You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's Mariel.

I was working from home the other day, and I had a little time before an interview,

so I decided to peel some potatoes for a recipe.

Well, I cut my finger pretty badly.

It hurt, a lot, and took a while to stop bleeding.

I had to jump on an interview minutes later.

And it turns out the incident was a good starting point for our guest, Ethan Cross.

He's a psychology professor at the University of Michigan.

And he pointed out, we as humans rely on pain to protect us.

If you didn't experience physical pain a few minutes ago,

you might have just continued peeling and gone through your finger, and it might have been a lot,

lot worse. So physical pain serves a function, right? You probably retracted your hand. Did you scream? I didn't scream. I definitely cursed.

He says we can apply this same concept to emotions.

All emotions, even the quote unquote bad ones, provide us with information that can be useful.

They become less useful when they're experienced too intensely or not intensely enough

or for too long, not long enough. Ethan is the author of a book called Shift, Manage Your Emotions,

so they don't manage you. On this episode of Life Kit, he gives us research-backed ways to process

our emotions without getting stuck in them forever forever and also to shift or move between them

as needed.

The book is called shift. What does it mean to shift emotions? So shift, it refers to turning the intensity

up or down on an emotional response.

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