Emotion Regulation: Top 10 Neuroscience-Backed Tools | Ethan Kross & Emma Seppälä
5/18/20261 hr 1 min
Manage anxiety, rewire your inner critic, and never worry alone.
Emma Seppälä, PhD is a psychologist and research scientist from Yale, and the author of two books, The Happiness Track and Sovereign.
Ethan Kross, PhD is a professor at the University of Michigan, where he leads the Institute for Mental Fitness. He is the author of two books, Chatter and Shift.
In this episode we talk about:
- What emotions actually are, and why even anxiety and anger serve a purpose
- Why self-criticism backfires, and what the research shows about self-compassion instead
- How chronic suppression makes your emotions stronger, not weaker
- Regulation tools you can use in the moment to shift emotional states
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Clips
Showing 10 of 13Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDan Harris· Host0:00
[upbeat music] It's the Ten Percent Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. [upbeat music] Hey gang, here's the deal: we all experience emotions all day long. Often, those emotions are powerful, negative, and, uh, very, very uncomfortable, and they can provoke us to do things that degrade our relationships and our happiness. So that is the bad news. The good news is that there are evidence-based strategies for managing and regulating your emotions. So today, we've got two maestros who are gonna talk us through the top 10 neuroscience-backed ways to regulate your emotions. Uh, we discuss the surprising upside of anxiety and anger. We talk about how to rewire your inner critic, why suppressing emotions can backfire, but why avoidance actually sometimes makes sense, and why you should never worry alone. This episode is part of our ongoing 10th anniversary series. I can't believe this show has been going on for more than 10 years now. So as part of this 10th anniversary, we're bringing back many of our favorite guests, pairing them up, and creating these top 10 lists on, uh, subjects we know you, uh, care about. My guests today are Dr. Emma Seppälä, who's a psychologist and research scientist from Yale. She's written two books, The Happiness Track