How to Use Focus to Control Your Emotions | Dr. Ethan Kross & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | - Earlier, you mentioned attentional spotlights

00:00:05.640 | and I'm fascinated by this.

00:00:07.900 | I know that most people hear that we can't multitask,

00:00:10.320 | but primates again, of which we are old world primates

00:00:14.280 | in particular can do covert attention.

00:00:17.600 | If I were not completely focused on you,

00:00:20.240 | I could focus an attentional spotlight on you

00:00:22.280 | and your voice and pay attention to you,

00:00:23.700 | but I could also monitor components of the room.

00:00:25.900 | - Yeah.

00:00:26.740 | - I can merge those spotlights.

00:00:28.560 | I can divorce those spotlights.

00:00:30.120 | - That's right.

00:00:30.960 | - But it's very hard to generate three

00:00:33.680 | kind of compatible attentional spotlights at once.

00:00:37.120 | It seems like we kind of have two.

00:00:38.880 | - Yeah.

00:00:39.720 | - Maybe some people can manage three,

00:00:41.340 | but I'm betting most people can't manage more than three.

00:00:44.200 | - Well, I think it becomes especially difficult

00:00:46.960 | to manage even one when you're experiencing

00:00:49.680 | an emotional episode that is essentially

00:00:53.720 | hijacking your attention.

00:00:56.080 | And attention is really important to talk about

00:00:58.480 | for a few reasons.

00:00:59.340 | So number one, as a species,

00:01:01.920 | we have the most sophisticated attention deployment system

00:01:05.120 | on the planet, right?

00:01:06.480 | We have the ability to strategically deploy our attention.

00:01:11.320 | So we can willfully place it on the things we want

00:01:14.980 | or yank it away from the things we don't want,

00:01:17.160 | or we can go, we can saccade our attention back and forth.

00:01:21.480 | When it comes to emotion though,

00:01:23.200 | we are often taught certain maxims

00:01:25.520 | about how to deploy our attention.

00:01:27.800 | But I think can sometimes be problematic

00:01:30.240 | because they fall into the category of prescriptive advice

00:01:35.240 | about magic pills.

00:01:39.120 | So often we hear, for example,

00:01:40.720 | that when it comes to chatter or really big emotions,

00:01:45.140 | things that you're anxious about or fearful,

00:01:47.760 | you should not avoid the problem.

00:01:50.040 | You should focus on it.

00:01:52.420 | And there's been a lot of research on this.

00:01:54.920 | And what we have learned is on the one hand,

00:01:56.420 | chronically avoiding things is not good.

00:01:59.800 | It's associated with all sorts of negative outcomes

00:02:01.920 | for our emotional lives

00:02:03.040 | and beyond our physical lives too, our health.

00:02:06.440 | But oftentimes the signature for adaptively coping

00:02:11.440 | with emotional curve balls

00:02:13.700 | is being able to focus on the problem at hand,

00:02:17.160 | deploy your attention elsewhere, take a break,

00:02:19.880 | and then come back to it.

00:02:20.720 | And so this was a question actually I learned

00:02:22.760 | from my grandmother inadvertently.

00:02:25.040 | My grandmother was this very interesting woman

00:02:27.120 | who grew up in Poland during World War II,

00:02:32.120 | had her entire family slaughtered during the war.

00:02:35.100 | One of these kind of devastating experiences,

00:02:37.560 | lived in the forest for years, back and forth,

00:02:41.540 | all this terrible stuff, family massacred and so forth.

00:02:44.240 | And growing up, she made it out of the war,

00:02:47.200 | moved to the States.

00:02:48.480 | I remember being just so exceptionally curious

00:02:50.960 | about what she experienced

00:02:53.800 | and how she was able to overcome it.

00:02:55.960 | And whenever I would ask her questions about this,

00:02:58.720 | she would always say, don't ask me why or what happened,

00:03:03.320 | why is a crooked letter?

00:03:05.080 | That was a phrase she would use,

00:03:06.400 | which was really interesting

00:03:07.320 | 'cause she didn't speak English very well at all,

00:03:09.920 | heavily accented language,

00:03:11.360 | but she'd mastered this curious idiom,

00:03:14.720 | like why is a crooked letter?

00:03:16.120 | In other words, nothing good comes from dredging up

00:03:20.560 | the past or really trying to understand things.

00:03:23.360 | Your life is awesome, you're in a safe place,

00:03:26.000 | you have a loving family, just enjoy life.

00:03:27.920 | So she's trying to shelter me.

00:03:29.780 | So she, for most of the time that I would know her

00:03:33.680 | during the year, she would never focus

00:03:36.960 | on this horrific event that she experienced,

00:03:40.000 | except one day a year,

00:03:41.840 | there would be this remembrance day

00:03:44.920 | and we'd all pile into a synagogue and we'd talk about,

00:03:48.940 | or I would listen to them talk about their experiences

00:03:51.640 | and the emotions would come out.

00:03:55.600 | So she would dose her exposure to the emotional information.

00:04:00.600 | Turns out what she was doing is she was being strategic

00:04:03.400 | in how she deployed her attention.

00:04:06.060 | She was focusing on the emotional issue at times

00:04:09.080 | when it was productive for her,

00:04:10.420 | but at other times when it didn't serve her well,

00:04:13.360 | she occupied her attention

00:04:14.880 | with other kinds of thoughts and experiences.

00:04:18.520 | And a large literature is now beginning to emerge,

00:04:21.840 | which shows that this capacity to be flexible

00:04:25.840 | in how we wield our attention

00:04:27.360 | when it comes to sources of emotional struggles

00:04:30.480 | can be a really, really useful asset.

00:04:32.880 | And so I think it's important to remind folks

00:04:35.760 | that these blunt prescriptions

00:04:38.680 | to like always approach a thing, a problem,

00:04:41.360 | or always avoid it, they aren't always true.

00:04:44.160 | And that often the magic that surrounds emotion regulation,

00:04:48.480 | I mean, the magic, not supernaturally,

00:04:50.520 | but the beauty surrounding it is in being really facile

00:04:54.160 | in how we can deploy our attention.

00:04:55.960 | - Really appreciate you sharing that personal anecdote.

00:05:00.060 | I've long struggled with the fact

00:05:02.760 | that so many of the sayings that were fed,

00:05:06.300 | like, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder.

00:05:10.520 | Well, yeah.

00:05:11.360 | Well, I also heard out of sight, out of mind.

00:05:12.840 | So which one is it?

00:05:13.680 | - That's right.

00:05:14.520 | - You know, and that's why eventually I became a scientist.

00:05:16.560 | - That's right.

00:05:17.480 | - Because, you know, it's both, right?

00:05:19.400 | And, you know, and you can see this

00:05:21.580 | in the fields of nutrition and exercise.

00:05:23.880 | I mean, there are certain core truths.

00:05:25.800 | And I think the goal is always to get to those core truths.

00:05:27.800 | And then there's some flexibility around those truths.

00:05:30.160 | There's margins of error.

00:05:31.360 | I love what she shared, you know, why is a crooked letter.

00:05:35.240 | It reminds me of the Bob Dylan, like, don't look back.

00:05:38.140 | Yeah, I mean, these are profound questions, right?

00:05:42.000 | Like how much of our consciousness should we use

00:05:45.280 | to enforce that we don't spend time thinking about the past

00:05:48.840 | and therefore miss out on the present

00:05:50.460 | and creating a best possible future.

00:05:52.420 | And yet we don't want elements from the past

00:05:55.480 | to kind of, you know, ferret into our psyche

00:05:58.040 | and then show up in ways that are destructive.

00:05:59.760 | So it's a complicated dance.

00:06:02.420 | - Oh, I mean, our emotional lives

00:06:04.060 | are anything but straightforward,

00:06:05.840 | but we do have guideposts to steer us

00:06:10.320 | in how we deploy our attention.

00:06:12.360 | And so a couple of common heuristics

00:06:16.720 | that I like to use and describe to folks is,

00:06:20.560 | so let's say something bad happens

00:06:23.280 | and you divert your attention away.

00:06:26.320 | You distract with a positive distraction,

00:06:28.400 | not a harmful distraction.

00:06:30.040 | And then the problem doesn't resurface, keep going.

00:06:34.160 | Like you don't have to go back in time.

00:06:35.720 | There's actually, I experienced some friction

00:06:38.080 | sometimes with my dad around this issue.

00:06:40.560 | So my parents were divorced and, you know,

00:06:44.560 | I dealt with the baggage surrounding that experience

00:06:47.520 | earlier in my life.

00:06:48.640 | And when I think about it now, I don't get upset.

00:06:51.360 | Like I understand why it happened.

00:06:53.460 | I love both of my parents.

00:06:55.400 | I've moved on, I'm well-adjusted.

00:06:57.560 | But my dad likes to talk about this a lot whenever we speak.

00:07:01.320 | And he, you know, will often bring it up.

00:07:03.520 | And when he does, I'm like,

00:07:04.880 | well, we don't have to talk about it.

00:07:06.520 | I'm actually totally fine.

00:07:08.080 | This isn't a source of ongoing distress.

00:07:10.960 | Sometimes we're able to make sense of what has happened to us

00:07:15.040 | and move on with our lives.

00:07:16.120 | And when that happens, you know,

00:07:18.440 | that's our cognitive machinery operating really, really well.

00:07:23.440 | We don't have to go back and revisit every single thing.

00:07:26.960 | If on the other hand, we are trying to get a mental break,

00:07:30.640 | we're distracting and we find thoughts

00:07:32.760 | about these experiences continually intruding

00:07:35.800 | into our awareness and being distracting.

00:07:38.200 | That is then a cue, okay, well, let's focus in on it.

00:07:41.400 | And then once you focus in on it,

00:07:43.000 | of course there are multiple ways

00:07:44.680 | you can engage with that experience.

00:07:48.040 | Sometimes just bathing yourself in the emotional pain

00:07:51.120 | can be useful for facilitating a kind of

00:07:54.480 | what we would call habituation.

00:07:56.120 | So getting used to the discomfort

00:07:58.040 | and realizing it's not so bad

00:08:00.080 | to be in the presence of those negative thoughts.

00:08:02.620 | Maybe you wanna reframe

00:08:03.840 | how you think about the circumstance.

00:08:05.480 | And we have wonderful cognitive apparatus

00:08:08.120 | to help us reframe things.

00:08:09.480 | We can look at it from different perspectives.

00:08:11.120 | We can focus on the silver lining.

00:08:13.180 | We can contextualize it.

00:08:14.860 | So you have lots of tools to engage with things

00:08:17.200 | once you refocus,

00:08:18.960 | but you don't always need to refocus on the problem.

00:08:22.920 | So you wanna be flexible.

00:08:25.000 | Flexibility and how you deploy your attention

00:08:27.460 | is really the mantra that I personally live by

00:08:31.380 | based on what I know of how all of this works.

00:08:34.180 | There are a couple of caveats.

00:08:35.360 | I wanna throw out there.

00:08:37.600 | When I'm talking about distraction and avoiding,

00:08:40.320 | I'm talking about healthy distractions, healthy avoidance.

00:08:43.840 | There are unhealthier forms of avoidance

00:08:47.780 | that we know definitively are not productive,

00:08:51.900 | like substance abuse.

00:08:53.240 | We also know that if you adopt a blunt rule

00:08:56.160 | of always just chronically avoiding, not good.

00:09:00.120 | So you wanna be balanced.

00:09:02.580 | - Could we add to the list of tools for avoidance

00:09:06.640 | that tend to be unhealthy?

00:09:07.740 | And this isn't one that I default to,

00:09:09.580 | but I know someone that told me

00:09:11.180 | that she used to default into over-consumption of story,

00:09:16.180 | like of audio books, not that audio books are bad,

00:09:20.820 | but of fiction audio books,

00:09:22.380 | and just kind of when there was a problem

00:09:24.220 | rather than dealing with the problem,

00:09:26.260 | overindulgence in narratives

00:09:28.020 | that would just kind of consume the mind.

00:09:29.500 | I guess any behavior where we're not dealing

00:09:32.660 | with the kind of itch that we probably need to scratch,

00:09:35.980 | at least for a short while,

00:09:37.540 | is probably gonna be maladaptive in the long run.

00:09:40.900 | - Yeah, I mean, if the problem keeps,

00:09:42.980 | like you wanna listen to what your mind and body

00:09:47.580 | are telling you.

00:09:48.580 | And so if you find that the problem keeps resurfacing,

00:09:51.060 | that's a cue you need to engage and deal with it.

00:09:54.200 | But a lot of the experiences we have on a daily basis,

00:09:57.540 | which may not be positive, negative experiences,

00:10:01.220 | as time moves on,

00:10:02.140 | sometimes that's all we need to keep going with our lives.

00:10:06.220 | And we do see in the literature

00:10:08.420 | that when you impose a particular view on folks,

00:10:12.420 | like you have to do it this way,

00:10:15.020 | that tends not to work out very well.

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How to Use Focus to Control Your Emotions | Dr. Ethan Kross & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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