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

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of religious discrimination, graphic violence, death, and mental illness.

In the Introduction to Shift, Kross establishes the groundwork for understanding emotions and their management by weaving together personal narrative and scientific overview. Kross opens with his grandmother Dora’s Holocaust survival story, recounting how she and her boyfriend, Izzy, narrowly escaped Nazi execution and survived a brutal betrayal by a Polish farmer, who invited them for dinner only to ambush them with militia. Her strategy for coping—deliberately suppressing traumatic memories except during annual Holocaust Remembrance Day gatherings—profoundly influenced Kross’s intellectual journey. This intimate narrative serves as an entry point to examine universal emotional challenges, positioning the book at the intersection of personal memoir and scientific exploration of mental health mechanisms.

Kross traces humanity’s troubled relationship with emotions, from ancient trepanation (drilling holes in skulls) to early 20th-century lobotomies, demonstrating desperate and often harmful attempts to manage emotional distress. He highlights the modern mental health crisis—rising depression and anxiety rates, costing the global economy $1 trillion annually—to establish the urgency and relevance of his work. In this context, it is worth noting that Kross’s interventions are individual by nature and thus do not directly address the systemic factors that contribute to increasing rates of mental illness, such as economic insecurity.