The expert guide to taking control of your emotions

Ethan Kross is a world expert in the psychology of emotions, and he has identified a set of tools that can help us to tend our wellbeing.

Ever since he was a child, Ethan Kross has been "an observer of emotion" and the often counter-productive ways that we deal with difficult feelings. "It seemed as if we were all just stumbling along, occasionally finding an accidental or Band-Aid solution to help us manage our emotional lives. Sometimes our improvised tools helped. Sometimes they made things worse. It seemed so haphazard, isolating, and inefficient," he says.

As a psychologist at the University of Michigan and director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory, Kross hopes to change this sorry state of affairs. In his new book Shift: How to Manage Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You, he aims to equip us all with a set of tools that will help us to navigate our ups and downs more constructively.

Kross spoke to science writer David Robson about the benefits of "negative" feelings, creating safe spaces and emotional oases – and the surprising upsides of distraction.

What are the most common misconceptions about emotions?

One big misunderstanding is that there are good emotions and there are bad emotions and that we should strive to live our lives free of all the bad emotions. This is an error, as far as I'm concerned: we evolved the ability to experience all emotions for a reason. Anger can motivate us to correct an injustice if there's still an opportunity to fix things. Sadness can lead us to introspect and make new meaning out of situations that have fundamentally been altered. Envy can motivate us to strive for things that we want to achieve. In the right proportions – that is such a key phrase – all emotions are useful.

One way of driving this point home is to think about physical pain, which is about as negative an emotional state as we can imagine. Many of us yearn to live lives free of any kind of physical pain. But some people are born without the capacity to experience pain, due to a genetic anomaly, and those kids end up dying younger than people who can experience pain. If they get their hand stuck in the fire, there's no signal that tells them to pull the hand away. The same principle is true for all our negative emotions.

People often find it liberating to know that they don't have to strive to live a life without negativity. What you want to strive to achieve is just keeping these emotional experiences in check, and I think that's a much more tenable goal.

Many people believe that their emotions are beyond their control. Where do you think this defeatist attitude comes from? And what are the consequences? 

I think it depends on the facet of our emotional experiences that we're talking about. We often don't have control over the thoughts and feelings that are automatically triggered as we live our lives throughout the day, but we can control how we engage with those thoughts and feelings once they're activated, and that's where the promise of emotion regulation resides.

But if you don't think you can do something, then you're not going to make the effort to practice it. If you don't think exercising is going to make you more fit, for example, why on Earth would you devote effort to exercising? And if you don't think that you can use different strategies to manage your emotions, why would you ever avail yourself of them?

So how can we change our responses to difficult feelings?

Listening to music is one example of a tool that's underutilised. If you ask people why they listen to music, almost 100% of participants will say that they like the way it makes them feel. But if you then look at what people do when they are struggling with their emotions – such as the last time they were angry, anxious or sad – only a small minority report using music. 

It's just one category of what I call "shifters", which are the tools that can push our emotions around. And once you know how they work, you can be a lot more strategic in how you use them in your life.

You also describe how a change in environment can boost our wellbeing. We might have experienced this on holiday, but how can we apply this principle to our day-to-day lives? 

As you say, a lot of people feel restored when they go to an entirely different place that is free of associations with work. But we can't always take that vacation, and what I like to remind people is that there are often places locally that can shift our mood.

We talk a lot about getting attached to other people, and when things aren't going well, being in the presence of that figure can be a source of comfort and resilience. But it turns out we also become attached to places in our environment. Mine include the arboretum near my home, the tea house where I wrote my first book and one of my offices on campus. From the moment I am in that space, I have positive associations that help me manage my emotions.

I think that they're not unlike the safe houses you have in spy movies or books. We all have these safe houses in our lives, and we want to be strategic about going to them when we're struggling. It's a way of managing ourselves from the outside in.

You can also curate your environment. We know that plants and images of green spaces can be restorative. So can photos of loved ones. We've done research where we expose people to pictures of loved ones while they're struggling with a problem. We find it speeds up the rate at which they "repair" following the experience. 

Is the aim to be more conscious of what we can do to change how we're feeling – rather than just leaving it to chance?

One of my hopes for this book is that we can get people to be much more deliberate about incorporating these tools into our lives.

I was surprised to find that distraction and avoidance can be a productive way of dealing with emotions. How so? 

Avoidance – trying actively not to think about something by distracting yourself or engaging in other behaviours – is generally derided as an unhealthy tool. And there's no question that chronically avoiding things has been linked with negative outcomes; it's not an approach that I would advocate for anyone to adopt.

But we do not have to choose between either approaching or avoiding our emotions; we can be flexible and do both. There's research showing that people who are effective at both approaching and avoiding their emotions, expressing and suppressing, often fare well in the long term.

What might that look like in our lives? Well, let's say you're triggered by something. You get emotional about an argument you have had with someone. One approach might be to address it right there at that moment, but it might make sense to take some time away from thinking about that problem or confronting it. I say that as the kind of person who, in general, does like to confront things right in the moment, just get to the bottom of it, and move on. But sometimes I've benefited from immersing myself in something totally unrelated for a day and then coming back to the problem. I might come back and realise it's not a problem at all, or I'll find that the intensity of the problem is diminished, and I can approach it from a broader perspective.

How should we deal with that killer of joy, social comparison?

We often hear that we shouldn't compare ourselves to other people. Good luck! We're a social species; part of the way we make sense of ourselves and our place in this world is to compare ourselves to others.

It is true that we often engage in the kinds of comparisons that lead us to feel bad about ourselves, but you can reframe it in ways that make the comparison work for you rather than against you. If I find out that someone is outperforming me, I can say to myself, well, they were able to achieve that, so why can't I? Now it's almost like a target for something that I can shoot towards.

More like this:

• Why we need to be more emotional to save the world

• The untranslatable emotions you never knew you had

• How climate change effects mental health

Do you have a favourite strategy that you would typically turn to in times of difficulty?

When I'm struggling, my first line of defence is to use distanced self-talk. I'll use my name and the second person pronoun – you – to silently coach myself through a problem, as if I'm advising a friend. (Read more: Illeism: The ancient trick to help you think more wisely.) And then I'll also engage in mental time travel. I'll ask myself, 'How am I going to feel about this in a day, 10 days, 10 months from now?' And I'll also go back in time. 'How does this compare to other difficult things I've been through?'

Oftentimes, those tools get me to where I want to be emotionally, but if they're not sufficient, I'll go to my emotional advisors, people in my network who are pretty skilled at empathising with me and advising me. And I'll go for a walk in a green space, or visit one of my emotional oases.

*Ethan Kross's new book Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You is published by Vermilion (UK) and Crown (US).

** David Robson is an award-winning science writer and author. His latest book, The Laws of Connection: 13 Social Strategies That Will Transform Your Life, was published by Canongate (UK) and Pegasus Books (US & Canada) in June 2024. He is @davidarobson on Instagram and Threads and writes the 60-Second Psychology newsletter on Substack.

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