Latest news with #Michigan
Yahoo
32 minutes ago
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Colton Herta Captures Pole in Detroit, Looks to Snap Podium Drought
For the second year in a row, Colton Herta will start on pole for the Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix. In its third year downtown, the race takes place on the nine-turn temporary street course around the Renaissance Center, a Downtown Detroit staple. Last year, Herta struggled on a lap 46 restart and fell out of contention for a win, finishing a lap down in 19th. Fellow Honda driver Scott Dixon would go on to win the race. A few races later, Herta would convert his second pole of the season on a street course to a win in Toronto. Herta's 2024 and 2025 seasons have been marred by strictly horrible luck following him most weekends. This has led to his six-race podium drought to start 2025 following his win in last year's season finale at Nashville Superspeedway. Herta told IndyCar on Fox that he felt the car wasn't strong following Friday's practice, and the tweaks made to it overnight made it a lot more competitive on soft tires. "It was such an unknown, and we were not really strong yesterday with the softer tires," Herta said. "The guys did a great job overnight." It's a big relief. We've been close a few times this year. On making it, not only making it to the fast six but making it on a pole run. Happy to do that, happy to start P1 tomorrow, best seat in the house." David Malukas, who inherited a second-place finish in the Indy 500 last weekend, picks up where he left off, starting P2 in Detroit. Malukas is one of the drivers that have shown love for the new street circuit due to how overly technical it is to run. Malukas did not race it last year, where rain, constant crashes, and attrition led many drivers to form a less positive opinion. Behind Herta on the start will be his Andretti Global teammate, Kyle Kirkwood, the only driver to deny Alex Palou a win in 2025. Kirkwood was nearly four-tenths faster than Herta at the start of his final flying lap, but lost the momentum. "I've never been more disappointed in a third in my life," Kirkwood told IndyCar on Fox. You Might Also Like You Need a Torque Wrench in Your Toolbox Tested: Best Car Interior Cleaners The Man Who Signs Every Car Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
Forbes
32 minutes ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
25 Madonna Songs Thats Shaped Pop Music History
Madonna is one of the all-time greatest female artists, with some of the top hits of the '80s, '90s ... More and beyond. Madonna Louise Ciccone, aka the Queen of Pop, is one of the most successful musical artists of all time, with 18 multiplatinum albums and a knack for creating controversy that has kept her culturally relevant for more than four decades. Known simply by the name Madonna, she moved from Michigan to New York City after high school to pursue a career as an entertainer and released her first album in 1983, quickly becoming one of the top '80s female singers. Madonna music is known for being sexy, spicy and culturally relevant. The best Madonna songs focus on social issues such as religion, feminism and politics. This list of greatest Madonna songs includes music from every era of the versatile singer's career. Madonna is primarily a pop music singer, though she's also experimented with electronica and dance. She has released 14 studio albums, and three of them have sold more than 14 million copies, putting her on par with the Beatles and Whitney Houston. This list is based on commercial sales, critical acclaim and awards recognition. From I'm Breathless: Music From and Inspired by the film Dick Tracy, 'Hanky Panky' reflects Madonna's playful side and mimics tunes from the movie's 1930s era. Some women's groups criticized Madonna begging, 'You can just spank me,' but she said the song was tongue-in-cheek. It was a top-10 hit in the U.S., Australia and UK. Madonna's songs often deal with the darker side of love, but 'Cherish' from Like a Prayer has a lighter, more optimistic tone. In the video directed by Herb Ritts, a fashion photographer, Madonna romps on the beach with mermen, who became gay icons. The song hit No. 2, her record 16th straight top-five single. The video for 'What It Feels Like for a Girl' (from Music) was directed by Guy Ritchie, Madonna's then-beau, and banned by MTV for its violent imagery. That was kind of the point—the singer wanted to illustrate how society encourages women's independence but ultimately punishes them for it. 'Girl' earned critical kudos. Madonna croons, 'I want to free my soul,' on this release from True Blue. It came amidst intense media scrutiny of the singer's relationship with actor Sean Penn, and she wrote the song to explain what those moments felt like. It wasn't released as a single but still gained popularity due to its heartfelt message. Envisioned as a tribute to Sly and the Family Stone, 'Express Yourself' appeared on Like a Prayer and encouraged women not to settle for 'second-best.' The suggestive video, directed by David Fincher, had a then-record $5 million budget. The girl power anthem urged women to pursue what they want, as men do. Madonna performs "Express Yourself," one of her best singles, at TD Garden on Tuesday, September 4, ... More 2012. Madonna co-wrote this song about ushering out a poor lover with Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds, advising, 'The night is over/This masquerade is getting older.' As the second single on Bedtime Stories, it topped the charts for seven weeks and established Madonna as one of the quintessential '90s female singers as her 11th No. 1. 'Burning Up' came from Madonna's first studio album, Madonna, and helped cement her as one of the top early '80s artists. It played on one of her favorite themes, sex, with the singer confessing she 'had no shame'—but it was also a double meaning, speaking to her professional ambition on later display as well. Madonna closed out the decade with this electronica banger. The singer channeled '60s psych-pop as inspiration for the song for the soundtrack of Austin Powers film The Spy Who Shagged Me. It peaked at No. 2 in the UK and netted Madonna a fifth Grammy, won for Best Song Written for Visual Media. Curtis Hudson and Lisa Stevens-Crowder offered this song to several artists, including the Supremes' Mary Wilson, before Madonna snapped it up for her debut album, Madonna. The dance-pop energy and upbeat tempo helped the song become the singer's first top-20 single, and critics now regard it as one of her finest releases. Remember when Madonna was an actress? This single from her third movie was much more memorable than the film itself—so much so, in fact, that its original title (Slammer) was dropped, and it was renamed Who's That Girl. The Latin pop song, with some lyrics in Spanish, became her sixth No. 1 hit. American singer and actress Madonna with director James Foley on the set of the film "Slammer," ... More later titled "Who's That Girl?." 'Ray of Light,' the title track of Madonna's seventh studio album, sees the singer delve further into electronica and is one of her biggest critical hits, earning three Grammy nods, including Record of the Year. It bowed at No. 5, her highest chart debut. The video also won five MTV Video Music Awards. From Confessions on a Dance Floor, 'Hung Up' marks a return to Madonna's dance club roots, a high-energy song that samples ABBA's "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)'—ABBA has rarely authorized such samples. Madonna tied Elvis with her 36th top 10 single with 'Hung Up' and hit No. 1 in 41 countries. 'Open Your Heart' was the fourth single from Madonna's wildly successful third album, True Blue, and became her fifth No. 1 hit. It also made her just the second female singer to chart three No. 1s from one album. The acclaimed music video is partly inspired by Cabaret. Lyrically, 'Live to Tell' (off of True Blue) marked a departure from earlier Madonna songs, telling of a dark secret she must keep: 'Hope I live to tell the secret I have learned/ Till then it will burn inside of me.' She has never revealed the secret, but it resonated with listeners, rising to No. 1. This song became Madonna's second No. 1 hit, appearing on the Vision Quest soundtrack—and also marking the singer's feature film debut. The pop ballad marked a departure from her earlier dance music, earning her a first Grammy nod (Best Female Pop Vocal Performance) and helping her break into adult contemporary. The singer and actress Madonna in concert at the Pala Alpitour in Turin, Italy for one date of her ... More Rebel Heart World Tour. After going to a Sting concert, Madonna was moved to write this song about the unifying power of song. 'Music makes the people come together/Music, mix the bourgeoisie and the rebel,' she sang. The song from the album Music hit No. 1, and the video, which featured then-up-and-comer Sacha Baron Cohen, was a smash. From the first movie Madonna starred in, Desperately Seeking Susan, which she co-wrote, 'Into the Groove' was Madonna's first UK No. 1 and her bestselling early single. The sexual innuendo-laden tract invites a boy to 'prove your love to me.' A Billboard poll once dubbed it the best 1980s dance single. 'Material Girl' was one of the defining '80s songs, appearing on her second album, Like a Virgin. Though Madonna has said she herself isn't materialistic, she liked the provocative nature of the song, which declares, 'We are living in a material world.' The song vaulted the singer to superstardom, topping the Hot Dance Club Songs. Another Like a Virgin hit, 'Dress You Up' opens dreamily, 'You've got style, that's what all the girls say.' The song, widely regarded as one of Madonna's top singles, got a boost when the Parents Music Resource Center added it to its "Filthy Fifteen" for suggestive lyrics—helping into Billboard's top five. From Madonna's debut album, 'Borderline' is so catchy and danceable that it's no wonder it became the singer's first top-10 hit. The video depicted an interracial romance as Madonna proclaimed, 'You just keep on pushin' my love/Over the borderline.' 'Borderline' drew critical acclaim, with Rolling Stone naming it the No. 2 song of the year. Softer and more experimental than most of her previous music, 'Justify My Love' became Madonna's ninth No. 1 single. Lenny Kravitz co-wrote the song, which portrayed the singer's sexual fantasies and belief women were in charge in the bedroom. MTV banned the suggestive video with Madonna's then-boyfriend Tony Ward, which nonetheless went multiplatinum. Madonna performs during opening night of The Celebration Tour at The O2 Arena on October 14, 2023 in ... More London. One of the most iconic '90s songs, this single from I'm Breathless is high-class fun. Madonna pays tribute to the stars of yesteryear. 'Strike a pose,' she encourages, later repeating, 'Don't just stand there, let's get to it/Strike a pose, there's nothing to it.' It became her biggest-selling single to date. 'Papa Don't Preach' appeared on True Blue and has become one of the most notable Madonna songs due to its content. It addresses women's autonomy and has also been interpreted as a pro-choice anthem, since the lyrics deal with a father's reaction to teen pregnancy. This marked Madonna's fourth No. 1 single. Madonna's performance of 'Like a Virgin' at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards remains an indelible pop culture moment. It was Madonna's first song to top the Hot 100, from the album of the same name, and has sold more than 6 million worldwide. She continues to sing the popular tune on her concert tours. Perfectly uniting Madonna's obsessions with sex, religion and taboos, 'Like a Prayer' may set a record for double entendres, like this lyric: 'I'm down on my knees/I wanna take you there.' The catchy song had an equally controversial video in which Madonna sleeps with a Black saint. Needless to say, it hit No. 1. Bottom Line Madonna is one of the most successful and revered pop singers in history for a reason. Her top songs reveal an ability to change with the times while continuing to get people talking and build her reputation. You can enjoy every song on this list over and over without tiring of them.
Yahoo
39 minutes ago
- Automotive
- Yahoo
IndyCar Series: Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix starting grid, qualifying results on May 31, 2025
The starting grid for the Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix is set. The IndyCar Series will race 100 laps race on a nine-turn, 1.645-mile downtown street layout on Sunday, June 1. Colton Herta uncorked a lap of 1 minute, 0.477 seconds, winning pole position for the second straight year on this track and for the 15th time in his career. Advertisement Scott Dixon and Graham Rahal will be assessed six-position starting grid penalties for unapproved engine changes. Here is the Detroit Grand Prix starting grid. IndyCar Series Detroit Grand Grix starting grid Row 1 1, Colton Herta 2, David Malukas Row 2 3, Kyle Kirkwood 4, Christian Lundgaard Row 3 5, Alex Palou 6, Rinus Veekay Row 4 7, Scott McLaughlin 8, Will Power Row 5 9, Marcus Armstrong 10, Christian Rasmussen Row 6 11, Graham Rahal (had fifth-best qualifying effort) 12, Marcus Ericsson Row 7 13, Louis Foster 14, Felix Rosenqvist Row 8 15, Alexander Rossi 16, Scott Dixon (had 10th-best qualifying result) Row 9 17, Callum Ilott Advertisement 18, Pato O'Ward Row 10 19, Kyffin Simpson 20, Jacob Abel Row 11 21, Santino Ferrucci 22, Robert Shwartzman Row 12 23, Devlin DeFrancesco 24, Josef Newgarden Row 13 25, Conor Daly 26, Sting Ray Robb Row 14 27, Nolan Siegel IndyCar Series schedule at Detroit (All times ET; all IndyCar sessions are on IndyCar Live, IndyCar Radio and Sirius XM Channel 218) IndyCar race schedule at Detroit on Sunday, June 1 9:30 a.m.: IndyCar warmup, FS1 10:30 a.m.: Indy NXT race, FS1 12:30 p.m.: IndyCar race, Fox What channel is IndyCar race at Detroit on? TV: Coverage begins at 12:30 p.m. ET, Sunday, June 1, 2025, on Fox. Green flag is scheduled for 12:47 p.m. Will Buxton is the play-by-play voice, with analysts James Hinchcliffe and Townsend Bell. Kevin Lee and Jack Harvey are the pit reporters. How can I stream the IndyCar race at Detroit on June 1? Fox Sports app. Advertisement Watch free with a Fubo trial How can I listen to IndyCar race at Detroit on June 1? IndyCar Nation is on SiriusXM Channel 218, IndyCar Live and the IndyCar Radio Network (check affiliates for each race) Will it rain at the Detroit Grand Prix? Sunday: Sunny, high around 70 degrees. IndyCar drivers for 2025 (Team and drivers; *-Indianapolis 500 only) This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar Detroit Grand Prix qualifying results, starting grid today
CBS News
an hour ago
- General
- CBS News
Detroit police seek information on 2 people in shooting near Martin Luther King Jr. High School
Police in Detroit are seeking information about two people in connection with a shooting at Martin Luther King Jr. High School that happened Thursday night. Shots were fired by an unknown number of people in the parking lot of the school on the 3200 block of East Lafayette Street around 8:26 p.m., police said. No one was injured. On Friday, law enforcement released the photos of two people who officials say were in the area at the time of the shooting. Detroit police say this person was near Martin Luther King Jr. High School when shots were fired in the area on May 20, 2025. Detroit Police Department Detroit police say this person was near Martin Luther King Jr. High School when shots were fired in the area on May 20, 2025. Detroit Police Department Investigators are hoping to speak with these two people. Anyone who recognizes either person or has information about the incident is asked to call the Detroit Police Department's 7th Precinct at 313-596-5740, Crime Stoppers of Michigan at 1-800-773-2587 or leave an anonymous tip here.
ABC News
an hour ago
- Health
- ABC News
Managing your emotions so they don't manage you
Sana Qadar: Do you feel like you have control over your emotions? Or do your emotions rule you? Professor Ethan Kross: If you're not able to manage your distractions, you're probably not going to be able to focus and study as much. If you're not able to manage your temptations, you're probably going to consume substances that aren't as good for your health. Sana Qadar: This is Ethan Kross. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, where he also directs the Emotion and Self-Control Lab. And if you're a long-time listener of All in the Mind, you'll recognize him from our episodes on chatter. That is, your internal monologue when it spirals into rumination. Professor Ethan Kross: (From past episode) When people tell me that they experience chatter, which is really the dark side of the inner voice, it's an example.... Sana Qadar: Those episodes were some of our most popular ever. And some of you, our listeners, have been asking us to bring Ethan back on the show to discuss the ideas in his new book, Shift, how to manage your emotions so they don't manage you. So we listened. Professor Ethan Kross: People were just so curious about their emotional lives, wanting to understand those lives and also become more agentic over how they can manage their emotional responses. And it led me to go back to the keyboard to do a deep dive into that space. Sana Qadar: This is All in the Mind. I'm Sanaa Qadar. And today, Ethan is back and he's talking about emotional first aid, if you will. Tools for shifting and managing your emotions before they spiral into something more serious. And also, can strategically avoiding your emotions, for a little while anyways, ever be helpful? Sana Qadar: We know a lot about why being able to regulate your emotions is such an important skill from a study that's conducted not too far from where I'm recording, just over in New Zealand. It's called the Dunedin Study, and it's well known in psychology and health research circles because of how long it's been running, the detail with which the subjects are studied, and for the more than 1,300 research papers it's helped produce. The study has followed the lives of more than a thousand babies born in 1972 and 1973 for more than five decades now, tracking everything from their heart health to their cavities, and even their emotions and mood. Professor Ethan Kross: They started tracking these babies from the time they were born, and they've kept tracking them over the course of several decades. I believe they're now in their 40s and 50s, maybe even a little bit older. And every few years they would run methodical assessments. They would measure lots of things, including when they were young kids, the kids' capacity to manage themselves, to manage their emotions. They would get multiple measurements on how good they were at emotion regulation. And then over time, they would track outcomes. How well are these kids achieving? What does their health look like? What do their relationships look like? Sana Qadar: What they found were that kids who were good at managing their emotions early in life tended to fare better later on. Professor Ethan Kross: They would achieve more, get better jobs, move further along in school. They would be physically healthier. There are some wild findings indicating that their organs aged more slowly according to sophisticated biological analyses. Sana Qadar: Wow. Professor Ethan Kross: So on the one hand, we see that this capacity to manage your emotions, it makes a difference in our lives. And I don't think it's hard to wrap our head around why that is, right? If you're not able to manage your distractions, you're probably not going to be able to focus and study as much. If you're not able to manage your frustration and anxieties at work, you're not going to be able to achieve as much. But what really stood out to me, as well as the experimenters, was there were also some kids who fit two different profiles. They just didn't stay good or bad at managing their emotions as they aged when they were kids. Some kids got better at managing their emotions over time, and some kids got worse. And they found that the kids who got better over worse, their trajectories of achievement got better. And the kids who got worse at managing their emotions, their trajectories of achievement were also worse. Sana Qadar: You could say that in one sense, this finding is a little bleak, but Ethan thinks there's a hopeful message in there too. Professor Ethan Kross: It is this notion that our ability to manage our emotions is not fixed. You, myself, everyone around us, we have the capacity to improve or get worse. And I think that's a really hopeful message, especially if you cling to the improve part of it. Like we can get better at this. And I am a firm believer that this is a set of skills that you can hone to genuinely improve your lives. Sana Qadar: So the Dunedin study suggests there is quite a bit at stake when it comes to improving emotional regulation. But how much is really in our control? You know, we can't control the world around us. We can't necessarily control hormones. You know, to what degree can we control the emotions we have? Professor Ethan Kross: There's a moment that stands out when I think about how to answer that question, because my whole life, I've always believed without question that we have enormous control over emotions. Right? The human mind evolved in some ways to allow us to manage our emotions, to manage ourselves. I've dedicated my life to this pursuit. I have a lab called the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Several years ago, I came across a study, however, that asked adolescents the same question that you're posing to me right now. Can you really control your emotions? And about 40% of the adolescents indicated, no, you can't control your emotions. This just floored me, this finding, when I first came. Like, how can this possibly be? Of course you can manage your emotions. And it led me to think more deeply about what might be giving rise to that view. And I've evolved my views on this. There are facets of our emotional lives that I believe now are genuinely outside of our control. So I can be navigating the world and encounter something that automatically elicits a set of thoughts or feelings that create an emotion. And I have no control over that. I might brush up against someone who smells really great and automatically experience emotion. I more often than not brush up against someone who smells really bad, and that elicits an emotional response. Sometimes I'll just be walking to work and I'll experience a thought pop into my head and I'm not going to tell you what that thought is because it's shameful, it's dark, I don't know where it came from, but it's leading me to experience an emotion. I don't know when those emotional experiences are going to be triggered. What I do know though is once the emotion is activated, then I do have control over its trajectory. I could choose to elaborate on the emotion. I could lean in further. I could go closer to the person who smells good or bad. I can move further away or I can choose to distract myself. There are so many different things we can do to alter the trajectory of the emotional response. So can you control your emotions? We can't always control our emotions when they're triggers. We don't know when we're going to be triggered, but we have enormous control over their trajectory. And that's really, that's the playground where we can be agentic. Sana Qadar: Some of the tools Ethan suggests you can use to alter the trajectory of your emotions are things we've covered in our previous episodes with him, like using mental time travel or distanced self-talk. Professor Ethan Kross: We possess the ability to shift our perspective on our own. When I'm dealing with some chatter, I will often use my own name and the second person pronoun you to coach myself through the problem. I'll think to myself, all right, Ethan, how are you going to manage this situation? What are you going to do? Sana Qadar: We're not going to cover those again in this episode, but they are fascinating and well worth your time. So we'll link to those episodes in our show notes. Instead, we're going to start by talking about something a bit more basic perhaps, but also unappreciated. It's the tool that is your senses, specifically your hearing and more specifically using music. Professor Ethan Kross: So senses refer to how we take in information about the world around us. And sensation is intimately linked with emotion, right? A scent automatically triggers an emotion. Music, I spent a lot of time talking about music in my book. I mean, music is a powerful, powerful shifter of emotions. If you ask people as researchers have, why do you listen to music? Most people say they listen to music because they like the way it makes them feel. It is a fundamentally emotional enterprise. And what's astounding to me, and we've done research on this, is it's an underutilized tool in my opinion. We all have this intuitive sense that music can be so helpful for shifting our emotions. But when you look at what do people do when they're really struggling, only between 10 and 30% of participants report going to music to push their emotions around. And sometimes people even go to music to shift their emotions, but counterproductively do it in a way that makes them feel worse. So you're feeling really sad. And instead of listening to, in my, you know, my feel good music would be Journey or Bon Jovi. It's terribly cheesy, but amazing 80s music. They'll go to listen to like Adele. Or some like, you know, bring you down. I love Adele, her music is great, but it pushes you in a different direction if you want to feel good. And so... Sana Qadar: Can I just ask about that actually? Because that feels, I get that because I remember when I had a heartbreak in my 20s, I spent a lot of time listening to sad music and kind of wallowing in that and deriving some sort of strange pleasure out of wallowing in it and listening to that music. It was mostly a lot of Taylor Swift, I Knew You Were Trouble when you walked in, or whatever the song is called. Why do we do that if that's going to make us feel worse? Professor Ethan Kross: Well, it speaks to the functionality of negative emotions. So if you think about sadness, as an example, one of the reasons we experience sadness when we encounter some loss that we can't replace, like a loved one, right? You get rejected or you reject someone, like that person is gone. And now, if they're an important person in your life, now you got to do the hard cognitive work to make new meaning out of your life right now with this person who's no longer in it. So you can think of sadness as like this computer program that gets loaded up. And what it does is it motivates you to pull back, withdraw, go, you know, have some alone time. Turn your attention inward to start making meaning out of the circumstance that you're in. Sadness motivates us to do that. It slows us down physiologically, allowing us to be more reflective. But it also, you know, we're a social species. Being alone can be bad for us if prolonged. So we've also evolved to have a particular facial display that often accompanies sadness. My daughters are especially skilled at displaying this on cue, by the way. If I am disciplining them for any reason, but we stick out our lower lip. And what that does is it's like a beacon to those around us to, hey, check up on me every now and again, make sure I'm okay. And so if you recognize that sadness has some functionality, it's leading us to try to do this hard cognitive work. Listening to music that is sad and perpetuates that state may just add to the functionality of this, right? It's allowing us to go deeper into that reflective state. So we have so many different kinds of tools available to us to manage our emotions. I start with a sensory bucket of tools because they work so fast. That is not going to help us help solve our major life dilemmas per se. But what they can often do is give us a bit of a reprieve and sometimes put us in a position to then use other tools to work through the experiences more deeply. Sana Qadar: Speaking of major life dilemmas, I want to totally shift gears here for a moment and talk about Ethan's grandmother's story. Because the common wisdom these days is to not avoid your emotions. You need to face up to them. But Ethan's research suggests it's slightly more complicated than that. And he conveys this through the story of his grandmother. Professor Ethan Kross: Yeah, so my grandmother had this both tragic and remarkable history. So when she was in her early 20s, she was living in eastern Poland. The Nazis invaded, slaughtered her family. She very narrowly escaped that fate with my grandfather, her then boyfriend at the time. Lived homeless for several years, eventually managed to come to the States, start a family. And somewhere along the line, I was produced. And I spent tons of time with my grandparents growing up because I would go to their house after school when my parents were working. And all I wanted to know was, how did you survive those kinds of atrocities? What went through your head? Why did you do the things that you did? And she would instantly silence me. Don't ask questions. Go back to riding your bike. Do your homework. Have fun. Don't think about these things. She really actively avoided thinking and talking about the war, except for one day of the year when she and several fellow of her co-survivors would organize a grassroots Remembrance Day event. And during that one day a year, and I was required to attend, you would just hear them immerse themselves in these stories about the war. And they would cry. It was really quite moving. My grandmother was really skilled at what I would call now being strategic in how she deployed her attention. For most of the time, she would deploy her attention on other things. She would actively resist thinking about the war. But then she would dose it. That one day a year, if she happened to bump into a survivor at the supermarket, she would allow herself to engage with it. And there's research which shows that this capacity to be strategic in how we deploy our attention can actually be a helpful tactic. And I think that this resonates with a lot of people. If you take the volume down from the Holocaust and you think more about... Think about email. Right? We're going to the opposite end. Sana Qadar: Okay. Yep. Professor Ethan Kross: Right? Like we're going the opposite end here for a moment. Just think about getting an email that provokes you. This is, I think, a universal experience of the 21st century. Like we get a message that really gets us upset. Sana, do you respond to that message right then and there? Or are you better off taking a couple of hours off maybe and then coming back and responding to that? Sana Qadar: I would say the healthier thing to do would be to wait and come back to it. Professor Ethan Kross: To wait. Right? That is a strategic form of avoidance. Right? You are taking time away and then you are coming back. And that is what makes us in some ways, one of the things that makes us unique as human beings, we can divert our attention on or away from things at will oftentimes. It is absolutely true. And I want to be super clear about this, that if your reflexive approach for managing your emotions is to always avoid them, chronically avoid, this is not good. There are reams of data, hundreds of studies that point out the deleterious consequences of chronic avoidance. We have unfortunately gone from that observation to using the technical phrase, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We have recognized that chronic avoidance is bad. And then we have gone from that to saying, well, you should always approach and immerse your feelings. You do not have to choose between only approaching or only avoiding. You can go back and forth. You can be strategic. And research shows that that can often be really useful for when you are trying to deal with adversity. And that is what my grandmother did. Sana Qadar: Yeah. Would another way to describe it be you can compartmentalize what you are going through? Professor Ethan Kross: You know, compartmentalize is an interesting choice of words because, at least in some of the academic circles that I roll with, so to speak, or I am familiar with, it can have some loaded meaning. It, you know, be described as a, by definition, negative coping mechanism. But if we just think about this in simple terms, like let us kind of escape from the jargon. What we are talking about is it is okay to kind of not engage with things that are bothering you for a while. Sometimes people, like once they take some time away and come back to the problem, they realize, oh, this was not a big deal after all. Right. Or they have this new perspective that allows them to deal with it. Sometimes this does not work. If you try to distract yourself and you just find that you just cannot stop thinking about this problem, that is a cue that distraction is not a good tool in this circumstance. And then you can choose to either re-engage or use any number of the other tools I talk about in the book. Sana Qadar: And just to go back to your grandmother's story once more, what is really interesting about her is, so, you know, often she would be avoiding, she would not talk to you about it. She never went to therapy, right? Professor Ethan Kross: Never. Sana Qadar: But the fact that she engaged in remembrance, you know, at least once a year and then with other survivors, that was enough to help her through it. Professor Ethan Kross: That's right. That's right. You know, and who knows what kind of conversation she had with my grandfather behind closed doors, although I don't suspect it was extensive. Yeah, that was it. You know, I also tell an anecdote in the book about my dad and this topic that's relevant to this observation that you're making. So my parents got divorced when I was 12 years old and it was a painful experience when it happened. But one that I'm actually grateful happened because, you know, I think everyone is better off. My parents are both lovely human beings that were better off going their own way. I haven't really ruminated about my parents' divorce in decades. I came to terms with that a long, long time ago. So I don't have to go back and think about it. Like we often hear people are prompted to do, right? If something really bad happened before, you've really got to go back and come to terms with that. There's nothing there that I really need to deal with. My dad, though, a common source of friction between us is he will often say, let's talk about the divorce. And my response to him is like, the only time I ever think about the divorce and become upset is when you tell me we need to talk about it. I'm really happy about it. Right. So the idea here is that even sometimes the really big things in life, we're able to work through them. Yeah. And we don't have to continually revisiting them in contrast to what some popular beliefs might suggest. Sana Qadar: Yeah. I mean, on social media, you really get the sense that you got to feel all your feelings. You got to post about all your feelings. And that's the most helpful thing to be doing. But yeah, clearly it sounds like that's not entirely correct. Professor Ethan Kross: That's absolutely true. We recently published these studies that looked at how people managed their COVID anxiety. These were large, large longitudinal studies that looked every day, what were the tools that worked for you and how did it impact your anxiety over time? The key finding, Sana, was that there was such unbelievable variability in the different tools that benefited people. There was no one size fits all solution for managing that distress. Some people benefited a lot from talking to other people and journaling and, you know, getting outside. Other people benefited from distancing and, you know, doing other things. So there's just, whenever you hear something or encounter in particular on social media, a maxim that suggests this is the one thing you should do to live a better life. I think that's reason to kind of have your antennae raise. That it's often not that simple. Sana Qadar: Now, to get back to some of the tools we can use to moderate our emotions, you write that there are elements in our external worlds that can shape our emotions and help us manage them. One of these ideas is pretty instinctual, I think. It's, you know, changing your space to change your emotions. Can you explain that? Why does that help? Professor Ethan Kross: Well, we're tuned to our spaces and there are multiple pathways through which our spaces can be harnessed as a tool. And I'll give you just a couple of examples. One thing that I don't think we often talk a lot about is that we develop attachments to our certain kinds of spaces, just like we do to certain kinds of people. So there's certain people in our life that we are positively and securely attached to. And when we're in their mere presence, we're filled with comfort and a sense of support. We also develop those associations with places. So do you have a place that when you visit it, you just feel a sense of calm and serenity and comfort? Sana Qadar: Do you know that's such a good question? Because recently that place has become the ocean in Sydney's east. I just crave the ocean with an intensity I have not felt before because, you know, things have been happening in my life in the last few months. And so the ocean is where I go to feel better. Professor Ethan Kross: And nature is a very, very common source of this sense of physical, spatial comfort. You know, I'll never forget when both of my daughters were young, whenever they would get nervous about something or if they would get in trouble, their go-to response would say, I just want to go home. I just want to go to my room. Their rooms were a source of comfort and safety and security. So one piece of advice I like to give folks is think about what your emotional oases are. And like, what are the spots around your neighborhood that give you this sense of comfort and support that you've developed these positive attachments to? I have several in Ann Arbor, the city I live in, in the state. So there's the local Arboretum. There's the tea shop where I wrote my first book. And when I'm not feeling great, I visit those places. That's helping me manage my emotions from the outside in. So that's one way that our spaces can help us manage our emotions. The other thing to realize is that what is around you has the capacity to trigger different reactions. Here's a cell phone, right? It's sitting on my desk. I have it turned down, turned over because if it's face up and I see the emails coming in, there will be an emotional trigger that occurs. There are picture frames all over my office with my family in them. The mere sight of those pictures activates what we call mental representations of people I care about. I look at the picture of my wife and kids that activates positive feelings. We've shown in research that speeds up how quickly people can recover from problems they're struggling with being reminded. There are people that care about you. So you can actually design your physical spaces to have these emotional resources around you. Clutter is another thing that, you know, when people are struggling with big negative emotions, creating order in their immediate vicinity can help give them a sense of agency and control that can be helpful. So there are lots of ways you can interact with your physical surrounds to help you manage your emotions from the outside in. That can be powerful. Sana Qadar: You mentioned there's lots of different tools and the tools that will work will differ depending on the person. I'm wondering what tools work best for you. What do you deploy in your own life when you're feeling not so great? Professor Ethan Kross: I have a stage response. Right. So I have some go to tools. So the moment I get triggered, anxiety or sadness, I will use distant self-talk. I start giving myself advice like I would a friend and I use language to help me do it. I actually use my name and you to silently work through. Come on Ethan, how are you going to deal with this? Lots of research on that can be useful. I will engage in mental time travel both into the future. How am I going to feel about this next year to highlight the fact that what I'm going through is temporary and then I'll go into the past, spend some time with my grandmother in Eastern Europe. Right. How does her experience evading the Nazis, how does that compare to my own? If weather permits in Michigan, which is not always the case, we're not as lucky as all of you in Sydney. I will go to the Arboretum and I'll take in some nature. So that's like stage one. And I would say 60% of the time, that's all I need to do to regulate myself. What about if the emotions are a little bit more powerful, right? These are bigger experiences. Then I go to stage two, which is I activate my emotional advisory board. So I have people who are exceptionally good at doing two things for me. They listen and learn about what I'm going through to empathize with me, to validate the experience, but then they also work with me to work through it. Right. They help me broaden my perspective. They help me think through the problem to find a solution. That is an incredible resource. And you know, if that doesn't work, I just give up. I'm joking. Most of the time, like, you know, that, that is, that is sufficient. But, but really for me, it's that two stage response. Sana Qadar: Some people might feel emotions, you know, in the extreme, like very acutely, very intensely when that happens. Do you think there are particular shifters that might be helpful in that situation? Professor Ethan Kross: When people are experiencing emotions really intensely and for prolonged periods of time, say more than two weeks, that's a cue that you might want to get a more intensive form of shifting support in the form of talking to someone, either members of your advisory board or even a mental health professional. So a lot of the tools that I talk about are useful for the everyday curve balls that life throws at us. But sometimes those curve balls are really, really hard to hit. I'm probably using the wrong metaphor here with, with Australia, but you know what I mean? Sana Qadar: (Both laugh) We'll take it. Yep. Professor Ethan Kross: Yeah, I'll take it. Right. And so that's a cue that sometimes, you know, elevating this to, to get more intensive forms of support might be useful. There is no one signature set of tools though, that you reserve for people who are more intensely distressed. There's, there's likewise still variability among folks. Like you look at cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy and psychodynamic therapy, and we could add four other branches of therapy to that list. Some people benefit from some branches and others benefit from others, and they are very different in some regards. Sana Qadar: You close the book by returning to your grandmother's story, and I want to end there as well. I suppose, what do you hope people take away from her story? Professor Ethan Kross: What I hope you take away from my grandmother's story is, is twofold. Like at a very kind of micro level that you can, you can be strategic with how you deploy your attention. You can, you can avoid constructively and then return to the problem. But more broadly, my approach to managing my emotions is quite different from my grandmother's approach. And, and what I hope my grandmother demonstrates for folks is, is again, this principle that there are no one size fits all solutions. And, and just really to emphasize the critical importance of this challenge to number one, learn about the different options that exist, different tools that are out there, and then start self-experimenting to figure out what works best for you. And that might change with time, but, but, but start engaging in that reflective process to ultimately, I hope live a better life. Sana Qadar: That is Ethan Kross, professor of psychology and management organizations at the University of Michigan and author of Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. As I mentioned earlier, we have had Ethan on the show a couple of times now, and his episodes are always incredibly popular. So we'll link to those episodes in our show notes and on our website, but you can also find them by searching the episode titles plus All in the Mind. The first episode was called Controlling the Chatter in Your Head. And the second is called What Influences Your Inner Voice? Controlling Chatter Part Two. Thanks to producer Rose Kerr, senior producer James Bullen, and sound engineer Dylan Prins. I'm Sana Qadar. Thank you for listening. I'll catch you next time.
