Let's say you've gone through a breakup. You're heartbroken, confused and angry. What do you do with all those feelings?
That's up to you. You have the power to "turn the intensity up or down on an emotional response" in a way that's useful to you, says psychologist and neuroscientist Ethan Kross, author of a new book published this week, Shift: Managing Your Emotions — So They Don't Manage You.
The ability to regulate your feelings is important. "Emotions are valuable in helping us navigate the world," Kross says. "They become less useful when they're experienced too intensely or not intensely enough."
So whether you want to deep-dive into an emotion or put it to the side for now, there are tools you can use to "prolong or shorten the amount of time we spend in that [emotional] response, or go from one emotion to another one," Kross says.
Kross, who is also the author of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, shares insights from his new book. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The idea of shifting your emotions around goes against the common wisdom that confronting your feelings in the moment is the only way to let them go. What do you think about that?
It's a myth that when we're experiencing some big emotion, we've got to get to the bottom of it right away.
There is value in doing that at times, but there is also value in strategically avoiding things for a certain period of time. For example, when I am provoked by a difficult conversation, I have found that immersing myself in work for a few hours or even a few days can take the sting out of the problem.
You don't have to choose between only confronting immediately or avoiding chronically. You can go back and forth and do whatever's useful.
How do you know when to face or push away your emotions in the moment?
If you're able to access the emotions accompanying this problem, work through them, find some resolution and reach a sense of closure that allows you to move on, then great, keep doing that.
But if you find you're trying to work through the problem and not making much progress — you're turning it over again and again and it's not making you feel the way you want to feel — that can be a cue for you to take some time away and come back later.
Your book includes many tools to help people deal with their feelings, including talking to a friend. How helpful is that?
It's common to talk to our network about problems we're experiencing. And a lot of people think the way to be supportive of someone else is to allow them to express their emotions.
There's been a lot of research on the emotional consequences of that. What we've learned is that it's not that simple.
Venting sometimes can make things worse. Sometimes you leave the conversation just as upset, if not more upset than when you began, because you've just harped on all the negative things.
What tends to work better?
First, share what you're going through. It's important to get it out, so that other person can learn about your experience and empathize with you. But then at a certain point in the conversation, the other person will help you reframe your experience.
How can someone do that without it coming off like, "Oh, just be positive!"?
[If I were the friend listening], I might ask them what they would say to me if I was going through that experience, or share how I've dealt with similar kinds of experiences.
I might ask them whether they've dealt with anything similar like this in the past and how did that work out?
We have trouble accessing solutions when we're caught up in a big negative emotional response. And that's where an emotional adviser, so to speak, can be an incredibly valuable guide.
In your book, you say that changing your environment can also affect your emotions. How does that work?
We often talk about how positive attachment figures provide a sense of comfort and support that help us deal with adversity. Well, we can also get securely and positively attached to places. And when we visit those environments, they can help emotionally restore us.
So think about those safe spaces in your life that you can visit to help you feel better. For me, it's the local teahouse where I wrote my first book and the local arboretum and one of my offices on campus.
Tell me about WOOP, a motivational strategy developed by the social scientist Gabriele Oettingen. It stands for wish, outcome, obstacle, plan. How can this tool help us create goals around our emotions?
This technique can help us overcome the obstacles that get in the way of achieving our goals [including ones that have to do with emotional regulation]. For example, not getting so angry that you blow up or not going down the rabbit hole of rumination and despair.
Let's say my goal is to not get overly upset when one of my kids doesn't listen to me. That's my W, my wish.
The O is my outcome. If my wish is fulfilled, I'm going to have a better relationship with my kid. That's energizing, right? That's going to now fuel me to pursue my wish not to overreact.
The second O is my obstacle: fixating on the disrespectful thing that was said and responding in a way that might lead me to act out.
And then comes the P, which is my plan. If I find myself fixating on the disrespectful thing that was said, then I'll take a timeout for 10 minutes and come back to the situation.
What makes this plan so magical is that it takes the thinking out of the regulating. You know exactly what to do because you've rehearsed this.
The digital story was edited by Meghan Keane and Clare Marie Schneider. The visual editor is Beck Harlan. We'd love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
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