Ethan Cross is a world expert in the psychology of emotions, and he has identified a set of tools that can help us maintain our well-being.
Since he was a child, Ethan Cross has been an "observer of emotions" and the often counterproductive ways we deal with our difficult feelings.
"It seemed like we were all just wandering around, occasionally coming across some random Band-Aid-like solution that would help us cope with our emotional lives."
"Sometimes our improvised tools would help, and sometimes they would just make things worse."
"It all felt very random, isolating and inefficient," he says.
As a psychologist at the University of Michigan and director Emotion and self-control laboratories, Cross now hopes to change this sad state of affairs.
In his new book The Turn: How to Manage Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You, He wants to equip us all with a set of tools that will help us deal more constructively with our ups and downs.
Cross spoke with science journalist David Robson about the benefits of "negative" feelings, creating safe emotional states and emotional oases, and the surprising benefits of distractions.
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What are the most common misconceptions about emotions?
One of the biggest misconceptions is that there are good emotions and bad emotions, that we should strive to live lives completely devoid of bad emotions.
This is a big mistake, as far as I'm concerned: we evolved the ability to experience all emotions for a reason.
Bes can motivate us to correct injustice if there is still a chance to make something right.
Sadness can lead us to introspection and finding new meanings from situations that have fundamentally changed.
Envy can motivate us to strive for the things we want to achieve.
In the right measure, and that's the key phrase - all emotions are useful.
One way to illustrate this argument is to think of physical pain, which is as negative an emotional state as it gets.
Many of us long to eliminate any kind of physical pain from our lives.
But some people are born without the ability to experience pain, due to a genetic anomaly, and these children end up dying younger than people who can experience pain.
If their hand ends up in the fire, there is no signal to tell them to pull that hand out.
The same principle applies to all our negative emotions.
It is often liberating for people to realize that they do not have to strive to live a life free of any negativity.
What you should strive to achieve is just keeping these emotional experiences under control, and I think that's a much more sustainable goal.
I think it depends on the aspects of our emotional experiences we are talking about.
We often have no control over the thoughts and feelings that are automatically triggered as we go about our daily lives, but we can control our interaction with those thoughts and feelings once they are activated, and therein lies the potential for emotion regulation.
But if you think you can't do something, then you won't even make the effort to try it.
If you think that exercising won't keep you in better physical shape, for example, why on earth would you put the effort into it?
And if you don't think you can use different strategies to manage your emotions, why would you ever use them?
So how can we change our reactions to difficult feelings?
Listening to music is an example of an underutilized tool.
If you ask people why they listen to music, almost 100 percent of participants will tell you they love how they feel while doing it.
But then if you look at what people do when they're having trouble with their own emotions, like the last time they were angry, nervous, or sad - only a small percentage of them say they use music.
That's just one category of what I call "shifters," which are tools that can change your emotions.
And once you discover how they work, you can become a much greater strategist when using them in your life.
You also describe how changing your environment can improve your well-being. We could experience this on vacation, but how do we apply this principle to everyday life?
As you say, many people feel refreshed when they go to a completely different place that is devoid of work associations.
But we can't always go on that vacation, and I like to remind people that there are often places locally that can change our mood.
We often talk about bonding with other people, and when things aren't going well, being in that person's presence can be a source of comfort and resilience.
But it also turns out that we get attached to physical places in our environment.
Mine include the botanical garden near my house, the teahouse where I wrote my first book, and one of my offices on campus.
From the moment I find myself in that space, I have only positive associations that help me manage my own emotions.
We don't have to choose between accepting or avoiding our emotions; we can be flexible and apply both.
I think those places are very similar to the safe houses you have in spy movies or books.
We have all these safe houses in our lives and we want to strategically go to them when we have a problem.
It is one way to manage ourselves from the outside in.
You can also arrange your own environment yourself.
We know that plants and images of green spaces can be fertile.
So do photos of our loved ones.
We did a study where we exposed people to images of their loved ones struggling with a problem.
We found that this increases the speed at which they recover from that experience.
Is the goal to be more aware of what we can do to change how we feel - instead of just leaving it to chance?
One of my hopes for this book is that we can get people to be much more conscious of incorporating these tools into their lives.
I was surprised to discover that distraction and avoidance can be a productive way to deal with emotions. How is that?
Avoidance, the active effort to not think about something by taking your full attention elsewhere or engaging in another activity, is generally dismissed as an unhealthy tool.
And there is no doubt that it is hchronic avoidance of things associated with negative outcomes, it is not an approach I would advise anyone to adopt.
But we don't have to choose between accepting or avoiding our emotions, we can be flexible and apply both.
Exists Research which shows that people who are effective at both accepting and avoiding emotions, at expressing and repressing them, often go through good in the long run.
What might that look like in our lives?
Let's say something "triggered" you.
You become emotional about an argument you had with someone.
One approach might be to deal with it on the spot and in the moment, but it also makes sense to take a break from thinking about or dealing with the problem.
I say this as a man who, generally speaking, prefers to face things in the moment, just to get to the heart of the matter and move on.
But sometimes I've benefited from letting go of something completely unrelated for a day and then coming back to the problem later.
I could go back to it and realize that it's not a problem at all, or realize that the intensity of the problem has actually been reduced and I can approach it from a broader perspective.
How do we deal with this "happiness killer" called comparing ourselves to others?
We often hear that we shouldn't compare ourselves to other people.
Good luck with that!
We are social beings, part of the way we find meaning for ourselves and our own place in this world is to compare ourselves to others.
It's true that we often engage in the kind of comparisons that make us feel bad about ourselves, but you can reframe them so that they work in your favor instead of against you.
If I find that someone has performed better at something than me, I can say to myself, well, he did it, so why shouldn't I?
And then that almost becomes a goal for something I can strive for.
Do you have a favorite strategy that you usually turn to in difficult times?
When I'm struggling, my first line of defense is to use distanced self-talk.
I will use my own name and the second-person pronoun you to quietly guide myself through the problem, as if I were advising a friend.
And then I will embark on a mental journey through time.
I'll ask myself, 'How will I feel about this one day, 10 days, 10 months from now?'
And I will also go back in time.
'How does this compare to other difficult times I've been through?'
Often these tools get me to an emotionally acceptable state, but if they're not enough, then I'll turn to my emotional counselors, people in my support network who are quite skilled at empathizing with me, as well as counseling.
And I'll take a walk in some green space or visit one of my emotional oases.
*Ethan Cross's book The Turn: Managing your emotions so they don't manage you It was published in the UK by Vermilion and in the US by Crown.
** David Robson is an award-winning science journalist and author. His latest book, The Laws of Connection: 13 Social Strategies That Will Transform Your Life , was published in the UK by Canongate, and in the US and Canada by Pegasus Books in June 2024.
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