Ethan Kross is a world expert in the psychology of emotions, and he has identified a set of tools that can help us to tend our wellbeing.

Ever since he was a child, Ethan Kross has been "an observer of emotion" and the often counter-productive ways that we deal with difficult feelings. "It seemed as if we were all just stumbling along, occasionally finding an accidental or Band-Aid solution to help us manage our emotional lives. Sometimes our improvised tools helped. Sometimes they made things worse. It seemed so haphazard, isolating, and inefficient," he says.

As a psychologist at the University of Michigan and director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory, Kross hopes to change this sorry state of affairs. In his new book Shift: How to Manage Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You, he aims to equip us all with a set of tools that will help us to navigate our ups and downs more constructively.

Kross spoke to science writer David Robson about the benefits of "negative" feelings, creating safe spaces and emotional oases – and the surprising upsides of distraction.

What are the most common misconceptions about emotions?

One big misunderstanding is that there are good emotions and there are bad emotions and that we should strive to live our lives free of all the bad emotions. This is an error, as far as I'm concerned: we evolved the ability to experience all emotions for a reason. Anger can motivate us to correct an injustice if there's still an opportunity to fix things. Sadness can lead us to introspect and make new meaning out of situations that have fundamentally been altered. Envy can motivate us to strive for things that we want to achieve. In the right proportions – that is such a key phrase – all emotions are useful.

One way of driving this point home is to think about physical pain, which is about as negative an emotional state as we can imagine. Many of us yearn to live lives free of any kind of physical pain. But some people are born without the capacity to experience pain, due to a genetic anomaly, and those kids end up dying younger than people who can experience pain. If they get their hand stuck in the fire, there's no signal that tells them to pull the hand away. The same principle is true for all our negative emotions.

People often find it liberating to know that they don't have to strive to live a life without negativity. What you want to strive to achieve is just keeping these emotional experiences in check, and I think that's a much more tenable goal.

Many people believe that their emotions are beyond their control. Where do you think this defeatist attitude comes from? And what are the consequences?

I think it depends on the facet of our emotional experiences that we're talking about. We often don't have control over the thoughts and feelings that are automatically triggered as we live our lives throughout the day, but we can control how we engage with those thoughts and feelings once they're activated, and that's where the promise of emotion regulation resides.

But if you don't think you can do something, then you're not going to make the effort to practice it. If you don't think exercising is going to make you more fit, for example, why on Earth would you devote effort to exercising? And if you don't think that you can use different........

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