Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

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Andy Earle: You are listening to Talking to Teens, where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host, Andy Earle.

We are talking about the skill of emotional regulation.

How can we raise teenagers who are in control of their emotions?

How can we give them the skills to modify the way they're feeling?

Research shows that emotional regulation skills in children are linked to all kinds of success and positive outcomes later in life.

So how do we raise teens who are good at this?

Ethan Kross is back on the show with us today to discuss his new book Shift: Managing Your Emotions So they Don't Manage You.

Ethan is one of the world's leading experts on emotional regulation. He is an [00:01:00] award-winning professor at the University of Michigan's department of Psychology. He's the author of the book Chatter and the new book Shift.

He's here with us again today. Ethan, thank you so much for coming back to The Talking to Teens podcast.

Ethan Kross: Delighted to be here as I was last time, and appreciate the opportunity to share the science about how to manage our emotions in other peoples with a group of people who I resonate with deeply. Because I'm a parent of a teen, so I'm living this stuff every day.

Let's get into it.

Andy Earle: I think a lot about your previous book and what we talked about there. You talked a lot about this voice in our heads and this way that we talk to ourselves. I found all of that really interesting.

Excited to see that you had this new book. You're diving into emotions in this book. Why emotions? Why is that the next topic you think, and what did you feel needed to be said or explored, in that topic?

Ethan Kross: My first book was about getting stuck in negative thought loops about the past, present, or future. Worrying and ruminating. What I call [00:02:00] chatter, which, I continue to think, is one of the big struggles we face as a species.

I would talk about that topic. I would offer people science-based tools for managing their chatter and without fail, people would come up to me after the presentations and thank me for teaching them about some of these ideas, but then they'd have all these other questions. Beginning with what are emotions at all? Is it a bad thing that you even become angry at times or anxious at times? How do you deal with an emotion in the moment when it flares up? How do you just switch from one emotion to the next? It felt like I had just given a talk on how to combat cardiovascular disease, but people had all these questions about other ailments.

Other problems they were struggling with, like diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, you name it. And so what it really motivated me to do was try to distill what we've learned in a very accessible way about this messy emotional world we live in. What are emotions? Why do we have them? And why are they so seemingly difficult to [00:03:00] manage when we need to manage them most?

These are questions that decades of research have been devoted to addressing. We've learned quite a bit.

The joy of researching and writing Shift was to bring all that science together, wrap it around stories to make it really accessible, and give people tactical, pragmatic tools they could start using right away to shift their emotions.

And when I say shift their emotions, I mean turn the volume of their emotions up or down. Shorten or lengthen how long their emotions last. Or even change from one emotion to the next. How do you do that for yourself? How do you do that for the people you care about, your colleagues, your loved ones, your kids?

And that's what the book's all about.

Andy Earle: That ability to regulate your emotions is such an important skill. We often don't really give it the credit that it's due, in terms of how it affects your trajectory in life. And you have some fascinating research in here, findings looking at the link between early lack of emotional regulation and later substance abuse. Kids who [00:04:00] struggle most with emotional regulation end up more likely to drop out of school, commit crimes.

Kids who are better at it, go further in their careers, save more money. There's all of these things that happen later in your life as a result of your ability to manage or not manage your emotions starting really early on.

Ethan Kross: That's right.

Andy Earle: How is that possible?

Ethan Kross: Well, if you think about it, emotions are relevant to everything we do.

There's one study I talk about in the book that tried to gauge how much of people's waking hours are spent experiencing emotions. About 90% of the time we're awake, we're feeling something. That's basically the majority of the time. And so when you ask, how is it possible that this ability to manage our emotions may have all these implications for the other areas of our lives, emotions affect how we think.

They constrain our attention. They point our attention on specific things. Andy, I'm sure you've been overcome with emotions at times that made it hard to think about anything else. Well, guess what? That [00:05:00] can make it hard for you to do your job. That can make it hard for you to study. That can make it hard for you to just listen to what someone else is saying, right?

We also know that emotions have implications for people's relationships. They can, if they're unregulated, create real friction in our relationships with other people. Think about how important relationships are to being successful in life at every single level. so now you're beginning to see how this can really impact us.

Let's think about emotion dysregulation taken to an extreme, where you really can't get ahold of your emotions. You stay home. Well, you stay home enough, now you're missing school. You miss enough days at school, now it's becoming hard to catch up with tests. Connect the dots and this just cascades moving forward.

I think this need to understand how to manage our emotions is one of the big struggles we face as a species. We need to do a lot more to teach people how to do this. And that's one of the reasons why I wrote the book.

Andy Earle: You talk about the really extreme examples of [00:06:00] that, and there's a fascinating one of those in the book where you talk about this fear of snakes. Bandura doing this research, recruiting people who have this really strong fear of snakes and then helping them to get over that.

Why is that such an important example or what did that teach us about how emotional regulation works?

Ethan Kross: I worked with this really famous psychologist, my mentor. His name was Walter Michelle. He developed the marshmallow test, right?

You give a kid a choice. One marshmallow now. Two later. If they wait for two, they do better in life. One of the first things Walter taught me when I started graduate school being, when I was an apprentice to him, was Ethan, self-control, which he talked about as the ability to manage emotions.

There are two basic parts. There's motivation and there's ability, and you need both. If you're not motivated to manage your emotions, then you could give people all the tools in the world. They're not gonna use them. Let's take the other example. You're really motivated to manage your emotions, but you [00:07:00] don't have any of the tools.

What you really need is motivation and ability. That experiment I talked about in the book, that Bandura study with the snake phobics, what that study did is it made it clear to folks that they possess the ability to manage themselves, right?

So what the Bandura study did is it's changeable. It's changeable. And that is such a crucially important mindset to possess, right? If I don't think it's possible to get better at something, why am I gonna devote any resources to trying? Sometimes, managing your emotions can be really easy.

Sometimes it can be really, really hard. I've been through both of those scenarios and everything in between. What gets me through the harder ones is knowing that it is possible to get through it. That's hope. And hope we've known for a long, long time.

It's a powerful psychological experience that can propel us forward. And so that's what that study is all about, is basically showing that we all [00:08:00] can manage our emotions. And if you have that belief, it's a step in the right direction.

Andy Earle: So, if we can, the question also is, should we?

Aren't we supposed to deal with our emotions and face our emotions? And if we're shifting into a different emotion when an unpleasant one comes up, isn't that unhealthy? Are we avoiding dealing with something that is really important or is wanting to come up?

Ethan Kross: I think first of all, it's important to tell everyone that there are no one size fits all solutions for managing emotions. Some emotions you wanna focus on right away and nip in the bud and it's easy to do that. Other experiences, taking some time away and then coming back to it can be helpful.

Strategically avoiding and being flexible. Whether managing your emotions is good for you or not depends on what your goals are. the scientific name for what we're talking about is self-regulation. How do you align your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with your goals?

Sometimes I have the goal to be totally unregulated. I wanna just [00:09:00] experience things fully, right? When I'm coaching soccer for my daughters or at a dinner with close friends, I just wanna be fully immersing myself in that experience. No management of emotions there.

And other times, when I'm experiencing anxiety or when I'm angry or sad, I want to learn from those experiences, because they do convey information that's important. But I usually don't wanna stay in them too long.

Andy Earle: Not dwell there necessarily.

Ethan Kross: And so those are instances where regulating is really good for me.

Andy Earle: Yeah.

Ethan Kross: So you could regulate in harmful or healthy ways. It really depends on what your goals are. One chapter of the book talks about how you can harness your senses to manage your emotions.

So like music can push our emotions around. Smells can push our emotions around. You can use that information for good. To feel better. You can also use it to be manipulative. For example, if you own an establishment and want to manipulate how people feel, have them feel good when they come in, you could pipe in certain kinds of scents to do that. And many places do.

Manipulative is maybe [00:10:00] the wrong term, but you're certainly trying to manage another person's emotional state. So, it all depends on what your goals are, whether regulating is good or bad.

Andy Earle: Interestingly when you talk about, how sensory experiences can influence our emotions, there's something you mentioned in the book that I found fascinating is called the Emotional Congruency Effect, where depending on whatever emotional state we're currently in, we might almost seek out things that perpetuate that. If we're feeling bad, maybe we're seeking out sensory experiences that almost perpetuate that feeling.

Ethan Kross: That's right. So, emotional congruency effect. You nailed it. It's like, you're feeling sad. And so rather than turn on Journey or Bon Jovi or whatever it is that gets you to feel better, you're going the ops direction, you're listening to sad music.

Now, to the degree that feeling the emotion is functional, maybe you do wanna listen to the sad music when you're sad. One of the reasons scientists think we evolved the capacity to experience sadness [00:11:00] is that what it helps us do is turn our attention inward to make sense of circumstances we need to make meaning out of.

Because, something has happened, it violates our understanding of the world, or our place in it, and we can't fix the situation. You lose someone you love, you're rejected. You gotta reframe it. Sadness motivates you to turn your attention inward and think about the circumstance, right?

If you need to do that hard cognitive work, maybe listening to some Adele is gonna help you get there. Adele being shorthand for wonderful music, but it tends to have a sad quality. If your goal is to not go deeper into the sadness, then you wanna fight the pull of the emotional congruency effect and listen to some happy music.

Andy Earle: That they're different because you talk about, you call the Myth of Universal Approach, that we should always confront, express, and process difficult feelings. Almost seeing things like compartmentalizing as negative connotations. It's interesting thinking about how it can be [00:12:00] adaptive to decide, is this a time when it's gonna make sense for me to move into this emotion? Or is this a time when it's gonna make sense for me to take some space from it?

Ethan Kross: You wanna be strategic and recognize that there are lots of things you could do.

We often talk about approach and avoidance. Like you have to choose between the two, either approach or avoid. You can go back and forth and that can often be really helpful. You can also use other tools as well. You don't have to just flood yourself with an experience.

You can reframe it, you could talk to someone about it. There are lots of tools you can use. I do think that we tend to describe avoidance as across the board harmful. Chronic avoidance is harmful. And by that I mean if something bad happens, if you reflexively try not to think about it, that tends to not work out well for folks. But being flexible can be really helpful.

Andy Earle: Something really interesting that I found is a study that researchers are looking at social media posts, people writing about their breakups on Reddit, and they found [00:13:00] that they could predict when a person was going to experience a breakup by the increased use of first person singular pronouns.

Ethan Kross: That's right. How does that work? Well, Andy, when you have experienced a major negative emotional event, I'm guessing you zoom in on it and you're thinking about the implications that it has for you. And so first person singular pronouns are a linguistic marker of being consumed with an experience.

You can't stop thinking about I, me, my. What am I gonna do? How am I gonna manage this? My feelings, I'm so upset. I can't believe you said this to me. It's a verbal indicator of where we are emotionally.

Andy Earle: I love that and it ties into a lot of what you were talking about in your previous book with the self-talk and switching more from the I me type of self-talk to almost talking to yourself in your head, in the second.

Ethan Kross: That's right. You see this happening spontaneously, and sometimes it can be useful to use language to break you out of [00:14:00] that immersed state.

Use your name and you. So, all right, Ethan, enough of this. You gotta get back to doing other things because working on this problem isn't gonna make any more progress right now. Sifting the way you talk to yourself using your name and you, distanced self-talk can be helpful.

Andy Earle: I found the book very helpful. You have all kinds of research here, great examples and stories. I will highly encourage people to pick up a copy, and leave a review. It's called Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You, by Ethan Kross.

Ethan Kross: Thanks so much for having me, Andy. Really appreciate it.

Andy Earle: Can you talk about where people could go to learn more about you and what you're doing?

Ethan Kross: Check out my website, www.ethankross.com, and links to everything you want to know about Shift, my lab, me, and more.

Andy Earle: Awesome.

We are here with Ethan Kross talking about how to raise teens who can manage their emotions, and we're [00:15:00] not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Ethan Kross: Changing your space can be a very useful strategy for managing emotions that we often don't reflexively think about. There's research which shows glancing at a picture of a loved one after you think about a distressing experience actually speedens up the pace at which you recover from that event. Think about what are the spaces in your home, in your neighborhood, in the cities in which you live, that provide you with a sense of safety, security, emotional nourishment, if you will, and visit those spaces when you're struggling. There are no bad emotions. If you experience anger or anxiety or sadness.

There's nothing wrong with you. This is how we're built. The focus should not be on never experiencing negative emotions.

Andy Earle: Wanna hear the full interview? Sign up for a subscription today. It's completely affordable and your membership supports the work we do here at talking to Teens. You can [00:16:00] now sign up directly on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.