Latest news with #EthanKross
ABC News
3 days 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.
Forbes
24-04-2025
- General
- Forbes
Try Ethan Kross's Methods to Manage Emotions in the Moment
Circle arrows icon set. Rotate arrow symbols. Round recycle, refresh, reload or repeat icon. Modern ... More simple arrows. Vector illustration. I recently spoke with Ethan Kross, PhD, about his new book Shift—Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. Kross, an award-winning professor at the University of Michigan and Director of the Emotion and Self Control Laboratory, is also the author of the bestseller Chatter; he's an expert on emotion regulation. His research has been featured on CBS Evening News and Good Morning America, as well as in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and many other outlets. How do you keep your emotions from getting the best of you? Is there a quick fix? According to Kross, no; however, you can learn to regulate your emotions in the moment and make a plan to not be bested by intense feeling. Kross said there is no one size fits all tool for emotional regulation. Rather, he encourages readers to keep an open mind and try many different tools. Kross and I discussed methods and modalities you can keep in mind when you need to refocus and emotionally regulate in difficult situations. The WOOP self-regulation plan. If you're prone to reactivity, working a plan for emotional regulation can help you in moments when you are overwhelmed. Kross says implementing this plan pays dividends. He uses the framework 'Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan' (or WOOP) to assess any emotional challenge: W-Wish: Write down a wish or a goal that is important to you and within the realm of possibility O-Outcome: How will it feel when you accomplish this? Write it down. O-Obstacle: What are issues in your path keeping you from success? List them. P-Plan: The action you are going to take when you face this obstacle. Write how you will keep moving despite obstacles. Inevitably, you will face barriers as you pursue the things that are important to you. A WOOP plan allows you to not be thrown off or overly disheartened when you face setbacks. Remember that you have an action plan; feel your feelings, then work the plan. Mentally time travel. Worst-case scenario thinking can translate into rumination. Rumination can quickly lead to shame: thoughts such as 'Why is this happening?' or 'I should be past this point by now.' To break this cycle, you must "flip the switch," says Kross, through mental time travel. To mentally time travel, imagine how you will feel in a month, after you are out of the woods with this particular situation. Realize that whatever you are facing will pass. When you can connect with a feeling of certainty, you allow yourself to access solutions for how you will get through the current moment. Another way of mentally time traveling is looking backward; how have you dealt with these situations in the past? You made it through those times; you'll make it through this rough patch as well. Seek quick relief. When emotions are overwhelming you, reach for quick relief. Reset your emotional state. You can do this by listening to your favorite song on repeat, changing your space (go to your local coffee shop, for example), or by mentally time traveling. Kross shares a story about an interaction he had with his daughter. His daughter Dani played soccer; one Saturday on the way to a game, Dani was sitting in the backseat, surly. Emotions are contagious; Kross said his daughter's bad mood was also bringing him down. Then, one of Kross's favorite songs came on the radio. He and his daughter started singing along; when he looked to the back seat of the car, Dani was smiling and happy. When they got to the field, Dani was happy and ready to play. (Thanks, Journey!) A good song on the radio, a quick dance break—these mood lifters don't take much time, but they can change the tenor of your day. Kross advises readers to take advantage of these resets. Talk it out. Don't wrestle with a difficult situation in isolation. Talk through your issue with someone you trust. However, be careful with whom you share, says Kross; you want someone who will be empathetic, affirming, and solution-oriented—not someone who will cause you to despair more. Seek someone who is not in the same emotional straits as you. Be clear in your intent; say that you would like to share the facets of what is bothering you, and you're sharing because you'd like help seeing the situation differently. You don't want just to keep talking and talking—you want to come to a resolution. Kross shares that there are many different ways to manage your emotions and regulate. Leverage the tools in Shift so you can flip the switch so that you see the situation in a different light.
Chicago Tribune
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Heidi Stevens: What a psychology professor's grandmother — and Dennis Rodman — can teach us about regulating our emotions
Ethan Kross grew up under the loving, watchful gaze of his Polish grandparents, who lived a few blocks from his childhood home in Brooklyn. His grandmother greeted him after school with elaborate meals and generous helpings, which, Kross jokes now, kept his grandfather — a tailor — busy catching up with his grandson's expanding waistline. Dora and Izzy, Kross' grandparents, moved to Brooklyn after immigrating to Lithuania and then Israel. They were Holocaust survivors whose families and friends were slaughtered by Nazis, a fate they barely escaped. And they never talked about it. 'Except,' Kross writes in his new book, 'for one day a year.' 'Every year, on a crisp Sunday in the fall, my mom would drag me from my soccer game, still dressed in my cleats and typically muddy uniform, to attend the Holocaust remembrance day gatherings my grandparents held with other survivors,' Kross writes. 'That was where I first heard my grandmother speak of the time she spent living in the woods, going days without food, surviving the winter in a thin dress and coat. 'It's where,' Kross continues, 'I heard her talk about learning that her mother, grandmother and younger sister had been massacred in a ditch off the town square, and the moment she realized her father's rushed farewell from the home where they were hiding would be the last words she ever heard from him.' And it's where he saw her cry. Once a year. 'These were people I normally knew to be pillars of stability,' he writes, 'which made this display of raw emotion even more jarring.' Kross asked his grandmother all sorts of questions over their after-school meals — about the war, about her childhood, about her memories. But she brushed his queries away. Those weren't memories — or emotions — she wanted to access in those moments. Her reticence to open her wounds on demand sparked in Kross a curiosity and fascination with human emotions, particularly our ability to regulate them. 'As I grew up,' he writes, 'I became an observer of emotion.' He's now a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, where he directs the Emotion and Self Control Laboratory. His new book, 'Shift: Managing Your Emotions — So They Don't Manage You' became an instant bestseller. In it, Kross turns on their heads many of our assumptions about emotions, including the notion that we should tap into and process them the moment they surface. He writes about the long history of humans trying to control (defeat may be a more accurate term) our emotions, including the ancient practice of carving holes in our skulls. He profiles people, including a Navy SEAL, who've trained themselves to experience their emotions as signals — not to avoid, but to tune into and deploy with precision. He shares emotional regulation research and strategies, including this one I love: Talk to yourself in the third person. Because we're so much better at giving advice to other people than taking advice of our own, a simple shift to 'You can handle this' instead of 'I can handle this' can be a game-changer. It's called distanced self-talk, and it helps you see and, importantly, feel a situation from a different perspective. The book is fascinating, and Kross' grandmother is gently and generously woven throughout. In a particularly powerful passage, he writes about what his grandmother had in common with, of all people, Dennis Rodman. Rodman, the five-time NBA champion and former Chicago Bull, was known for what he did off-court as much as what he did on — especially his occasional disappearing acts before big games. Hiding out in Las Vegas, hitting a World Championship Wrestling match in Detroit with Hulk Hogan, marrying Carmen Electra for nine days. 'When I look at Rodman's antics,' Kross writes, 'I see more than just a party boy shirking his responsibilities. I see someone strategically using distraction and avoidance to regulate their emotions. Rodman's determination to step away from the stress and anxiety of such a high-pressure position was an effective counterbalance to his focus and determination on game day.' What does all that have to do with Kross' grandmother? 'The septuagenarian that I watched describe her father's last words was not a stoic,' Kross writes. 'She was suffused with emotion, shot right back into the past, fully feeling the reverberations of her trauma. I wasn't wrong that my grandmother suppressed emotion in her day-to-day life. She certainly did. But what I didn't understand was that her superpower wasn't denial; it was her ability to flexibly deploy her attention to what she'd endured.' I think this is such a powerful reframing of what so many of us may view as a weakness. Instead of seeing a kid who takes breaks from schoolwork as not applying himself; instead of seeing a partner who doesn't want to process that fight in that moment as avoidant; instead of beating ourselves up for taking a couple days to reply to that tricky email, we can acknowledge that a little time and distance might be assets, not liabilities. 'Our emotions are our guides through life,' Kross writes. 'They are the music and the magic, the indelible markers of our time on Earth. The goal is not to run from negative emotions, or pursue only the feel-good ones, but to be able to shift: experience all of them, learn from all of them, and when needed, move easily from one emotional state into another.' And if not easily, I would add, at least with some grace — for ourselves and for the people we love.
Wall Street Journal
28-02-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
‘Shift' Review: Riding the Ocean of Emotion
Ethan Kross was close with his grandmother, but throughout his childhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., she rebuffed his questions about her harrowing escape from the Nazis during World War II. Once a year, however, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, she would speak at her synagogue, sobbing as she recounted the murders of her immediate family members in Poland and her own improbable survival. Mr. Kross is a psychologist who directs the Emotion and Self Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan. He returns to his grandmother's story throughout 'Shift: Managing Your Emotions—So They Don't Manage You,' his lucid guide to emotion regulation. His grandmother was a typical Jewish bubbe the rest of the time, so growing up he was mystified by that annual display of anguish. 'Where did all that emotion go?' he asks. 'How did she manage to keep it locked up inside, and did she suffer for it?' Conventional wisdom would posit that she must have: We're told to process our emotions, not push them down. But Mr. Kross frequently breaks with conventional wisdom. His conclusion is that instead of repressing her feelings, his grandmother was able 'to flexibly deploy her attention to what she'd endured.' That flexibility is at the heart of 'Shift.' Mr. Kross suggests that while we can't control which emotions are triggered within us, we can, with practice, control their trajectories. The goal is to consider the messages that fear, anger and anxiety are sending us before shifting to a more constructive emotional state. Mr. Kross takes readers through recent research in the neuroscience of emotion, as well as a number of engaging case studies. And, with an amiable, can-do air, he offers a range of strategies to help manage emotions: They can be as simple as putting on a favorite song to alter your mood. 'No judgment, please,' he quips after revealing that he likes to sing along to Journey's 'Don't Stop Believin'.'
BBC News
27-02-2025
- Health
- BBC News
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? 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. --
