Name: Manage your emotions, in 9 minutes
Uploaded: 2025-08-12T18:37:30.000Z
Duration: 7 min 38 s
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Questions surrounding how we can manage our emotions are questions that we have been grappling with, likely for as long as we have been roaming the planet in our present form.

If you turn the clock back, our ancestors invented a technique called trepanation, and what it involved doing was carving holes in people's skulls.

In the Middle Ages, it wasn't uncommon for folks to have their blood released to cure different kinds of emotional maladies.

If we fast forward to the 1930s, a Portuguese physician invents a technique that's commonly referred to as the frontal lobotomy, and it was viewed as such an advance that it actually won the Nobel Prize in medicine.

These different interventions speak to the fact that the inability to manage big, dysregulated emotional states is a significant concern.

One of the things that people often get wrong about emotions is that we think of our negative emotions as our enemies.

We evolve the capacity to experience negative emotions for a reason, and when we are not attuned to how to manage those emotions effectively, the consequences can be quite severe.

And they're an important guide that we can use, and the good news is that guide does not come with ice picks and cranial drills and the like.

I'm a professor of psychology and management and organizations at the University of Michigan.

My latest book is called Shift, Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You.

So I'm a proponent of the belief that the emotions we experience in everyday life, they're not good or bad, they are information.

When we talk about emotion regulation, we often reflexively focus on the negatives.

But what we also know is that managing your emotions well isn't just about reducing negative outcomes.

So being in tune with your emotions, that's linked with heightened performance at work.

It can predict flourishing in relationships as well as improved health and wellbeing.

From the individual all the way up to culture more broadly.

When you bring groups together who have diametrically opposed views, this is a place where you want to be able to allow those individuals to manage their emotions more effectively to come up with compromises.

In many ways, I think we are living through a golden era of research and emotion.

The beautiful thing about this science is that we have revealed dozens of different tools that exist.

And you can divide these different kinds of emotional shifters as falling into two broad categories.

One type of inside out shifter is called perspective shifting.

What perspective shifting allows us to do is reframe the experiences we're going through that are driving emotions we don't want to have to quell those emotional states.

On the surface, it seems so logical and simple.

Change the way you think, change the way you feel.

And yet, when you turn the volume up on a negative emotion, we often try to think differently about our circumstances, but we often fail.

Sometimes we actually reframe what we're thinking about in ways that simply make us feel worse.

So let's say I'm provoked by someone at work.

I might start going into the situation and hyper-focusing on what they said to me in ways that only make me feel worse.

The key is understanding how to harness this capacity so that you make this tool of the mind work for you rather than against you.

So one science-based tool that you can use to shift your perspective is a tool called distance self-talk.

And what distance self-talk involves doing is using your name and the second person pronoun you to silently work through your problems.

Most of us have the experience of finding it much easier to give advice to other people than to take that advice ourselves.

When you use your own name and you, it's automatically shifting your perspective.

It's getting you to think about your own problems like they're happening to someone else.

And that makes it a lot easier for us to give ourselves sound, emotionally intelligent advice that is often what we need to propel ourselves forward.

So one of the ways that we can shift from the outside in is through our relationships with other people.

So if you think about organizations, they have a board of advisors.

These are people who are carefully selected to steer that company to success.

The same is true when it comes to our own lives.

We all possess the capacity to build our own curated board of advisors.

So what characterizes a good emotional advisor?

They start off by listening and they work with you to validate your experience, to normalize it, to empathize with you.

Once they learn about your situation, they then start working with you to broaden your perspective, to help you cognitively work through the problem so that you can actually move on with your life, which is often our goal.

Other people are in a great position to do this because the problems we're experiencing aren't happening to them.

They have an objectivity that we often lack.

So what I love about this science is that it's also relevant to teaching you how to be a better emotional advisor to others.

There is research which shows that you can catch an emotion within seconds from other people around you.

So being attentive to how you impact others emotionally and how they have the potential to impact you is essential to being adept at managing your own emotional life.

Some people think that they can't control their emotions and they're not entirely wrong.

I don't have control over the emotions that are often triggered throughout the day.

But once those emotions are triggered, I have enormous control over the trajectory of the response.

There are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

You've got to learn about the different emotional shifters that exist.

You have to start playing with those tools and seeing which are the ones that really work well for me given the emotion regulation goals that I have.

Because if you go around thinking that you cannot control your emotions, then why on earth would you ever try to do so?

And what we know from the science is if you don't try to control your emotions, if you don't think you can, the trajectory of your life is going to look a lot different and a lot more negative than if you think you actually can.