Ethan Kross always shared a special bond with his grandmother, Dora, whom he considered a “second mom”. She lived just a few blocks away from his childhood home, and when he came by each day after school, she would shower him with kisses and lavish him with food – matzo balls, chicken broth and noodle pudding.
Despite their closeness, she would barely ever talk about the horrors she had endured during the Nazi occupation in Eyshishok, modern-day Lithuania, before she had emigrated to the US and found a home in New York. How did she rebuild her life to become such a stable figure for her family? And why did she never discuss her trauma, except on specific occasions like Holocaust Memorial Day? “I found it puzzling, how she could mostly avoid speaking about those events but still be OK,” says Kross.
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Such questions would follow Kross through his adolescence; as an and director of the Emotion and Self Control Lab at the University of Michigan, he has spent his career seeking an answer. “Emotions are full of richness and utility, but they can also get the better of us when we are most vulnerable,” he says. “So why does that happen? And what can we do to handle them more effectively? That’s what I went to graduate school to figure out.”
Kross’s new book, Shift: How to manage your emotions so they don’t manage you, is the product of all he has learned. He also isn’t the only psychologist fascinated by the idea of mastering our emotions. From mental exercises like reappraisal and self-distancing to changing our environment and hacking our senses, the latest research offers a toolkit of strategies for controlling our feelings. This emerging body of evidence suggests that our emotions are more elastic than we realise – and by learning to harness them, we can enhance our health, happiness and longevity.
Our emotions are our thoughts’ constant companions. When people are asked to describe the contents of their head at random points throughout the day, they report feeling at least one emotion for . And many of us are ill-equipped to deal with these feelings – as a landmark study shows.
Emotional control
Around 50 years ago, scientists selected a sample of just over 1000 babies born in the city of Dunedin, New Zealand, between April 1972 and March 1973, whose progress they have followed ever since. Early on, the children were assessed by parents, teachers and independent psychologists on their emotional regulation, based on factors like the frequency of their tantrums and how well they managed to master their impulses. This detailed information allowed the researchers to examine the links between those skills and the participants’ future prospects, while controlling for factors like family background and socioeconomic status.
Children who struggled to keep their emotions in check tended to do worse at school – but the consequences went far beyond their academic success. By the age of 32, the people with the lowest levels of emotional regulation and were about four times more likely to be convicted of a crime compared with those with the highest levels of emotional regulation. They were also at greater risk of substance abuse.
By age 45, the effects could even be seen in their biological ageing. During various follow-ups, researchers have assessed 19 markers of physical health, including blood pressure, cholesterol levels, white blood cell count, lung capacity and tooth decay.
As many of us know all too well, these parameters tend to shift as we get older, but for some individuals, the changes happen more rapidly – and a 2021 paper on the Dunedin study found that the speed of that decline could be . “The individuals with poor self-control were ageing more quickly than their peers,” says at the University of Michigan, who worked on the paper. They even looked older, according to independent judges asked to guess their ages from photographs.
The people with better emotional regulation may have been eating better, exercising more and cleaning their teeth regularly – all factors with specific effects that should help to keep people healthy. Crucially, however, they may have experienced less stress overall, which – over extended periods – might have led to less general wear and tear on their organs. People who are less impulsive are better able to stick to plans, which helps create long-term stability. “And when crises arise, they are better able to navigate them,” says Richmond-Rakerd.
There is also an . The causes of mental illness are complex, but impaired emotional regulation is a common risk factor for many conditions, including depression, anxiety and disordered eating.
If you can change how you think about a situation, you can change how you feel
The trillion-dollar question, then, is whether we can learn better ways to manage our feelings. A good place to start looking for answers is with the Dunedin participants. While many had a constant level of emotional regulation over time, others improved as they got older. “And the individuals who changed did better in adulthood,” says Richmond-Rakerd.
The biggest barrier to better emotional regulation may be a set of underlying beliefs – known in psychology as “implicit theories” – about our capacity to change the contents of the mind. In the mid-2000s, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her colleagues asked first-year university students to rate some statements on a scale of 1 (completely disagree) to 5 (completely agree). These were: everyone can learn to control their emotions; if they want to, people can change the emotions that they have; no matter how hard they try, people can’t really change the emotions that they have; and the truth is, people have very little control over their emotions. The first two statements were designed to reflect the view that our feelings are malleable, while the last two reflected the view that they are fixed.
Mental wellbeing
Over the following 10 weeks, students who held the fixed theories of emotions and poorer social relationships than those who believed they had conscious control over their feelings. They were considerably more likely to report feeling anxious, angry, lonely or depressed, for example, and less likely to report feeling happy, proud, loved or stimulated. Overall, it seemed that the people with fixed beliefs were struggling to cope with the uncertainty they were facing, thanks to the major life shift of starting university, preventing them from making the most of their time there.
In other words, these students’ beliefs were a self-fulfilling prophecy that in turn affected their behaviour. Someone who believes their emotions are beyond control won’t even try to change how they are feeling, shutting off potentially useful emotional regulation strategies.
One such strategy is a highly intuitive technique known as “cognitive reappraisal”. “If you can change how you think about a situation, you can change how you feel,” says , who recently completed a PhD in emotional regulation at the University of Limerick, Ireland.
Shum gives the example of facing a difficult exam and focusing solely on the possibility of failing, increasing anxiety. With cognitive reappraisal, you could remind yourself that the worst-case scenario is only one of many possible results, breaking out of doom-laden thoughts and easing some of your worrying.
Cognitive reappraisal can also amplify welcome emotions. “When we’re feeling good, we can actually make ourselves feel even better,” says Shum. If you are at an exciting sports game, for instance, you can remind yourself how lucky you are to be witnessing the action.
In a review of the evidence to date, published last year, Shum found a clear , which included a reduced risk of mental illness and an increase in overall life satisfaction.
“Cognitive reappraisal is a very good form of emotion regulation, but many people don’t use it as often as they should,” says at the Chinese University of Hong Kong – and his work suggests that this is a direct result of the implicit theories that Tamir studied.
Changing patterns
Working with at Central Luzon State University in the Philippines, he surveyed 355 college students about their emotional lives – including a section on cognitive reappraisal, in which they had to rate their agreement with the statement “when I want to feel more positive emotion, such as joy or amusement, I change what I’m thinking about”. As expected, people who think emotions are malleable – and this was partly explained by their use of cognitive appraisal. Those with fixed views tended to dwell on their bad feelings without seeking to change their thinking patterns.
After accepting that emotions are within our control, anyone can learn to apply cognitive reappraisal, along with many other strategies to . “We have lots of tools at our disposal; different tools will work for different people,” says Kross.
Some of these instruments are within our grasp – we simply forget to use them. Kross points to using music to shape our mood. There are many biological pathways through which music can turn the dial on our emotional experiences. Brain scans reveal that it alters the expression of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with expectation and reward in the brain, and affects our physical stress response, . We might use some energetic tracks to pump ourselves up before a big event, or slower, softer music to wind down afterwards.
We can reap music’s benefits only if we remember to use it, however. In his book, Kross reports a series of studies, pending publication, which he conducted with his colleague , to examine the various means people use to “turn the volume down on their negative emotions”. Fewer than 30 per cent reported actively using music to quieten their sadness, anxiety or anger. “It’s a tool that is right there in plain sight that can powerfully reroute how we are feeling,” he says. Other “sensory shifters” might include the soothing acts of .
Changing our environment is another possibility. Spending half an hour in a natural space, like an urban park, has been shown to , compared with walking the streets. And the latest research suggests we may not even need to leave our homes to feel restored. A recent study by at KU Leuven in Belgium and her colleagues found that watching short clips of wildlife documentaries helped participants over a week-long trial. The benefits lasted a further seven days.
Kross’s primary line of research concerns a strategy known as , which involves taking an outside perspective on our problems. We can do that by considering how we would view our situation in the future, or by imagining how we might advise a friend feeling the same things that we are. Simply (you or he/she/they) can do the job.
In multiple studies, Kross and his colleagues have found that self-distancing can , helping us find greater feelings of closure. “It’s my go-to when I need to manage my emotions,” he says. “When I find myself dealing with a thorny interpersonal issue at work, I’ll use distanced self-talk to give myself advice like I would a friend, and then jump into the mental time travel machine to both think about how I’ll feel about his problem a few years from now – to highlight its impermanence – and also think about how it compares to other issues I’ve endured.”
Mixed feelings
Kross emphasises that context is key, since . Consider envy. Jealous of a friend who has just been promoted to a stellar new role? You could brew in bitterness – or see your envy as a form of motivation. Your friend proves that success is possible, which might spur on your own ambition. Anger, meanwhile, might push you to fight for your rights, achieving a fairer resolution to a disagreement.
In such situations, you may even choose to amplify those feelings a little, by focusing on the things that made you jealous or angry. Kross’s studies show that people tend to be more satisfied with outcomes when they in this way. “Negative emotions are functional; they can serve a purpose,” he says.
It all depends on balance and proportion. Are we experiencing those feelings to such a degree that they are no longer useful? Or are they so damaging that we need to regulate them using the strategies described above?
Occasionally, the best solution may be to turn away from them entirely. We are often told that hiding from difficult feelings – but Kross argues that there is nothing wrong with emotional avoidance to provide short-term relief, provided that it is used sparingly. He points to research into bereaved partners: people who turned their thoughts away from their grief and actively avoided reminders . “I think this notion that avoidance is always harmful is, in and of itself, a harmful notion,” he says.
This brings us back to Kross’s grandmother, and the questions he wanted to answer all those years ago. He says she didn’t undergo any formal therapy, but – from his perspective, at least – Dora appeared to have found relief in compartmentalising her trauma and facing it only sporadically, when she needed to honour her experiences. Knowing what he now knows about human psychology, he suspects that she “stumbled” into a way to “regulate her emotions adaptively”.
The same approach wouldn’t work for everyone. That is precisely Kross’s point. “Science has identified dozens of tools that can push our emotions around,” he says. “And once you have familiarised yourself with those tools, you can start self-experimenting to learn what combinations work best for you, given your unique emotional makeup.”
He practises what he preaches: “Once I detect the emotional response that I want to manage, I know exactly what to do to rein it in.” And with a little effort – and faith in our abilities – we might all do the same.
