Managing your emotions so they don't manage you

Australia Broadcast Center

31-05-2025

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.