Stateside Podcast: A neuroscientist's tips for managing emotions

As humans, let’s just acknowledge: we have so many feelings. Sometimes, those emotions give us really important information about a situation. Other times, they are so overwhelming, they become paralyzing.

But the problem, Ethan Kross told Stateside, is not the emotion itself—it's what we do with it. Kross is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, and he recently released the book Shift: Managing Your Emotions — So They Don't Manage You.

It’s all about simple steps for redirecting the brain so that emotion serves its important role in biology without getting in the way of the things we need to do everyday.

At first glance, it might seem that thinking and feeling are two entirely different systems in our brain. But according to Kross, it's a mistake to think that thinking and feeling are on opposite ends of a seesaw.

"The truth is, our thoughts play a powerful role in modulating the emotions we're feeling," Kross said.

Understanding the influence of thoughts on emotions, and vice versa, he explained, can help people harness their thoughts to impact their emotions. Take, for example, a bug bite. While you can't control the itchiness a bite causes, you can control whether or not you choose to scratch it.

You could, as Kross did when he and his wife woke up with bed bug bites on vacation, remind yourself that scratching those bites can lead to serious infection and work on distracting yourself from the itchy sensations.

"Once [emotions] are triggered, that is our playground," Kross added. "That is when we can get in there with our knowledge of how to shift our emotions around and push them in the directions that we want to push them in, if we're so inclined."

As for how we push them in the right direction, Kross said he has a few strategies that he uses to feel his emotions without letting them take over his behavior.

1. Strategic avoidance

Avoidance might get a bad rap, but Kross said it can be useful to take a break from something that's triggering an emotional reaction and coming back to it when you're in a better space to deal with the issue at hand.

2. Reframing and mental time travel

Life's struggles can feel really overwhelming when we are right in the middle of them. But when we pull back a little, and put them in the context of our whole lives, we can see that they might not be as big as we imagined. Kross said he often thinks of his own grandparents' stories of surviving the Holocaust to help him put things into perspective.

3. Cue the music

Music has the power to shift our senses. And for many people, Kross included, it can help boost positive emotions.

Hear Ethan Kross's full conversation with April Baer on the Stateside podcast.