Shift: Managing Your Emotions—So They Don't Manage You

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use.

Chapter 3 explores how sensory experiences serve as powerful, effortless tools for shifting emotional states. The chapter presents neuroscientific evidence demonstrating why sensory pathways offer a uniquely efficient avenue for emotional regulation. The sensory cortex, one of the brain’s evolutionarily oldest regions, processes information from the five senses and communicates with emotional networks through ancient neural pathways, allowing sensory inputs to trigger emotional responses within milliseconds—often before they are registered in conscious awareness. This adaptation evolved to help humans avoid dangers and remember important experiences, with emotion serving as the “glue” that binds sensory information to memory. 

Kross contextualizes this mechanism within the “Law of Least Work” (61), a cross-disciplinary principle asserting that organisms naturally gravitate toward paths requiring minimal physical and mental effort. This explains why sensory regulation tools often succeed where more cognitively demanding strategies fail—particularly during periods of stress when cognitive resources are already depleted. Sensory pathways bypass the prefrontal cortex’s executive function requirements, allowing for emotional shifts without taxing the brain’s already limited cognitive resources.

The chapter positions sensory regulation as an underutilized yet highly accessible approach that complements existing frameworks, offering what Kross terms “emotional side doors” that can be opened strategically to shift between emotional states (66).