The Search for the Well-Tempered Soul

As my elder daughter and I were heading toward the woods for a walk, I meekly apologized that I was, for reasons beyond my introspective access, in a low mood. My daughter recommended a mood shift so that we might enjoy our time together. Perhaps this was, as she might put it, “a download from the universe,” since by chance (chance!?) I had just started reading Ethan Kross's Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You. I feel good about this review assignment because even though I have not studied human affect beyond its cognitive manifestations (e.g., Baumeister et al., 2003), I can claim some street cred on the matter, having co-taught a lecture course on “The Psychology and Philosophy of Happiness” (Krueger, 2016), and having attended, with mixed feelings, the first conference on positive psychology in Akumal in the Yucatán in 1999.The question raised in Shift has been nagging at humanity since the dawn of self-consciousness. As self-conscious creatures, we humans have evolved a susceptibility to the idea—the illusion—that we have (or “are”) a fragile ego hosted by a body running multiple self-regulatory systems, with most of its operations being unknowable, incomprehensible, and uncontrollable (Goel, 2022; Krueger et al., 2017). Our emotions, and other types of affect such as moods, are the body's way of telling us—the ego—that something important is going on and that we may want to act in order to survive. Although emotions speak a crystal-clear language, they also have their own opacity. We know when they demand to be felt, yet we often struggle to fully understand just what exactly they want from us. Are they well calibrated to our living needs, and if not, how might we moderate them? In Shift, Ethan Kross lays out an evidence-based roadmap to illuminate the opportunities and limitations of self-regulation. The presented evidential base is of high quality and up to date, and its delivery is enhanced by engaging, if lengthy, anecdotes.The quest for a well-tempered soul can be understood as a dialectic play between two principles, the Apollonian and the Dionysian (Nietzsche, 1872). If we lean too far into the former, we will find ourselves reduced to a kind of Mr. Spock; if we lean too far into the latter, we drown in our own intoxication. That said, with its quest for the well-tempered soul, Shift's mission is largely Apollonian—perhaps meta-Apollonian in the sense that it aims for the two gods to be living together harmoniously in the human mind. Thus, the Delphic advice of “nothing in excess” does not quite hit the mark. A person who never experiences strong emotions would be stunted. Kross tells the poignant story of his grandmother, who survived the horrors of genocide, raised a family, built a community, and flourished deep into old age. Where many victims were lastingly traumatized, this tough and wise woman found a way to manage her emotional life by neither suppressing her sorrow and grief nor allowing it to overwhelm her. The management tool that worked for her was to set aside certain times, such as the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day, to experience and share her sorrow. Although this may sound like an overly cerebral solution (“I will cry on the 27th of Nisan”), we can imagine that this strategy works well if it is practiced (which is one of Shift's key recommendations) and if it is supported by social norms and expectations.The three major ecological properties of emotional expression are frequency, intensity, and duration, and the first is a question of balance. Let us emote, but not too often and not too rarely! The second property may submit to the Delphic advice to not overdo anything. However, any answer to the question of intensity depends on the emotion's frequency. If grandma leans into her sorrow once a year, she can emote more strongly than if the emotion were scheduled for every Monday morning. As to duration, the situation is simpler in that a healthy organism's emotional episodes are brief, with a sudden onset, an early spike, and a tapering dénouement. It is the lasting negative emotional states that require therapeutic interventions, and these lie beyond Shift's purview.Shift focuses on everyday opportunities for reasonably healthy people to move their emotions and moods away from the negative and toward the positive while not losing sight of the signal function so characteristic of evolved emotional systems. The narrative progresses conventionally from the proximal and specific to the distal and general. Closest to home lies managing the sensory input, followed by directing attention, shifting perspective and interpretation, shaping the space that surrounds us, deftly using the presence of other people, and finally, respecting and navigating the wily currents of the cultural context.A few examples illustrate this progression. As to sensory input, play some of your favorite music to lift the emotional boat (it need not be Journey), or better yet, go into Nature for she will hit multiple senses all at once. As to attentional selection and processing, make creative use of distractors without seeking outright or long-term avoidance of triggering stimuli. At the positive end of the emotional spectrum, cultivate the art of savoring (not elaborated in Shift, but see Lyubomirsky & Layous, 2013) so that even when you fall off a cliff, you can still marvel at the beauty of the flowers clinging to the crags (it's a Zen thing). As to perspective changing, put some distance between yourself and what appears to be happening to you. One way to do this is to imagine what advice you'd give to someone else in the situation you yourself are in right now.Another way to create distance is to physically locomote. Given the resources, we can vote with our feet. The Irish did that after the potato blight, and Professor Santos escaped from Yale University after burning out from teaching a massive course on happiness. It is easy to see how such zooming out (literally, in this case) is a confounded affair and that firm conclusions must remain elusive. If the Santos story is to be probative, we should be interested to know whether the good professor recovered from her crisis, and if she did, to what extent the improvement was due to the retreat to Cambridge per se and not just a restored life–work balance. Shift stays away, just barely, from the corny idea of finding your “happy place.” We all know that we can never go home again, but we can go to Cozumel or Coney Island. It matters that the destination offers natural beauty, but perhaps the decisive element is psychological distance—that recognition that the place is not “here.” Even Cambridge, Massachusetts, might do.There is a common core of distance finding and the perspective shift discussed above. But even if you stay put, we are told, you can modify your situation by removing triggers of desire and its attendant emotions, as the author reportedly does when he sends his dinner guests home with doggie bags of half-eaten pizza, thereby putting distance between himself and the carboniferous treat. This tactic refers back to the idea of controlling one's sensory input. Incidentally, it should be made clear that this sort of sensation control does not constitute self-binding, as the latter admits sensation while blocking the behavioral response (Elster, 2000).Shift then covers some well-trodden territory of human sociality. Since the days of Allport the Elder (Allport, 1924), we have learned much about the ease with which emotions—and particularly negative ones—travel from one person to the next (Kelly et al., 2016). Emotional contagion is adaptive as it underwrites group cohesion and cooperation. Thanks to its automaticity, contagion is difficult to regulate. It comes in handy, though, when in times of emotional trouble one seeks social support and empathy. Venting to and gossiping about others are crude but useful heuristics when looking for a shift; they bring relief but risk alienating third parties, such as the targets of gossip. Shift cautions that emotional sharing is but a first step. The second step is to sit back (distance!) and consider what creative solutions are available so that the person can move on.The zooming journey ends—though it does not culminate—with comments on culture. This is a rather weak section, for what can be said about a person's emotional self-regulation at the cultural level? Sure, local culture is the water in which we human fish swim, and cultural assumptions rarely break into consciousness; it might take a physical move, be it from a shtetl to Brooklyn or from New Bedford to New Haven, but migration does not guarantee happiness. Well-being tends to be lower among immigrants than among the residents of the host location (Arpino & De Valk, 2017). Yet immigrants tend to have greater self-concept clarity, which is something to feel good about (Adam et al., 2018). Shift touches on this point when discussing the potentially beneficent role of social comparisons. Such comparisons need not be downers if the comparer knows what lessons to learn from the comparisons’ outcomes. This is as true at the interindividual as it is at the intercultural level.Shift is more about local culture than it is about grand sweeps, such as the tired distinction between individualism and collectivism. Seekers of emotional self-regulation are advised to develop their own routines and rituals, advice that jibes with the general tenet that regulatory if–then rules must be well practiced in order to work. Lastly, there is the general point that cultural competence and embeddedness encourage compliance, conformity, and cooperation. This is good and well, but it dodges the question of what people need to do to stand out, rebel, and self-actualize, that is, to be free (Krueger, “La Vie en Révolte,” this issue).Shift concludes with a return to the theme that self-regulation, at its best, is routinized. Having become automatic, self-regulation liberates attention and working memory to focus on more interesting things at hand. “The goal is,” Kross observes, “to be able to shift your emotions easily and effortlessly—almost habitually, the way you buckle your seat belt without even thinking” (p. 201). One way to get there, he suggests, is to follow Oettingen's WOOP scheme by visualizing what you Want, visualizing the desired Outcome, visualizing potential Obstacles, and Planning accordingly. Kross seems to realize that this is a hyperrational way of thinking about human action and that it is applicable only to standardized, recurring, and foreseeable situations. Emotions often take us by surprise, however, which is their way of frustrating the rationalist's best efforts to stay in charge. As to WOOP, there are reasons to leave the champagne bottle corked. In a meta-analysis, Wang et al. (2021) found a positive effect of about g = .3 but also of evidence of publication bias. The two largest studies produced very small effects: g = .09 with N = 9,619 and g = .06 with N = 4,290. Self-regulators in the wild may wish for stronger medicine.It is unfortunate that Shift fails to transcend the traditional dualist frame, where a conscious ego-self seeks to harness an autonomous emotion-self. Success in self-regulation is still sought in the victory of the ego, as expressed in the book title's byline. If we take this dualism seriously and accept the image of two battling selves, we should not be blind to the emotional self's creative ways to fight back. Everyone is familiar with the experience of conscientiously following self-help advice (ever since Smiles, 1859) only to find that affect asserts its interests just when the ego is poised to declare its own supremacy. Shift acknowledges this dynamic in the context of affect suppression, but it seems likely that the same dynamic extends to any and perhaps all attempts to tame the passions with reason. Moving away from the ego-as-master narrative as David Hume famously counseled (see epigraph), life may be best lived—and enjoyed—in the interplay of the two self-systems. Let us follow the ancient Greeks, who knew that both Apollo and Dionysos demand their due.