Managing emotions by shifting, not suppressing

Executive overview

Triggers are unavoidable. What determines emotional outcomes is how you engage with an emotion once it fires. Emotional flexibility — the ability to both approach and avoid strategically — outperforms either extreme alone.

Ethan Kross calls the act of intentionally redirecting emotions "shifting." A toolkit of "shifters" lets you increase or decrease intensity, shorten or lengthen duration, or move from one emotional state to another entirely.

Emotional fitness, like physical fitness, requires a varied toolkit — no single tool works for every person or every situation.

The myth of universal approach

• Chronic avoidance predicts poor outcomes; that data is solid.
• The error is concluding the opposite — that you must always approach and work through emotions immediately.
• Approach and avoidance are different muscles. Being skilled at both, and knowing when to use each, is the strongest predictor of resilience.
• Forcing confrontation in the heat of the moment often backfires, especially in interpersonal conflicts where the other person needs time to cool down.
• Taking hours or days away before re-engaging often dissolves the problem entirely, or substantially reduces its intensity.

What shifting is

• Shifting = deliberately altering the trajectory of an emotion after it fires.
• You can push an emotion in four directions: increase or decrease intensity, lengthen or shorten duration, or move to a different emotional state.
• Emotions are tools — functional responses to situations. The problem is they are unwieldy; without management they can overshoot or misdirect.
• The playground for change is not preventing the trigger but choosing how to engage once the emotion is activated.

Attention-based shifters

• Distraction: engage a genuinely immersive activity that prevents attention returning to the trigger — buys time to re-equilibrate.
• Mental time travel forward: ask how you will feel about this next week, month, or year. Surfaces the near-universal truth that emotional intensity is temporary.
• Mental time travel backward: recall how you or others you know survived comparable or worse adversity. Reframes the current situation in proportion.
• Pre-trigger anchoring: note how you felt in the moments immediately before the trigger hit — interrupts the spiral before it deepens.
• Flexible attention deployment, not rigid approach or avoidance, was the strongest predictor of coping in a study of New York students after 9/11.

Sensory and linguistic shifters

• Music: one of the most underused shifters. The majority of people listen to music for how it makes them feel, yet fewer than 30% use it deliberately when struggling emotionally.
• Build playlists mapped to desired states — energised, calm, focused — and activate them intentionally rather than reactively.
• Listening to sad music when sad extends the state; use it purposefully or choose against it.
• Distance self-talk: coach yourself using "you" or your own name rather than "I." Shifts you into advice-giving mode, making it easier to navigate the problem as you would for a friend.
• First-person pronoun density is a measurable index of emotional immersion; as people work through problems effectively, language naturally shifts toward more distanced forms.
• All senses — taste, touch, smell, sound, sight — carry the potential to shift emotional states when engaged deliberately.

The toolbox principle

• No single tool works for everyone. Meditation, mindfulness, and nature walks are powerful for some and ineffective for others.
• The combination of tools that works in one type of situation may differ from what works in another.
• Emotional fitness resembles physical fitness: it typically requires a varied set of practices, not one exercise repeated forever.
• Recognising this removes self-blame when a celebrated tool does not work for you — other options exist.
• The tools do not have to be effortful. Many of the most effective shifters (time travel, music, distanced language) are simple and fast to deploy once you know they exist.