How To Stop Feeling Negative Emotions All The Time - Dr Ethan Kross

... the director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan. What's that mean?

Well, what that means is we get to ask two kinds of questions, uh, in my lab. So number one, we, we try to understand how do people work when it comes to managing their emotions? And we really care about getting in there to understand the mechanics that underlie what we call emotion regulation. And then the second kind of question we tackle is, how can we use this understanding of the nuts and bolts that explain how people can manage their emotions to actually help them do a better job of that in their daily lives outside the lab? And so, um, trying to address those two big picture issues is something that keeps us really busy and is something that is, uh, really fun, a fun way to spend your, your life.

Mm-hmm. Uh, from your time, decades looking at them, what, what are emotions from a definitional perspective? How do you come to actually define them?

(inhales deeply) It's a great question, and, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's funny. I often, um, when I'm speaking about this topic to folks, I, I often ask people, "Hey, who, who here feels comfortable coming up to the front and, uh, just telling us what, what it means to have an emotion? What is an emotion?" It's kind of wild. We experience emotions... According to this one study that I cite in my book, about 90% of the time that we're, we're awake, we're experiencing some type of emotional response. We, we are truly an emotional species. And yet if you ask people, as I often do in presentations or when I'm teaching, "What's an emotion?" people often just stop and they have trouble answering that question. So let me, let me pose it to you actually before I go give you the, give you my definition. What do you think an emotion is? And don't worry about being right or wrong.

Yeah. Uh, a state in the brain that informs us of, uh, what is going on in the rest of our body.

So, um, not bad, not bad. So I, I, I define emotions as, uh, responses we have to events in our lives that we deem meaningful, i.e. they capture our attention in some way. And these could be situations that happen to us as we're navigating the world outside or even situations we imagine in our minds. And when we encounter those circumstances, it's almost like a software program that gets loaded up to help us manage that circumstance, and that software program has a few different pieces, few different components. So emotions activate what we call a loosely coordinated set of responses. So what do I mean by that? Well, when we experience emotion, there's, there's often a physiological component. So if I experience a little bit of anxiety, I often feel that in my stomach. It, it kind of feels like the stomach is, is wringing, I've got to go to the toilet right away. Uh, depending on how potent a response it is, that predicts the strength of that impulse. Um, our emotions are also capturing our cognition, how we're thinking about our circumstances. So anxiety will kind of zoom us in on the potential threat in front of us. Um, and then, and then there are motor responses and facial displays that often come along with our emotions. So can you tell when someone is angry at you sometimes-