New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Secrets That Will Make You Emotionally Intelligent

The problem with emotions is not that we have them, but that they’re allowed to operate unsupervised.

You’d think we’d have figured out by now how to not be held hostage by a rogue’s gallery of feelings that behave like the cast of a badly written soap opera trapped inside your skull. Emotions are like a chaotic group chat and you’re just trying to mute it without accidentally blocking your own capacity for joy.

But here’s the really annoying thing: emotions aren’t just intrusive thoughts pretending to be important. They matter. They’re useful. They’re not just evolutionary mistakes, like wisdom teeth or reality TV. They’re how we know something is wrong. They’re like those annoying, blinking dashboard lights in your car that you ignore until the engine explodes. For instance:

• Anxiety, the TSA of the psyche. Feels like emotional hypochondria. But it also means you care about something. Like your job, your friends, your family.
• Anger is rarely productive and mostly just cardio for your adrenal glands. But sometimes it helps you draw a boundary you didn’t know you needed.
• Even guilt is just your conscience knocking, saying, “Try and be less of a jerk in the future, alright?”

Now it would be nice if they all had an off switch. I know, I know: shifting your emotions on command sounds about as realistic as trying to shift the weather by thinking really hard about the sun…

But it can be done. And we’re about to learn how.

Ethan Kross is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. His book is “Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don’t Manage You.”

Let’s get to it…

 

Sensation

Sensations are a quick, easy, effective way to change your mood.

I’m talking about music. About movement. About the minor miracle of biting into something that tastes like happiness compressed into carbohydrate form. About chasing a dog around a room until it turns into a yelping, tail-wagging symbol of joy. (Dogs are furry antidepressants with tongues.)

So simple… What’s the catch?

And that brings us to the real issue: cost. Because sensation, like every tool, can be misused. Eating three donuts every time your boss sends a passive-aggressive email? That’s less comfort and more cardiology. Drinking a glass of wine after a difficult day is fine; drinking until your memories develop a skip-function is less so. The danger lies not in sensation itself, but in our inability (or refusal) to consider its consequences.

There is a middle path here, paved not with enlightenment but with pragmatism: choose sensations with low overhead.

Now some will say sensation is a cheap trick. It’s shallow. Honestly, if distracting yourself with pleasurable things is “shallow,” then slap a snorkel on me and toss me in the kiddie pool. You’re not weak for wanting to feel good; you’re smart. You’re emotionally literate enough to understand that sometimes, healing isn’t a journey. It’s a dance break.

Sensation, for all its simplicity, works better than most of what’s in your coping toolbox because it reminds you that there’s more to life than the story playing in your head. There’s rhythm. There’s sweetness. There’s warmth and fur and basslines and ice cream. There’s a world outside your brain. And sometimes the best way to find it is to stop thinking and just feel something else.

(To learn more about the neuroscience of emotions, click here.)

Unfortunately, we can’t always blast music or play fetch with Fido. What else works?

 

Self-Talk

Formally, it’s called “distanced self-talk”, and it’s stupidly effective and simple.

Speak to yourself in the third person. Really. That’s it. You’ll sound crazy but, ironically, this is the path back to sanity.

When we talk to ourselves in the first person, we’re like journalists embedded too deep in the war zone of our own heads. There’s no objectivity.

But third person? Third person is an editorial. A narrative overlay. It implies structure. And with structure comes the glimmer of control. It allows the brain to shift from immersed to observant, from Hamlet to Harold Bloom, from “I AM PAIN” to “Let us examine the construct of this suffering.”

Instead of thinking “I’m losing it,” you say, “Charlie is losing it.” See what you did there? You just transformed from the sweaty protagonist of a bad indie drama into a detached narrator. It’s a cognitive sleight of hand. It sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous. But it’s also scientifically sound.

It’s the same suffering, but now with a higher vantage point and a lifeline to objectivity. Think of distanced self-talk as emotional outsourcing. That tiny grammatical shift creates just enough room to wedge in a little logic. Maybe even some compassion, if you angle it sideways.

(For more on using distanced self-talk, click here.)

Talking to yourself in the third person too crazy for you? No problem. We’ve got something even crazier…

 

Time Travel

Time travel lets you escape the tyranny of now. Because, emotionally, now is LOUD. Now is all CAPS LOCK.

Of course, I’m not talking about hopping in a DeLorean or stepping through a wormhole. I’m talking about the low-rent, DIY kind of time travel. The kind you do in your own head, when you’re trying to keep yourself from losing your grip on reality over life’s latest tragedy.

Let’s start with traveling to the past, shall we? It’s you, asking yourself, “Haven’t I felt like this before?”

Yes, you have felt like this before. Many, many times as a matter of fact. And back then you were sure you’d never recover. But here you are: employed, sporadically showered, and not in a cave. You survived it. And you’ll survive this too.

There’s a particularly grim solace in looking back on your own emotional track record and realizing how often you’ve been wrong about the permanence of your distress. You thought it would always feel like that. After the breakup. The job rejection. These were terminal conditions. And yet, time, indifferent and miraculous, kept moving.

Time traveling to the past is a reminder that you are not new to pain. You’re not some ingenue in the opera of suffering. You are a seasoned veteran of the human condition.

You can also shoot forward to the future. Future-travel is asking the brutally sobering question: “Will this matter in a week? A month? A year?”

Almost always, the answer is a resounding “No.” Future-you doesn’t even remember what set you off today. (98% of my emotional freak-outs have an expiration date of, like, 48 hours. Tops.)

Why is mental time travel so powerful? It introduces scale. You stop catastrophizing because you remember that you’ve been here before and it was fine. You stop spiraling because future-you won’t even remember this moment unless you choose to tell it as a funny story.

(For more on using time travel to increase happiness, click here.)

Shifting your emotions doesn’t always have to come from inside your head. Sometimes the secret is all around you…

 

Environment

Maybe you can’t think your way out of an emotional rut, but you can trick yourself out of it by changing your environment.

Ever wonder why you suddenly feel more alive in a hotel room? Or why the same to-do list feels impossible in your home, but borderline inspirational when you’re sitting in a mediocre café?

There’s this thing called “state-dependent memory.” Your brain recalls memories better when you’re in the same physiological or emotional state you were in when they happened. Translation? The place you panic in becomes the place you panic best. So congratulations: your living room is a trauma amplifier.

But changing your environment interrupts the script. It also does two other great things:

• It resets your sensory field. Your body gets new data. Sunlight, space, a breeze, not the same recycled air of your shame bunker.
• It creates the illusion of agency. You moved, you did something, therefore you’re not totally helpless. (It’s fake, but fake can work.)

Go around your home and design spaces for focus, rest, or creativity. These are not merely aesthetic choices. They’re psychological war tactics. You are fighting yourself, and your enemy lives in your habits. Stack the terrain in your favor. Arrange the space to foster the emotion you want to feel there.

And do this in advance. Emotional architecture has to be preemptive, not reactive.

Here’s a radical idea: stop making your environment reflect who you are and start making it reflect who you’re trying to become.

(To learn the 6 secrets to dealing with negative thoughts, click here.)

Okay, we’ve done plenty of shifting. Let’s round it all up and learn the most powerful way to change your emotions. And how we usually do it wrong…

 

Sum Up

Here’s how to increase emotional intelligence…

• Sensation: The song, the walk, the mango, the dog. They bring you back to your body, back to the moment, back to a baseline of sanity.
• Self-Talk: Speak to yourself in the third person. That’s right: just like Elmo or The Rock. (Whichever you find more relatable.)
• Time Travel: Next time you’re emotionally constipated and ready to Hulk-smash the universe over something that won’t matter next Tuesday, hop in your mental TARDIS. Glance backward for proof you’ve survived worse. Peer forward for proof this is nothing. Either way, it beats stewing in the molten idiocy of the present.
• Environment: You feel stuck? You’re not stuck. You’re surrounded. Your environment is not neutral. It is a psychological co-conspirator.

And the final technique?

Human contact. Yes, that terrifying thing where you talk to someone. Not text. Talk. With your actual voice hole.

Problem is, when our emotions get the best of us, we usually choose the wrong people to talk to.

We often pick the Listener Zombies. Those sweet, well-meaning souls who nod and murmur “Oh no, that’s awful!” They’re lovely. They’re calming. And they leave you exactly where they found you: emotionally stuck in a cul-de-sac with no exit.

Or worse, we pick the Advice Tyrants. You know, the ones who leap in with solutions before you’ve even finished your sentence. These folks are allergic to ambiguity in a way that should be studied by neuroscientists and possibly the Pentagon. They don’t want to understand your feelings; they want to terminate them.

So what kind of friend do you need? The Dual-Wielding Emotional Ninja. The friend who can listen, let you ugly cry and do your full HBO drama arc, and then help you reframe it without making you feel like a failure. They don’t jump in too early with “solutions,” but they also don’t leave you stewing in your own rage-brine until you pickle.

They validate and offer perspective. These types are your emotional Avengers. Assemble them. Cherish them. Make a list of the people in your life who can do this for you. Yes, an actual list, just like emergency contacts.

Sensation, self-talk, time travel, environment and talking with people. They can all help. And you should give each a shot. Emotional distress is not a one-size-fits-all situation. You need a whole toolbox. One of those ridiculous, overstuffed, black toolboxes with everything from tiny screwdrivers to whatever that weird hooky thing is for.

Because human emotion is not user-friendly. It’s a 1978 Chrysler LeBaron with three flat tires, and a cassette deck permanently jammed with an old mixtape from your worst breakup. But having a range of options gives you something to fall back on besides crying in the fetal position while watching a third consecutive season of a reality show where rich people yell about countertops.

Because sometimes the tiniest thing works. Sometimes one little strategy is enough to shift the vibe. And that’s all it needs to do. Just keep you afloat. It’s not about mastery. It’s about margin. Breathing room.

Enough to get to tomorrow. Enough to remember that maybe that mixtape isn’t all heartbreak songs. There’s a good one in there too. Track seven, probably. Right after the part where it clicks, hums, and then plays a few bars of something unexpectedly beautiful.