choosing sovereignty, making sovereign choices and very conscious choices is so important.

47:04You know, what is the first thing you're going to do when you wake up in the morning? Are you really going to be checking your phone? Are you going to be really checking the news? What's that going to do to you? It's going to put you in fight or flight right away. Is that what you want? Is that what you want? Great. What are you doing right before bed? Do you want to sleep well? What are you going to watch? What are you going to listen to? And this goes so well with what Ethan was just saying about music and other ways that we can influence how we feel. I'd be curious on this topic of tending to your inputs.

47:30What's your take on Instagram? I, as I've mentioned many times on the show, deleted Instagram from my phone a couple months ago, and I noticed that it was massively helpful.

47:40Ethan Kross:I completely agree that you want to be aware of what your triggers are. Triggers that set you in the wrong emotional direction, but also triggers that can send you in the right direction. So as you were talking about my thought about, I deleted the New York Times app from my phone several months ago. I haven't put it back and I'm massively happier. No, I still read the New York times, but I used to read it every time I checked my phone and the bombardment of just information I found was not serving me well. So I got rid of it with respect to Instagram. I think there's really good reason why removing it from your phone may serve you well.

48:24I have

48:24Ethan Kross:actually kept it on my iPad and I do so for a very particular reason. So I actually find that Instagram, I use it in a very specific way. And it's an emotion regulatory way that serves me well. I watch these ridiculously funny, silly reels. It kind of takes the edge off after a long day. I'll often share them with my friends and they send me these very silly videos that I'll show my wife one out of every five and she just rolls her eyes. And I don't know why these are funny to you. Am I the only one who's ever had this experience, by the way? I saw a video the other day. I still have TikTok on my phone.

49:07TikTok does not bum me out the way Instagram does. I use it for the exact same reason you do. And I saw a funny video the other day of a woman on the couch and you could hear in the distance, a male laughing hysterically. And the caption said, I know in 30 seconds, he's going to send me a really stupid video.

49:26Ethan Kross:I literally saw that last night and I showed it to my wife and she gave me the look. So I use it in a very purposeful way in that regard and it serves me well. If I went down the wrong path in it, would it trigger me in some way with social comparisons? Absolutely. And that would not make me feel great. And so I think it's really about, like if we zoom out, what is emotion regulation about? about aligning your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with your goals. So what are your goals here? My goal is before bed, I want to feel happy. I want to feel good. It helps me go to bed. So that helps serve my goals.

50:07Ethan Kross:If my goal is to not be overwhelmed with a highlight reel of other people's lives, then I should stay away from socially. If my goal is to not be reminded of all of the terrible things that are happening in the world right now, every 13 minutes or less, then I should probably take the New York Times off my phone and dose it at particular times of the day. So it's really about being deliberate about what are the goals that I have and then how do I structure my life to help me reach those regulatory goals? These tools that we're talking about, they are all instruments in the service of that end.

50:48Emma, how do you tend to your inputs in the spirit of know thyself that Ethan is preaching? How do you apply this? I'm very deliberate. I don't have Instagram on my phone. I check the news very sparingly and with a lot of awareness. I once spoke to Tico Ayer. I don't know if you had him on the show. Sure, yes. Yeah, he just said, you know, I'm a current events journalist and I'm going to tell you that our job is to create anxiety because that's how people will click and then they'll click on the ads. You know what I mean? It was like very black and white, right? So I'm very deliberate with that.

51:21I guess I just want to make a point here about, you know what, Dan, I know you talk about so much, which is meditation. When you meditate regularly, you're developing the awareness that you need to have the ability not to be taken in by whatever it is, whether it's headlines or the social media app or whatever. So the more you meditate, the more you create that awareness and the freedom to make the choice that you need. And that's what's so beautiful about it and the message that you spread, Dan. Because I really have found myself that as absolutely key. I mean, I've been very regular with my meditation practice, no matter how I feel.

51:58Like this morning I was meditating and I was feeling not great during it. And I was like, I'm here and I'm meditating. I'm with this, whatever it is, you know. I find that absolutely key to being able to then make the right choices. Not that I don't slip sometimes. Of course, I do. But even when I'm slipping, I'm aware that I'm slipping. Yes. I'm obviously a big fan of meditation. I do think it is exactly what you said. It is a way to train attention. And it's very powerful in that regard. Over time, my views have evolved in part as a result of hosting this podcast for now 10 years plus. And Ethan and I were talking before we started rolling about the research that shows that rather than making a dogmatic case to people that there's one thing you should do to take care of yourself, it's actually more effective to present a toolkit.

52:45And so I often talk about presenting people with a menu, not a to-do list. And I find that it feels better in my body to give people a bunch of things they can do and let them choose. Speaking of you, Ethan, let's go to you for tip number nine. So I mentioned before your first book is called Chatter. The second was called Shift. And we've talked a little bit about shifting your attention when you are in the grips of a powerful emotion and, you know, it's not the time to fully feel it. You also argue that that kind of strategic avoidance is sometimes the right move and not a weakness. Can you say more about that?

53:22Ethan Kross:Yeah, we have this very interesting tendency in our culture to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We overgeneralize. And so that pertains to this concept of avoidance. When I first got into this business, and I'm sure Emma has had the same experience, I get to grad school. avoidance is synonymous with the worst possible thing you could do for your emotional life. And why is that assumption prevalent? Because it is true that if you chronically avoid things, the outcomes are really grim across the board. If you have a simple decision, every time I am triggered in some way, I'm just going to suppress, repress, distract.

54:09Ethan Kross:Things don't work out very well. but that's an extreme case of a coping style where you are doing this one thing all the time. We also possess the ability to be strategic with our attention. In fact, that's one of the beautiful things of the human brain. We can split our attention back and forth and it turns out there's a lot of research which shows that the ability to divert your attention away from something that's bothering you for a while and then come back to it, that can actually be really, really useful. And I'll give you a very concrete example. It's one that I have benefited from numerous times in my life.

54:54Ethan Kross:I will every, oh, I don't know, seven to 10 days get an email that provokes me. I read the email and it's either anger followed by some inner self-talk filled, like that sounds almost like a Robert De Niro character, or maybe it's anxiety provoking. In a former life, and I have, I laugh sometimes, I might respond immediately, or I can force myself to push the email aside, I have this beautiful snooze button in my email browser that actually takes it out of my inbox. So it's no longer a visual cue. I don't set it to come back until the next day or sometimes two days, right? And when the email comes back, I am now approaching it from an entirely different point of view.

55:48Ethan Kross:That is a case that speaks to the strategic value of strategic attention deployment or being strategic with your avoidance. So I like to always invite people to play around with this idea. Sometimes you can't actually avoid something that is bothering you for even a short period of time. It's so hot, if you will, that you can't distract productively. If that's the case, like no problem, you have another two dozen tools that you could bring to bear to deal with that kind of circumstance. But many of the emotional curveballs that we are thrown in life, we can take some time away from and then come back.

56:30Ethan Kross:And that's a helpful tactic to have in your toolbox. Agree. Let's get to the 10th tip in the interest of time here. And to me, and I'll be interested to hear if you two agree, to me, this may be the most powerful. And it is to lean on your relationships as a way to regulate your emotions. Emma, let me start with you on this. Yeah, we know that after food and shelter, our greatest need is for positive social relationships. In particular, we need to feel safe, seen, heard, valued, appreciated. I mean, that is so basic, whether you're an infant or you're 99, we really need that. But when they're positive, when they're supportive, when they're accepting, that is really powerful.

57:13And it's a relationship with people. For some people, it might be relationship with animals and even be relationships with nature. And in fact, all three could be part of someone's toolkit. You know, we know, for example, that when you go out into nature, it reduces your anxiety in minutes, increases well-being, it even increases citizenship behavior. So there's something so profound about that communion with the other, assuming it's a positive other, of course, whether it's human, whether it's animal weather. It's the natural world. I love that you're ending on this. Ethan, you talk about doing something you call an emotional advisor audit.

57:52What does that mean?

57:53Ethan Kross:It means thinking about who the people are in your life that you go to for support when you're struggling. I couldn't agree more with both of you. Other people are one of the greatest resources that we possess when it comes to our emotional lives, which means our lives more generally, or emotional creatures, but they can also be tremendous liabilities. I often have this fun experience. I'll just ask people in a group like, so how many of you think that other people are a tremendous asset in your emotional life? Every hand goes up. All right, one more question for you before it to do. How many of you think that other people can be a tremendous liability in your emotional life.

58:34Ethan Kross:Every hand goes up. So what's the deal? The deal is that the right kinds of relationships, the right kind of people can be a total game changer for helping extricate you from the bowels of chatter, despair, or whatever phrase you want to call it when you're descending down the rabbit hole. But even the well-intentioned support providers can sometimes is make things worse. So the audit I like to give people is list the names of the people that you go to for support. I want you to actually write those names down. And then for every person, I want you to ask yourself, when you go to them, do they do the following two things in this sequence?

59:18Ethan Kross:Do they first and foremost connect with you emotionally, empathize, validate, normalize your experience, just listen and learn about what you're going through. Then once they have a sense of that, and you feel like you've had the opportunity to connect with them and really release this, do they then start working with you to help you reframe this, to broaden your perspective, to ultimately allow you to reach a sense of closure that we need to move on? The people who do both of those things for you in that sequence, they are your emotional advisors. they form the foundation of your advisory board.

59:57Ethan Kross:Now, if you have people on your list who don't meet both of those criteria, I give people two choices. First, I pass around red Sharpies and I say, you can cross them off the list. They're gone. And yeah, I joke that doesn't mean they're out of your life. It means maybe just don't go to them for emotional support because oftentimes that people just get us to co-ruminate. They just ask us questions about what we're feeling in ways that make the situation a whole lot worse. The other choice and the one I hope people take me up on is to educate our networks about how to be a great support provider.

1:00:35Ethan Kross:What I've just described is grounded in decades of scientific knowledge. We have a roadmap for how to help other people. I can speak from experience. Before I became familiar with this work, I didn't know how to help someone else when they called me for support. Like I remember someone once called me, someone passed away. And I was like, oh, I'm so sorry. Oh, yeah, I'm really, I'm sorry. Sounds terrible. What can I do to help? I didn't know what else to do, how to guide that conversation. I very rarely find myself in that situation now because I have this science-based roadmap. And it's an easy one we can give to everyone.

1:01:16What do you say if somebody calls you and tells you there's been a death in the family? What is the right thing to say?

1:01:22Ethan Kross:The first thing to say is I do start with the sorry. So that's an old trick. But then I ask them to just tell me about how they're feeling and what's happening, what's going on. And I just allow them to start working through that with me. And sometimes that's all we do on that call. but sometimes they'll voice a desire to try to get past that. And then we start broaching that. And I'll at times shift the conversation from just talking about how we're feeling to, well, all right, let's try to look at this bigger picture. They've had a wonderful life, right? So there are ways of gently starting to try to nudge the conversation in that perspective, broad interaction.

1:02:11Ethan Kross:Sometimes that happens over a few calls though. Yes, grief is a mysterious force. Dan, can I add a point to jump on Ethan's? Yes. I love what Ethan said. I just wanted to add that when we help others, it helps us. And I think that's a point that we often forget, but the data of show is that when we live lives that are characterized by a greater sensitivity to others and more altruism or even just the intention to help or uplift others, it actually profoundly benefits our own well-being. And sometimes when we're not feeling well, I think we can all probably remember a time when we were feeling stressed or like, oh, it's a terrible day, but somebody else calls us and they're really having an emergency and you show up at their door or wherever they are and help them.

1:03:00And then if you think about how you feel, you feel amazing. You feel so energized and positive. And there's something so profound about that being there for others, this compassion that we forget. There's so much data showing how it improves psychological well-being, physical well-being, even longevity. And the last thing I want to do is I want to, on the topic of self-compassion, remind people to watch your TED Talk, Dan, which is so wonderful and such an incredible example of what self-compassion can do for yourself as well as your relationships. Thank you. I second that. Thank you. Okay, we are at time, but we have made it through and congratulations to us.

1:03:41We have made it through all 10 tips. And yeah, let me just say personally, even though I've heard many of these things before, it is so incredibly helpful to be reminded because you can hear, and I say this a lot, you can hear really wise, strategic advice, emotional advice, and life just pulls you back into your habit patterns. And so it is so helpful to be reminded by smart, thoughtful people. So Emma Seppala and Ethan Cross, thank you both. Really appreciate it.

1:04:15Thanks again to Emma and Ethan. Great to have them as part of this 10th anniversary series. Before I let you go, I do want to tell you about something that's happening in the Western Dharma scene that you should probably know about. Christina Feldman, who is an amazing teacher at the Insight Meditation Society, is dealing with some quite serious health problems and could use some help. Her friends have set up a GoFundMe. And if you'd like to support, you can find the link to that GoFundMe in the show notes to this episode. Or you can just do a Google search, Christina Feldman, GoFundMe. Her name is F-E-L-D-M-A-N.

1:04:52As you know, we in the 10 % world really like to support Dharma teachers in their hours of need. And this certainly is one for Christina. She's amazing. If you want to help her, this is your opportunity. Also, speaking of amazing Dharma teachers, don't forget to go check out my new-ish meditation app, 10 % with Dan Harris, where we have a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers. Plus, you can get this podcast without any ads. We do weekly exclusive live stream events. And this really is a great way to support me and my team, but also these amazing teachers. Plus, there's a free 14-day trial if you want to check it out before you spend any money.

1:05:32I just want to end by saying thank you to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

1:06:07Ethan Kross:This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.