Why Happiness Experts Still Struggle to Be Happy with Dr. Ethan Kross

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But here's something I don't talk about quite as often, the times when I struggled to put that advice into practice myself, and it turns out I'm not the only happiness expert who has this problem. In today's episode, in our new series of live podcast conversations, I'm joined by my good friend, the psychologist, Ethan Cross, Ethan studies how we manage our thoughts and emotions and why our own minds can sometimes make that harder than it needs to be. Ethan and I sat down together at the World Happiness Summit at South by Southwest, and we got real about the things that even happiness experts like us get wrong and also how you can learn from our mistakes. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy, but what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. This time coming to you live from the World Happiness Summit at South by Southwest. Welcome everyone to the Happiness Lab at South by Southwest and the World Happiness Summit. I am super excited today to have Ethan Cross, one of the world's leading experts on emotion regulation, award-winning professor at the University of Michigan's Department of Psychology and their Ross School of Business, two-time national bestselling author for his books Shift and Chatter. Ethan is an expert on how the conversations people have with themselves impact their health, performance, decisions, and relationships. Everyone welcome Ethan Cross. Ethan, you and I have been colleagues and friends for a long time, so it is good that you are joining me on this stage because today we're going to get into something that's pretty personal. Today, Ethan and I are going to reveal a bit of a dark secret that we have when it comes to happiness. Ethan, do you want to be the first to come clean about this dark secret? Not really. I prefer that you go. You know, the dark secret is I think it's so easy when people listen to us speak or read about what we write to think that we are this strange breed of human being that never grapples with their own emotions and that is simply not true. We struggle just like everyone else here. We struggle because we are humans and that is a defining feature of humanity. And so we thought when trying to think about what we could share with you today is let's normalize this struggle a little bit, talk to you about how we've grappled with this in our own lives and give you some insight into our successes and maybe misfires. Yeah. And we're taking it to all of you right now, but this is something that emotion experts, happiness experts talk about privately a lot. I remember Ethan, this one conversation we had over the phone where you said, you know, you and I live with a curse. The curse is that we know what we're supposed to be doing. Like we talk about it on our podcast, but we still don't put it into practice because we are not a hundred percent great at this either because we're human. So that's what we're going to be getting into today. And it makes sense that we kind of suck at this because it turns out there are a few very well-known biases that control why we don't put the stuff that we know into practice. One of my favorite that I wanted to start with, because it's the bias that I came up with, my colleague Tamar Gendler back in 2014 is a bias that's known as the GI Joe fallacy. Ethan, you are an older midlife gentleman. Like I'm an older midlife woman. Do you remember GI Joe and what this is? Oh, yeah. GI Joe. Who here is a fan of GI Joe? Everyone listening at home, the audience is a little bit midlife like me. So it makes sense. So GI Joe, you know, a super team of military operatives, they make the world a better place, save all this good stuff. And every single episode ends with this phrase, knowing is half the battle. Knowing is half the battle. In fact, it goes, now I know. And knowing is half the battle. GI Joe. You know, I remember I was a couple of years ago and was coming back from dinner with my wife and another couple, really close friends. And the husband was bemoaning a problem at work. And this was an interpersonal problem, as I'm sure we've all experienced with some regularity. And he was going on and on. And everyone in the car is being empathic. And then his wife turns to him and says, well, why don't you just focus on the bright side, like reinterpret it positively? And then he pauses and he goes, yeah, easier bleep and said than done. And it just captures, I think, this truism that so many of us have experienced, which is oftentimes we do have the knowledge, but we don't actually act on it for a variety of reasons. And that is a GI Joe fallacy. We think knowing is half the battle. Knowing is a little bit of the battle, like maybe 10 percent. I don't know the exact percentage, but it's probably not half, because when you know something, it doesn't mean that you act on it. Right. And the sad thing about the human mind, this is true in so many different contexts. How many audience kind of give me a clap? I've seen these optical illusions, something like the Muller-Lyer illusion, which is that illusion with the arrows where it's like the arrows go one way or another way. Know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, if you're watching at home, we'll throw this in the show notes, but the idea is that it looks like the two arrows are different lengths, but you measure them and they're the same length. And all of you that clap have seen this and you know it. When your eyes look at it, you're just going to see it is different lengths, even though, you know, it doesn't change how your eyes perceive things. And then there are all kinds of economic tricks that, of course, play on this. Right. If you go and look at the South by Southwest swag that we have here, you're going to see, you know, some shirt that's like $19.99 and you're going to feel like that's a much better deal than if the shirt was 20 bucks. But of course, $19.99, I mean, we don't even have the penny anymore. Look, it doesn't even matter. Right. They're going to upcharge you anyway. These are the things that economists play with. And of course, there are these health behaviors where we do this. We know we need to sleep more. We need to eat better. We need to exercise more. But that doesn't translate into doing it. And that, of course, is the same with happiness. So what would you say your knowing is half the battle fail is when you think about your emotional life? Oh, my gosh. Like so many different things. Give us your. Yeah. I mean, I a big one for me. This isn't exactly my emotional life, but definitely some of the happiness stuff I talk about is that I preach about the beauty of time affluence. We need some free time. And I'm usually the person who has the least free time in any given situation. I know that complaining about things and ruminating about things. I know that that's going to make me feel terrible. Yet I do it all the time to the point that friends of mine have to be like, didn't on your podcast you say that doing this really bad, like it's not a good thing to do. Right. And how do you like when your friends say that to you? Oh, it feels great. It feels great. My former producer, Ryan Dilley, who's amazing, my co-writer and former producer, when we would get in these text threads of complaining about this stuff, would sometimes say, like, I wonder if there's a podcast that you could listen to that would help with that. So that's G.I. Joe fallacy, this idea that we know we're supposed to do, but we don't do it. Bias number one. Ethan, you have a second bias that you like that I know you've done some work on. Tell me about that one that leads us astray when it comes to putting the stuff into practice. I think about this all the time in my own life and other people's. And it's called Solomon's paradox. And to introduce it, I'd love to ask folks here a couple of questions. So how many of you here find that you are often a lot better at giving advice to other people than following that advice yourself? So, OK, so so that's right. Everyone who's listening, everyone here in our audience is a giant hypocrite. So turns out that this is a universal feature of the human condition. We can give great advice. We don't always follow it ourselves. We call this Solomon's paradox named after the Bible's King Solomon, one of the wisest people in history when it came to other people's problems. If you look into his own history, he made a slew of terrible decisions. I'm often mindful of this when I fail to follow my own advice and when my kids call me out for this. So this is a very common experience where I tell my daughters to do things that are good for them. I always preface it by saying I have one goal here. It is for you to be happy and healthy and successful. I guess that's three. But regardless, in that sequence, they still don't believe me. They then will turn around and say, but you don't do that. And that really weakens my rhetorical position. But then I explain to them Solomon's paradox and I say, well, that's fine. You still need to follow this because people are just bad at following the really good advice. So that's a really pervasive condition. And I do think knowing about it is an important step. But you then need other frameworks to be able to overcome it. I do love the idea of knowing about Solomon's paradox. You can whip that out whenever your kids call you out on something because I don't have kids. But I have a lot with my students who take my class, who will constantly see me in some situation that I'm doing something that's against my values that I've shared in the class. A big one is I'll be out in the courtyard on my phone and they'll say my title is head of college at the time. So Hawk Santos. Hawk Santos, I thought you said that you should put your phone away so that you could have social connection when you're in the courtyard. And I'm like, I was checking for an email, but yes, getting called out is helpful. But if I know about Solomon's paradox at that point, be like, well, you were just illustrating another thing we'll talk about in the course, which is Solomon's paradox, which is very important to know about. OK, I want to jump to my next bias number three that I think messes us up when it comes to doing the stuff that we know we should be doing, which is how sticky habits are. And this is something where we can nerd out a little bit and like talk about what happens with habits in the brain, because there's a very funny feature of habits that make them really sticky. So to think about this, let's go back to like way old school habit, like a rat running a maze. He gets a little cue and he knows that when he hears that cue, he's going to look around in the maze, like say a tea maze where it sort of splits at the top and go left or right, which he's going to pick. He goes left. And when he goes left, he realizes, oh, there's a reward. Oh, my gosh, that's great. I get a little piece of cheese. What's happened? He learns the cue, means he does this routine and he gets a little reward, right? When a rat's brain is first learning this, the brain fires a lot when he hears a cue and then it fires a lot when he does the routine. These are neurons in the rat's basal ganglia, the reward areas. Fires a lot when he does a routine, fires a lot when he gets a reward. That's when he's first learning it. But if you look at a well-learned habit, something interesting happens. Rat hears a cue, brain fires a lot, then doesn't fire at all while he's doing the routine and fires again when he gets the reward. What does that mean? The brain basically shuts off when you're using a well-learned habit. It's literally not using any energy to fire because well-learned habits are just easy. The brain doesn't have to put in any energy anymore. When I see those rat data, it's really powerful when I'm thinking for me, which is like picking up the phone when I'm walking through the courtyard is a well-learned habit. I'm not thinking my brain isn't making an active choice anymore. It's just kind of stuck in there. And now when I see those neural firing data just stays with me about like, oh, of course, it's going to be hard to do that. Yeah. And, you know, I think it's so important also to understand that that is a virtue of the human condition and the way our brains work. We like to minimize any expenditure of effort as much as possible. In other words, we are all lazy. That is how we have evolved to conserve resources. And this is just one of those instances where that conservation, if it's around the wrong kind of behavior, can get us into trouble. The really good news, of course, is our big, beautiful brains also developed opportunity. to course-correct, you just need to know how to harness them. And that's what is so beautiful about this podcast, is you share those tools with folks. And so we're going to share how we can fight these biases, how we can do a little bit better, and also how Ethan and I do it in our own personal life. Does that sound like an exciting thing to hear? Well, you are going to hear that South by Southwest, Happiness Lab Live at World Happiness Summit, as soon as the Happiness Lab gets back from the break. You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself reaching for over and over again? The sweater that somehow works with everything? The jeans you know will always fit just right? Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe. And that's exactly what Quince does so well. I recently pulled my fall clothes out of storage, and I was so excited to see my black Mongolian cashmere full-zip hoodie that I got from Quince. It's soft and warm and perfect for cozy nights. I love it so much that I now have a gray one in my quince.com cart right now. And when I buy that new gray hoodie, I know I'll feel good about my choice, because everything at Quince is priced 50% to 80% less than similar brands. 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OK, Ethan, we were just talking about the biases that lead us astray when you and I, experts in this stuff, put this stuff into practice. What are some of your favorite solutions for moving the needle? Well, I have a ton. But when it's a really big issue that I know I'm struggling with, I actually use this framework that has been researched out the wazoo. It's called WOOP. The technical term is Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions. WOOP's just a little bit easier, kind of rolls off the tongue. The way this works is WOOP's an acronym. So what's the W stand for? It's your wish. What's the goal? For me, an emotion regulation goal that I do often struggle with is when I see my daughters fight with each other in what I would describe as ugly ways, it triggers something. Only child, want the family to all be happy and loving like we all do with our families. And it just kind of hits a chord. So then we get to the first O. What's that? That's the outcome. What is life going to look like if I'm successful in achieving that goal? And the reason for thinking about that outcome is you really want to kind of energize the person behind the goal, motivate them to pursue it. But you don't stop there. Then you get to the second O. That's the obstacle. Now that we have the goal in mind and we're really motivated to pursue it, now let's think about, well, what are the personal obstacles that get in the way of me being successful? So for me, it's this kind of blinding tunnel vision. And I think about the fact that we've talked about this so many times. This is not the way we behave in this family. You can see the tone I'm already taking as I describe this to you. It's not very productive. So now I know the obstacle. I know the behavior to watch out for. Then I get to the P, which is the plan. But it's not any kind of plan. It's what we call an if-then plan. And what it does is kind of magical in my mind because it links a particular response. So if I see my daughter's fighting and I have this reaction to intervene in a confrontational way, then I will plug in one or two or three of my most effective tools for keeping my emotions at bay and coming back at the situation more productively. That framework is generalizable. And what that means is you can use it for any kind of goal that you have. This is something that has been researched not only with five-year-old kids at school to help them achieve their academic goals, but adults across the lifespan. It also happens to be very, very similar to the framework that an organization called the Navy SEALs use before every one of their operations. So I was talking to a former Navy SEAL, a Navy SEAL instructor, about the psychology involved and how do you get people ready to do these really emotionally trying things. And before even talking to him about this WHOOP framework, he just lays it out to me. He goes, Ethan, this is how it works. So you bring the team in and you sit in a room. And then Socratic style, where anyone can be called, you start off, what's our objective? In other words, what's the wish? What does success look like? What's the outcome? All right, now let's think about what are all of the different ways that this can go sideways? In other words, what are the obstacles? And for every one of those obstacles, they develop a plan. If this happens, then I do this. If this happens, then I do that. That is a framework that automates emotion regulation. So you don't find yourself in a situation that's important to you, and now all of a sudden you need to start, oh, what should I do? You know exactly what to do. So I will use that in my own life. You can't do it all the time, obviously. But for the big things, I find that it can be really, really helpful. And I love the WHOOP framework for two reasons. One is what we often get wrong, I think, when we want to achieve some goal, is that we're really easily able to think about the wish. And we're often really easily able to think about the outcome, like, oh my gosh, I want to not scream at my kids in this situation. Oh, they'll love me more, and we'll have less anger and aggression over the table. But we often stop there. And this is a strategy that I see often for some kind of goal setting a lot on social media. This is very akin to things like manifesting, where you think of the thing you want. Oh my god, I want harmony in my home. I'm just going to manifest it by thinking about the positive outcome. And the problems that work by folks like Gabrielle Oettingen and others have found that when you stop with the wish and the outcome, you do something not great for your brain, which is that you let your brain rehearse how great that reward feels. And a very weird thing about our brains is that when we imagine rewards really well, really vividly, there's part of our mind that kind of thinks we got that reward already. There's some lovely work by Kerry Morwedge and his colleagues, where he had people either slowly imagine putting coins into a coin thing, or slowly imagine eating M&Ms over time, right? You're just imagining, you're not really doing it. But then at the end of this imagining period in the study, they come into the room, and there's a big actual pile of M&Ms. And the question is, how many do you eat? And what Kerry finds is that when you imagine slowly eating M&Ms, and your brain thinks you've already been rewarded by all those M&Ms, the last thing you want to do is eat more M&Ms. So we can get confused if we just stick with the wish and the outcome. Second thing I love about the whoop practice is the final part that you mentioned, the if-then plan. What those Navy SEALs are doing by practicing all the things that could go sideways is they're harnessing, in some sense, the imagined version of that habit loop. And they rehearse that in their brain, such that what they're doing is they're changing the activation energy for doing that routine over time. They make their brain do it more easily over time. That's right. And this is one of the ways you can make self-control, or emotion regulation, or behavior change automatic, which is, of course, what did we say before? We like to do things that are easy, that we don't have to spend much time thinking about. Turns out, when you're flooded with emotion, it's a lot harder to sort through your Rolodex of, the people know what a Rolodex is here. It's a GI joke. They're all like us, Ethan. It's a safe space, man. Sometimes I'm with younger groups, and the Rolodex comment does not go over too well. So when you're flooded with emotion, it can be hard to methodically find that tool that you actually have at your disposal that you do know about to bring it back to what we were talking about earlier. And this is a way of building in a little psychological space to make you more effective. So I'd encourage everyone to try out a whoop. I'm going to try out this M&M technique when I get home. I know. Because I struggle with refrigerated mini chocolate peanut butter cups after dinner. Yes, yes, yes. Ethan, you and I are having this conversation right before Easter, and my danger zone is the Cadbury mini egg. I have a bag of them literally in my hotel room right now. But if you imagine eating them, you don't want them anymore. Lots of good regulation strategies you all are getting in this live Happiness Lab show, let me tell you. Next regulation strategy we want to talk about is the power of other people. And other people can be an amazing asset or a huge liability when it comes to achieving our happiness goals. Ethan, how do you navigate this space? With great care. So I mean, other people, they can be an amazing asset or a tremendous liability when it comes to our emotional lives. And when I think back 20 years ago, when I was first starting out in this business, I would have, I think, a very ordinary experience where someone would call me, and they would just want to talk about something that happened in their lives. Sometimes positive, but often negative. And I wouldn't really know what to say to them. I would know to be supportive, like, oh, I'm so sorry that happened. Really? Tell me more. And then I would just kind of repeat that loop over and over. I'm really sorry. I mean, that thing that happened to you, I'm sorry about that. Isn't that terrible? And it turns out that that does provide a lot of value. Because when we're doing that, it communicates empathy. If you take it a little bit further, maybe you're normalizing this. Oh, yeah, I've been through this too. But I never really knew how to steer the conversation to help that person. And on the flip side, I wasn't really that deliberate about thinking about, who is it that I should go to for support when I'm dealing with different kinds of problems? I've got like five or 10 people in my life who care a lot about me. They'll answer the phone whenever I call. I was never strategic about activating those people. Turns out, and this I think is just a real success story of science, that science provides us with a roadmap for figuring out, who are the folks that might push you in the wrong emotional direction even when they really care about you? And who are the folks who can actually help you? And it turns out there are two core steps. You want to talk to people who are skilled at doing two things. Step one is empathically connect, listen, give the person the opportunity to share what they're experiencing. It's really important to have those social connections. But then step two, talk to someone who can help you reframe what you're going through. We talked about this a little bit earlier. Other people are really effective at giving great advice to others. So they're in an ideal position to help us think differently about circumstances. So for me, that's a powerful roadmap I use to find the right people in my life to help lead me to the desired emotional consequences. And you have a word for this. because another thing we know that can help us remember how to do stuff is just to have a word for this type thing. What's your word for these people who do that? These are my my chatter advisors. Chatter advisors. And you're very deliberate about picking these folks. I am super deliberate. I have a wonderful chatter advisory board. I have two boards actually, one for personal issues, one for professional. They are not populated by clinical psychology PhDs and psychiatrists. Those are not qualifications that exclude you from being on my board, to be clear. But they are people who understand this art of being a great emotional or chatter advisor. And they are one of the most invaluable regulatory resources that I possess. I will get dealt curveballs in life just as all of us do here. 60% of those I'll use tools that I can use on my own to stumble my way through it. But for the other 40% I activate the board and they increase the success rate exponentially. But you pointed out that there's a good way to be a chatter advisor and a bad way to be a chatter advisor. And so we we might want to see how this works and what we can do a little bit better. And I think for that we have a demo. Yeah, why don't we demo it right now for folks on stage? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so Lori, you're gonna call me and ask to talk to me about something that's bugging you. Terrible. Let's try that again. Sorry, they're just hearing this. The people at home can't even see that we made a little phone gesture. They're like, what is happening on stage? Your team can do like a sound check. Yeah, that's true. Rebecca, producer, put in like a cool sound. Please do not play that part. Okay. Hey Lori, what's up? Ethan, I'm having such a bad day, dude. What's going on? I just got this comment on that podcast where people said that my voice was stupid and they really didn't like the show. And I know I'm not supposed to read the comments, but it's making me feel really bad about myself. Oh God, that's the worst. I mean, I can just tell you every time I read comments, there might be 98 positives. If there are two negatives, I'm like sprawled out on the couch with a cold compress on my head. It's miserable. You know, the comments suck, Ethan. They were so mean. They were so mean. Were there any good ones? Well, there was one where the people said they really loved the show and it changed their life, but that was just, that was one. Yeah, but there was that mean one where they said my voice was stupid. Do you ever actually stop to think about what you've been able to accomplish in terms of changing people's lives with your science? Okay, that's true. I feel so much better now. Thank you, Ethan. All right, Ethan, dissect what you just did in that conversation. So in a very, very compressed way, we started with listening, validating. That's really hard. It happens to me as well. So we create that sense of safety, psychological safety and connection. Lori now knows that she's being heard and empathized with, and then we're broadening her perspective a little bit. So when you get really emotional, you tend to zoom in on that one comment out of 999 comments. And when you zoom in on a bad one, it can feel terrible. But where a chat or advisor can often help is by zooming you out. And so, you know, Lori, how many other scientists have been able to have the impact that you've had in terms of translating science? Now we're shifting her perspective. And so that's the general formula. It's listen, empathize, connect, and then work with the person to reframe. Now there's an art to doing this, and it doesn't always follow the same time course. I wish I could tell all of you, you should empathize and connect for two minutes and 36 seconds, and then shift into reframing mode. It does not work that way. The bigger the emotion, which is often dictated in part by the nature of the situation and the person, the more time you often have to spend just listening and connecting before that person feels ready to have their perspective be broadened. But if you have this framework, you've got a roadmap for steering the conversation. And if you're not sure when to shift from listening, normalizing, empathizing, to reframing, you can always ask. And so with my wife, when she comes to me to talk about something, hey, can I talk to you? Of course, what's going on? Listen, listen, listen. Hey, I have a thought. Can I share? And sometimes it's please, that's why I'm here. Tell me what you think. Other times it's no. Let me read the comment to you before you say that. It was really mean. That's right. And so you want to have that flexibility. It really, really works. So take that with you for when people come to you for support. But importantly, what I would invite all of you to do after this recording is make a little table at home. Personal problems, work problems. And then just list the names of the people who you go to talk to about those issues. Some of you may have no names in either column. You don't talk to anyone. That's fine if you do other things and you're okay. Most of you will have some names. Go through each name and ask yourself, do they do both of the things that we've talked about? Do they both listen and empathize as well as help you reframe? If so, circle that name. Those are your chatter advisors. If they don't do that, go buy a red Sharpie and cathartically cross their names off your list. That doesn't mean you have to cross them out of your lives. Many people I love dearly. DNA determines that. I don't talk to them about my problems. Talking about other things. So that was using other people more effectively. Can I share one of the ways I like to move? Yeah. I'm getting back to my nerdy rat habit example, which is to try to hack the habit loop to do a little bit better. And there are a couple ways you can do that, right? So habit, if you recall, this little rat running through the maze is a cue, like some bell dings or something, and then you do a routine and you get a reward. So it turns out if you hack those parts of the habit loop, either the cue or the routine or the reward, you can sometimes move things around. Best way for me is to hack the cue. This is something that I'm failing to achieve right now. I just mentioned that I'm trying not to eat as many of the Cadbury mini eggs in my life right now. There is literally a bag in my hotel room of Cadbury mini eggs. So when I walk in, and it's not like away in a cabinet somewhere, it's literally on the counter in my Airbnb, just sitting there when I walk in, I'm like, eat me, eat me. That is a cue. And it will make me do the routine of eating the Cadbury mini egg to get the reward. But a smart person who knew about their habit loop would move the cue away or would just not have them in their Airbnb at all. So that's thing number one is change the environment, change the cue. Second hack I like is to take the routine that you already have, because your habits good at that, and there's like add a different behavior that you could do on top of that or instead of that. There was a famous study that was looking at people who wanted to develop a habit of flossing their teeth more. And they either had people try to do this habit of flossing their teeth before they brush their teeth or after they brush their teeth. Why is this relevant? Well most of us hopefully have this habit of brushing our teeth. So when you get up in the morning, maybe that's your cue. Like first time you go in the bathroom, you brush your teeth. If you try to do the flossing before that, it's hard. But if you try to floss your teeth after you brush, then you're already doing the brushing routine. That happened easy. You can kind of just tack that other habit on top. And this is what the research found is that you actually, if you put flossing after brushing, you do it more because you're adding an additional behavior on to a well-learned habit. That's one way to do it. But another way to do it is to take a thing that you're already doing and add something at the same time. And this is what I try to do when brushing my teeth is like, that's a moment when I remember like, oh yeah, the whole gratitude thing I'm supposed to be doing or that whole presence thing I'm supposed to be doing. Let me think of a few things that are delights that I appreciate. What are the meetings I'm having today? How can I think about how I want to be in that space? But it's like, I'm gonna brush my teeth anyway. Can I like stick in something into that space that I want to do more to boost my happiness? Yeah, I love that. That's a kind of bundling activity. Let me add one more. Habit breaking. So you can get rid of a habit by rewarding another kind of behavior to replace it. So I did this with my daughter. One of my daughters, when she was younger, she had this very creative habit. Some kids suck on their thumb. She would massage her thyroid. It was really weird. No condition, by the way. It was just, she would like, you know, kind of pull. It's very funny you say that. I had a college roommate who used to do this. Well, so this is what we wanted to fix before college. So she would not only massage her thyroid, but simultaneously while doing this, suck on the, I don't know, what do you call this part of the hand? The front part of the palm. You could imagine that this is slightly disruptive in school, at dinners, you know, when trying to communicate. And we had tried so many different things to break this habit. And then I remember reading a few papers. Occupational hazard, right? You kind of read about how to disrupt it. And there was this one set of studies that speak to this idea, well, try to reward something else. And you just need to make the reward salient enough. And so I tried a few just basic rewards. Like, oh, you know, you can watch TV a little bit more if you don't do this. Bribes, that is. None of it worked. And then I remember reading, you have to make the reward great enough. So please no judgment here about what happens next. What I did is I said to my daughter, okay, if we don't do this and you could succeed in not doing this for several days, you can go to your favorite ice cream shop seven days in a row and get anything you want each time. Whoa. Done. Totally done. And it never came back. True story. Every parent is scribbling down right now. Ice cream shop seven days in a row. Okay. So we've heard some good strategies we can use. We can hack our habits. We can use other people. We can use strategies like whoop. All of these sound very good in theory. But unfortunately, as the G.I. Joe fallacy might suggest, you need to not just know about these strategies to actually use them. So how do we do this in practice? Well, when Ethan and I get back from the break, we're going to get real and talk about situations that we were struggling with and whether we actually used or failed to use these strategies in the trenches. The Happiness Lab. We'll be right back. You know, those pieces in your closet that you find yourself reaching for over and over again, the sweater that somehow works with everything, the jeans, you know, will always fit just right. Those are the pieces that are in a permanent place in your wardrobe. And that's exactly what Quince does so well. I recently pulled my fall clothes out of storage and I was so excited to see my black Mongolian cashmere full zip hoodie that I got from Quince. It's soft and warm and perfect for cozy nights. I love it so much that I now have a gray one in my quince.com cart right now. 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Welcome back to the Happiness Lab Live at South by Southwest and the World Happiness Summit. Ethan, you and I are talking about what we really do in the trenches when these things actually come up, and this is where I'm gonna ask you to get real, and we're both gonna talk about situations that were really tough for us. I know you recently had an awful situation in your family where you had to put these tips into practice. Tell me about that story. Yeah, about three or four weeks ago, life was humming along really great, and it's four o'clock, I'm at home, I get a text from my wife, and she says, meet me at the ER, child's hospital, now, diabetes. And so that's exactly what I did. Went right to the hospital. Turns out my daughter, for the past several nights, had been incredibly thirsty each night, and also going to the bathroom, and in my mind, I'm the cook in the home. Duh, I mean, I'm using too much salt, she's drinking water, and therefore, it's all logical. Fortunately, my wife is a nutritionist, and was able to see past that myopia that I displayed. Normal blood sugars are 70 to 150 or so. She was at 600 plus. So super, super dangerous, and as any parent who is here or listening knows, nothing matters more when your kids are not thriving. And now, I'm faced in an uncomfortable ER room for the next two nights with this thought that my daughter is not thriving, and in this regard, will never thrive until there's a cure. So that was not a particularly pleasant, emotional place to be in. And initially, I plummeted, as we all did. We were all feeling kind of bad. And then I actually used several tools that really, really moved the needle in a consequential way. So when I think back to those three days in the ER, 85% of my time overall was actually in a very positive space. And what did you do to get there? So what I did to get there, two things. Number one, I broadened my perspective. I very quickly realized that this is not great, but things could be way, way worse. She can live with this. She can have a wonderful life, continue doing what she was doing before. There are all sorts of other stories, other kids who are not as fortunate. This is a form, by the way, of social benchmarking, or social comparison, which you've talked a lot about on this podcast. It's really just looking at that bigger picture, something that we know is so vitally important for helping people persevere through adversity. Second thing I did was leverage a social tool. I normalized what I was going through. So one of the psychological responses that can really kind of send us astray is when we feel like we're all alone. We're the only ones dealing with this. We're a social species, and that is not a pleasant space to be in. And so quickly started learning about who else struggles with T1D, type 1 diabetes. Sonia Sotomayor, more relevant to my daughter, Nick Jonas. Many other people along those lines, athletes. And all of a sudden, my goodness, we can handle this. So those two shifts were really, really helpful. I also activated the advisory board. They all got a phone call, and my God, every single one of them, the conversation was empathic. It was helping me reframe. It was also slipping in, oh yeah, my sister, my partner, my kid. And so the normalcy of this was becoming increasingly clear. So that was 85% of the time. 10% of the time, I was back down in the bowels of despair, thinking about, oh my God, just two days ago, looking at a picture of her from last week, everything was perfect, and now it's no longer like that. And the other 5% of the time, for those of you tracking the math here, I was just fantasizing about my bed and toilet at home. Because if you have ever spent time in an ER, and you have to go to the bathroom, which is a normal human response, we can all agree, I mean, at one point, it was, I don't think I need to use that for three days. I think I can get by, and so. So that was the tools that we are talking about that I used made such a difference in that moment for me, for my wife, for my daughter. I actually called up the chief well-being officer of the hospital that we were in, who's a colleague, and I said, the care here has been just unbelievable. And it was, such empathy, such compassion. But why wasn't the first thing a handout with the 10 exemplars, the 10 people who are role models for these kids when they're struggling and afraid? Like, why aren't we getting these very simple tools that science has identified with pretty good precision? Why aren't we giving this to families? And so, it's actually next week, we're having a conversation about how to do that. So that was my muck of the last month. Everyone's doing great now. Let me turn this over to you, because you were generous enough, when I was working on my last book, I interviewed you for it, and you were incredibly authentic about some of the struggles that you've experienced, and the difficulties and successes that you've had applying some of these tools. So why don't you tell folks here about the event that sticks out in your life? Yeah, well, it's the one that I shared in your book, actually, which is cut back to the early days of March 2020, when we're having this conversation, that was just six years ago. But you all remember that moment, because life was, as you were saying, coming along, we thought everything was fine, and then all of a sudden, we had a global pandemic. And this hit, obviously, everyone really badly, but hit me in a kind of special, yucky way, because this was a time when I was serving as a head of college on campus, and got the news that you're kicking out your entire community of students who have to go home, they don't get to come back and get their books, so they don't get to come back and get their passports or their clothes. These are Yale students at the time were all on spring break. And then it was just a sundry of really difficult things, like, do we collect all the plants in the room or let them die? When they come back, do we let them go into the dining hall together? It was just decision after decision that we weren't prepared for, and that was awful. And I was, what I now know, was just starting to experience a really extreme form of burnout, which what we know from the work of folks like Christina Maslach and others tends to happen in these situations where there's a mismatch between your values and what you have to do. And this was a big one for me during COVID, not just because it was a yucky situation for everyone, but I'm like, I'm in this position of being the faculty member who's leading this community, this head of college, and all the decisions we're making is just making college really crappy. Like, why are we even doing this? It was just this real mismatch. And so I was seeing the classic signs of burnout. I was seeing this sense of physical exhaustion, even though I was in my house all the time, I was just like emotionally tired. I was seeing a sense of personal ineffectiveness, which is symptom number two, which is like, even if I did my job perfectly, why are we doing this? This still sucks, it's really awful. But the worst one and the one that hit me when I finally had a wake-up call is symptom number three, which is called depersonalization. But it's basically just extreme cynicism. Everybody is getting on your last nerve. And especially if you're in a role where you're supposed to be caring for and taking care of people, you don't have that care and that compassion anymore. You just have like, I don't wanna work. And this came out in a moment of, one of my jobs as a head of college is like, especially students who are low income, they come up with bad situations. You have a medical problem, or in this case, I think it was like a dental emergency. This kid needed dental work. And often what they'll do is they'll email the head of college and say, hey, this thing comes up. I'm having this problem in my mouth. I need some funds from the college to help this, which is not bad for me. I just have to send an email to someone that's like, oh, the student's in this bad situation. Can you help them? And I got this email from this student. It was a student I actually really love, which makes telling the story even more painful. My instant reaction was like, I have to send another damn email. And I was like, ooh, that was not the compassionate response that I would like to proudly say I would normally have. I'm not doing well. But to admit I wasn't doing well meant that I had to admit that as this happiness expert in the middle of this situation when I should have been using these tools, I was supposed to be doing better. How did I let myself get to this point? And I also made an even harder decision, which is I had the sense that I was no longer showing that kind of compassion and the wherewithal to be doing this job anymore in the middle of this. And I was realizing I needed to take some time off. And that was awful. It was scary. It was really hard to admit. And so tools that I used, tool number one was really a very intentional version of self-compassion where it was like, we're in the middle of a global pandemic. I have just kicked out this community that I've spent five years building and care for a lot. Obviously, this is tough. Obviously, this makes sense. I remember I bought and had delivered three of Christina Maslach's books on burnout and read them through and through to be like, okay, this fits. I'm having a values mismatch. It's not just me. And what I was doing there is doing the steps of self-compassion that Kristin Neff talks about. Step number one is mindful, right? Oh my gosh, I am not in a good place. I am at peak burnout right now. Step number two, exactly what Ethan was saying, and that's normal. It makes sense that I'm feeling this. This is classic pattern that people see in burnout. I'm not alone. Nothing's wrong with me. And then step three was kind of like self-kindness. Like what can I do to take stuff off my plate? Can I check in with a chatter advisor? Can I go seek some help? But a big one for me was that I just realized that I needed that big environment change, that nothing was gonna get better until I really took a break. And so in the midst of this really hard time, I decided to switch my environment. And that was the strategy that you wrote about in your book was my switching my environment. Well, you know, it's interesting. We often talk about avoidance as something that you should avoid, not good for you. So about a week and a half after my daughter's diagnosis, I had a pretty important set of business trips set up. My wife was actually gonna accompany me on a few of them. So her parents were coming up to watch the kids. There was no possibility that that was gonna happen. And I was about to not go on any of these trips. And my wife, you've gotta go. It's really important. I'm here, I've got my parents. We'll hold down the fort. And don't worry, I'll go away when you come back. Important. It was really remarkable. I left, I was experiencing guilt. The moment I actually got away, I did not forget about my family. But the change, the physical distance, it turned that volume down on the emotion just a little bit. It shifted my perspective in ways that were really, really useful. And I know that is true of you as well. In you getting just, I mean, a state away. You went from New Haven to Cambridge. And tell us, I mean, what was the emotional experience like? I decided to take some time off away from this role. I did, to be fair, I did stick with it a little longer than I wanted to, because it's really bad to completely abandon your community in the middle of a pandemic. So I waited till the end of the semester. But yeah, I moved from New Haven, Connecticut, which is where Yale is, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, which for me is kind of a place where I have positive memories. I was in graduate school there. And I also still have lots of friends there. And so that was, I think, strategy number two, not just the environmental change, was I know I have my chatter advisors there. I know I have people that can know me in a different state and so on. And it was transformative. Instantly upon getting there did I have the clarity that like, oh, even though I love this role, even though it's so meaningful and powerful to me, I can't do that at the same time as I'm doing the podcast and so on. Part of it was what was going on with COVID, but part of it was like, I just have too much on my plate. And I really just, it sounds ridiculous to say I couldn't see that before I made that environmental change, but I genuinely couldn't. Yeah, and I do think it's important to emphasize there's a caveat here where you can't always do this. And that's okay because there are dozens of other strategies that you can use when you can't do this. But if the conditions are right, this can be a really, really useful tool. The learning lesson for me, and I'm curious if this is true for you, is as I rack up these kinds of hits of life and discoveries about how the science helps and how it doesn't, I have gotten a lot better at doing the things that move the needle a lot more quickly than I would in the past. Is that true for you as well? Oh, that's definitely true for me too. I think also what's interesting is, first, I think you're building a habit. You're kind of getting better at using these tools because you just use them more often. So it's like, oh, hit from life comes, I turn to self-compassion or I turn to this other thing. The second thing is I think you see the evidence that it's not that bad, because I think sometimes some of these tools come with a little bit of, I don't know if it's guilt or disbelief that they're gonna work, right? I know when I stepped away from that role, I just couldn't see that it was gonna be that helpful. Even self-compassion sometimes, I feel like, despite knowing the work, when I engage in that form of self-talk, there's another little part of my chatter that's going like, you don't deserve this, you're being indulgent. I have to squish that down to get through it. I think it's hard to know that these things are gonna work, these strategies are gonna work, even if you know the research. I can quote the papers, but it's still hard to believe that it's really gonna work. And that is the worst part of the G.I. Joe fallacy in action which is like, even when you know this stuff, your intuition doesn't change. Even though I can quote the studies, it's like I'm looking at that line illusion, the Mueller liar illusion that I talked about before where it's like, the lines just pop out to me as different lengths. I know the work on self-compassion, but I'm just hearing like, it's probably not gonna work. You just have to kind of push through and do it. Well, and it's essential because one of the ways that we learn, of course, is through doing. There's this wonderful theory called self-perception. The way we learn about ourselves is we observe ourselves in life, and so when you practice these tools, and the practicing is just so important, I always invite folks, like give these different tools a shot. If they work, keep using them. If they don't, maybe give them one more shot, and then move on to something else, because as you rack up those wins, then you realize, oh, this can be a part of my repertoire. You also, I think, build up some agency, too, because I think when you can be in these hits of life, it just feels really defeatist, and when you try something and it works, you get a little bit more hopeful about your own emotion regulation, right? You say, like, oh, well, even though it feels like this is a new one, this is a hit that I'm not going to come back from, last time it was that kind of hit. I used it and it worked, so maybe let me try it this time. You know, one of the most chilling findings that I have read during my career was a study which looked at adolescents' beliefs in whether they could control their emotions. And you have to understand, I direct a lab called the Emotion and Self-Control Lab. I'm in charge of an institute for mental fitness. I've dedicated my life to this pursuit and the belief that, of course, this is possible. Forty percent of adolescents did not think they could control their emotions. If you do not think you can control your emotions. If you don't have that sense of agency that you are referring to, why would you ever try? And in fact, there are hundreds and hundreds of papers on this notion of self-efficacy which show if you don't think you are capable of doing something, guess what? You don't try to do it. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't think going to the gym is going to help you lose weight and be more physically fit, why on earth would you do the painful things that occur in a gym? You wouldn't. So, this notion of agency is just critically, critically important. The belief that you can do it, coupled with actual knowledge of the tools you can use to bring those beliefs to fruition. And now you have whoop as well, so, you know, every one of you here should never struggle again once you leave. Ethan is joking because our final point and the reason we kind of came clean with this curse and our dark secret is like, this is hard. We are the experts on this stuff. We can quote you the studies and we still find it hard. Why? Because we are human, unfortunately. I think it's fortunate. In the age of AI, I'm going to say it's fortunate that I'm human. I like being human. Good catch, yeah. Yeah, thank you. But being a human means that this stuff is really hard. But the good news that feels like such a salvation is that it does actually work if you put it into practice and it does become easier if you put it into practice because that makes it easier if you put it in practice time one that you can put it in practice at time two. But we also have to come clean about what we heard at the beginning of this show, right? GI Joe fallacy. Just hearing these tips on the podcast, just hearing these tips in the live show, it's not going to move the needle unless you put them into practice. So we're going to send you off to let the real work begin of putting this stuff into practice. But the good news is it's going to be really effective if you do it. Not just for you, but for me and Ethan too. Can we get a round of applause for the amazing Ethan Cross, Happiness Lab Live at South by Southwest and World Happiness Summit. Thank you all so much for being here. Thank you. If you'd like to learn more about Ethan's work, I highly recommend checking out his books, Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You, and Chatter, The Voice In Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It. A big thank you to the folks at the World Happiness Summit and at South by Southwest for making these conversations possible. Next week, we're taking a little break from our series of live conversations to celebrate National Cat Day. We hear a lot about the happiness benefits of dogs, but what about our feline friends? Turns out that cats have some pretty special ways of boosting our well-being too. We'll speak with a cat cognition expert about the science behind our relationship with cats and the unique ways they can make human lives a little happier. They are speaking to us all the time, and I do hear cats are less expressive than dogs, but if you know what you're looking for, your cat is always telling you something. 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