Emotional control: how to harness your feelings for a happier, calmer life

Ethan Kross always shared a special bond with his grandmother, Dora, whom he considered a “second mom”. She lived just a few blocks away from his childhood home, and when he came by each day after school, she would shower him with kisses and lavish him with food – matzo balls, chicken broth and noodle pudding.

Despite their closeness, she would barely ever talk about the horrors she had endured during the Nazi occupation in Eyshishok, modern-day Lithuania, before she had emigrated to the US and found a home in New York. How did she rebuild her life to become such a stable figure for her family? And why did she never discuss her trauma, except on specific occasions like Holocaust Memorial Day? “I found it puzzling, how she could mostly avoid speaking about those events but still be OK,” says Kross.

Such questions would follow Kross through his adolescence; as an experimental psychologist and director of the Emotion and Self Control Lab at the University of Michigan, he has spent his career seeking an answer. “Emotions are full of richness and utility, but they can also get the better of us when we are most vulnerable,” he says. “So why does that happen? And what can we do to handle them more effectively? That’s what I went to graduate school to figure out.”

Kross’s new book, Shift: How to manage your emotions so they don’t manage you, is the product of all he has learned. He also isn’t the only psychologist fascinated by the idea of mastering our…