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

Earlier you mentioned attentional spotlights, and I'm fascinated by this. I know that most people hear that we can't multitask, but primates, again, of which we are, old world primates in particular, can do covert attention. If I were not completely focused on you, I could focus an attentional spotlight on you and your voice and pay attention to you, but I could also monitor components of the room. I can merge those spotlights. I can divorce those spotlights.

That's right.

But it's very hard to generate 3 kind of compatible attentional spotlights at once. It seems like we kind of have 2. Maybe some people can manage 3, but I'm betting most people can't manage more than 3.

Well, and I think it becomes especially difficult to manage even 1 when you're experiencing an emotional episode that is, essentially hijacking your attention. And attention is really important to talk about for a few reasons. So number one, as a species, we have the most sophisticated attention deployment system on the planet, right? We have the ability to strategically deploy our attention. So we can willfully place it on the things we want or yank it away from the things we don't want, or we can go, we can saccade our attention back and forth. When it comes to emotion though, we are often taught certain maxims about how to deploy our attention that I think can sometimes be problematic because they fall into the category of prescriptive advice about magic pills. So often we hear, for example, that when it comes to chatter or really big emotions, things that you're anxious about or fearful, you should not avoid the problem. You should focus on it. And there's been a lot of research on this, and what we have learned is on the one hand, chronically avoiding things is not good. It's associated with all sorts of negative outcomes for our emotional lives and beyond, our physical lives too, our health. But oftentimes, the signature for adaptively coping with emotional curveballs is being able to focus on the problem at hand, deploy your attention elsewhere, take a break, and then come back to it. And so this was a question actually I learned from my grandmother inadvertently. My grandmother was this very interesting woman who grew up in Poland during World War II, had her entire family slaughtered during the war, one of these kind of devastating experiences, lived in the forest for years, back and forth, all this terrible stuff, family massacred and so forth. And growing up, she made it out of the war, moved to the States. I remember being just so exceptionally curious about what she experienced and how she was able to overcome it. And whenever I would ask her questions about this, she would always say, you know, "Don't ask me why or what happened. Why is a crooked letter." That was a phrase she would use, which was really interesting 'cause she didn't speak English very well at all, heavily accented language, but She'd mastered this curious idiom, like, "Why is a crooked letter?" In other words, nothing good comes from dredging up the past or really trying to understand things. Your life is awesome. You're in a safe place. You have a loving family. Just enjoy life. So she's trying to shelter me. So she, for most of the time that I would know her during the year, she would never focus on this horrific event that she experienced, except one day a year there would be this, this remembrance day, and we'd all pile into a synagogue and we'd talk about, or I would listen to them talk about their experiences, and the emotions would, would come, come out. So she would dose her exposure to, to the emotional information. Turns out what she was doing is she was being strategic in how she deployed her attention. She was focusing on the emotional issue at times when it was productive for her, but at other times when it didn't serve her well, she occupied her attention with other kinds of thoughts and experiences. And a large literature is now beginning to emerge which shows that this capacity to be flexible in how we wield our attention when it comes to sources of emotional struggles can be a really, really useful asset. And so I think it's important to remind folks that these blunt prescriptions to like always approach a thing, a problem, or always avoid it, they aren't always true. And that often the magic that surrounds emotion regulation, I mean the magic not supernaturally, but the beauty surrounding it, is in being really facile in how we can deploy our attention.

Really appreciate you sharing that personal anecdote. I've long struggled with the fact that so many of the sayings that were fed, like, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder. Oh yeah? Well, I also heard out of sight, out of mind. So which one is it?

That's right.

You know, and that's why eventually I became a scientist.

That's right.

Because, you know, it's both, right? And, you know, and you can see this in the fields of nutrition and exercise. I mean, there are certain core truths, and I think the goal is always to get to those core truths. And then there's some flexibility around those truths. There's margins of error. I love what she shared. You know, why is it, is it a crooked letter? It reminds me of the Bob Dylan, like, "Don't look back." Yeah. I mean, these are profound questions.

Yeah.

Right? Like how much of our consciousness should we use to enforce that we don't spend time thinking about the past and therefore miss out on the present and creating a best possible future? And yet we don't want elements from the past to kind of, you know, ferret into our psyche and then show up in ways that are destructive. So it's a, It's a complicated dance.

Oh, it's, I mean, our emotional lives are anything but straightforward, but we do have guideposts to steer us in how we deploy our attention. And so a couple of common heuristics that I like to use and describe to folks is, so let's say something bad happens and you divert your attention away, you distract, with a positive distraction, not a harmful distraction, and then the problem doesn't resurface, keep going. Like, you don't have to go back in time. There's actually— I experienced some friction sometimes with my dad around this issue. So my parents were divorced, and, um, you know, I dealt with the, the baggage surrounding that experience earlier in my life. And when I think about it now, I don't get upset. Like, I understand why it happened. I I love both of my parents. I've moved on, I'm well-adjusted, but my dad likes to talk about this a lot whenever we speak, and he will often bring it up. And when he does, I'm like, "Well, we don't have to talk about it. I'm actually totally fine. This isn't a source of ongoing distress." Sometimes we're able to make sense of what has happened to us and move on with our lives. And when that happens, that's our cognitive machinery operating really, really well. We don't have to go back and revisit every single thing. If on the other hand, we are trying to get a mental break, we're distracting, and we find thoughts about these experiences continually intruding into our awareness and being distracting, that is then a cue, okay, well, let's focus in on it. And then once you focus in on it, of course, there are multiple ways you can engage with that experience. Sometimes just bathing yourself in the emotional pain can be useful for facilitating a kind of what we would call habituation, so getting used to the discomfort and realizing it's not so bad to be in the presence of those negative thoughts. Maybe you want to reframe how you think about the circumstance, and we have wonderful cognitive apparatus to help us reframe things. We can look at it from different perspectives, we can focus on the silver lining, we can contextualize it. So you have lots of tools to engage with things once you refocus, but you don't always need to refocus on the problem. So you want to be flexible. Flexibility in how you deploy your attention is really the mantra that, that I personally live by based on what I know of how all of this works. There are a couple of caveats I want to throw out there. When I'm talking about distraction and avoiding, I'm talking about healthy distractions. Healthy avoidance. There are unhealthier forms of avoidance that we know definitively are, are not productive, like substance abuse. We also know that if you adopt a blunt rule of always just chronically avoiding, not good. So you want to be balanced.

Could we add to the list of, um, tools for avoidance that tend to be unhealthy— and this isn't one that I default to, but I know someone that Travis Bradberry told me that she used to default into overconsumption of story, like of audiobooks, not that audiobooks are bad, but fiction audiobooks, and just kind of when there was a problem, rather than dealing with the problem, overindulgence in narratives that would just kind of consume the mind. I guess any behavior where we're not dealing with the kind of itch that we probably need to scratch, at least for a short while, probably gonna be maladaptive in the long run.

Yeah, I mean, if the problem keeps, like, you wanna listen to what your mind and body are telling you. And so if you find that the problem keeps resurfacing, that's a cue you need to engage and deal with it. But a lot of the experiences we have on a daily basis, which may not be positive, negative experiences, as time moves on, sometimes that's all we need to keep going with our lives. And we do see in the literature that when you impose a particular view on folks, like, "You have to do it this way," that tends not to work out very well.