Kelly talks to University of Michigan Professor Ethan Cross about his new book: “Shift: Managing Your Emotions – So They Don’t Manage You.” 

One of the key ideas in your book is that we are looking for single solutions to emotional regulation and there just isn’t one way to do this correctly. 

“There are no one size fits all solutions for managing our emotions, whether it be anger and anxiety or deep grief. We have these assumptions that there are these one size fits all solutions and that is not borne out in the data. I think few individuals would disagree if I were to say to them, we all have unique emotional lives. This is not a controversial statement. And even my emotional fingerprint is different from my wife’s and my kids. That seems to be a very non-controversial point. So, if that is true, if we have such uniqueness to how we experience the world emotionally, why don’t we embrace the same kind of uniqueness when it comes to managing our emotional lives?” 

One of the more stunning concepts in the book is the idea that avoidance can actually be a healthy shift for us sometimes. 

“We love to simplify things and put them in boxes. I’m very fond of the Einstein quote: ‘We should make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.’ If we try to make them too simple, it gets us in trouble. So, one of the things I do in the book is try to burst some of the myths surrounding shifting. And we just talked about this idea that avoidance is always toxic. It is not. Kelly, I will tell you that I have benefited enormously in my life from embracing the value that avoidance can provide. So, I was raised to not avoid, to approach problems head on. Like you deal with them, you snuff it out as soon as the fire starts to erupt. I’ve learned that that doesn’t always work.” 

Building on this, we don’t always want to be completely focused in the now, in the moment. 

“I spill coffee on myself, that actually happened to me recently, and you get stuck there. Well, one response is to teach people how to bring it back to the moment – on their breathing. We could get stuck in the past: ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I said that and did that. Life is over,’ and you get stuck there, you’re ruminating. Bring it back to the present. That’s one wonderful solution. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. That doesn’t mean you can never focus on the future or past. And it precludes us from harnessing that capacity to actually manage our emotions better. So, I gave you an example of how you can go back in time to help you feel better, to help you shift. You can go forward in time. How are you going to feel about this problem tomorrow, next week, next year, five years from now? That’s a powerful distancing tool.”