It wasn’t a particularly memorable fall Saturday morning, except for the fact that my younger daughter, Dani, was out of sorts. My family and I were about to pile into the car for her soccer game, normally one of the highlights of the week, but Dani was just not feeling it. All morning I had tried to figure out what was bothering her, and my usual motivational tricks to shift her into a different headspace were failing miserably. When we finally made it into the car and I glanced in the rearview mirror, I saw her head flopped back on the headrest, her expression downcast.
Serendipitously, just a few minutes later one of my favorite Journey songs came on the radio. It wasn’t long before I was pounding the steering wheel and belting out the chorus, admittedly with excessive enthusiasm: Don’t stop believing . . . hold on to that feeeeeeeling! (No judgment, please.) In part, I was trying to shake the grump out of the back seat, but mostly I just really love that song. After a minute or so I looked back to see Dani bopping her head, smiling, and singing along. By the time we pulled up to the soccer field, she was ready. Opening her door, she tore out of the car, barely remembering to grab her cleats. A cheesy power ballad from the 1980s was able to do what no parental pep talk from me could—shift my daughter into an altogether different emotional gear.
As my wife and I hauled lawn chairs toward the soccer field, I thought about what a difference those four minutes and eleven seconds of Journey might have made for her that day. It was such a small thing: a song on the car radio. But it had completely reshaped her emotional state, perhaps the type of game she was about to have, and even, in the future, her memories of this day.
I’ve been teaching about emotions for more than twenty years now. I know that calming sounds are effective at temporarily lowering blood pressure, that hearing birds twitter and chirp is linked with reductions in anxiety and paranoia, and that rats who have their sense of smell surgically removed show classic signs of depression. I’ve leveraged sensory experiences in my research time and again to alter the way people feel (which we need to do before we can learn how to help people manage their emotions). And yet, despite this knowledge and experience, if you had asked me as recently as a few years ago whether I purposely activate my senses to manage my emotions when I hit a slump, the answer would have been a resounding no.
It turns out there is plenty of research about how the senses affect our emotions, but very little on how to strategically use our senses to modulate our feelings. The more you look, the more you find a gap between what we know intuitively and what we put into practice. And this is where the opportunity lies.
While countless sensations a day don’t activate strong emotional responses, many do. There is an evolutionary reason for this: Emotions supercharge the meaning behind certain sensations we perceive to drive our behavior. In other words, when sensation activates an emotional response (fear of the tree limb hanging over your head), the sensory experience (the rattling of branches in the wind) is far more impactful. If the fear didn’t arise, you’d be much less likely to avoid walking directly under that perilous branch.
Emotion is like the glue that holds the sensory information and the lesson learned together, so when that same sensory input floods our system next time, we know what to do. This is why the memories we form are stronger and reverberate in our awareness longer when they have an emotional tinge, often due to sensory experience. For instance, the smell of Marlboro cigarettes will forever conjure memories of car rides with my dad, while a whiff of potato pancakes reminds me of holidays at my bubby’s house no matter what time of year it is.
Sensory experiences don’t have to be haphazard moments that randomly affect our emotions; they can be harnessed to proactively shift our emotional landscape.
Sensory experiences are such a foundational part of our everyday lives, and have been for so long, that it’s easy to forget what an effect they have on us—I certainly did. And they don’t have to be haphazard moments that randomly affect our emotions; they can be harnessed to proactively shift our emotional landscape. I didn’t have to wait for Journey to come on that day. I could have seen my daughter’s mood sliding precipitously downhill and queued up a playlist on my own.
The irony is that while I was fully aware of how powerful our senses are for shifting our emotions, I still didn’t use that information in the moments with my daughter before we got in the car, nor in countless moments before that in my life when I was the one who needed help regulating my emotions.
Knowing which senses, and what triggers for those senses work for you, is the first step. And that’s as easy as experimenting with the five sensory channels and figuring out which ones give you the biggest, most immediate benefits without excessive cost. So, before we go on, take a moment to consider the following questions:
- Which one or two of the five senses pack the biggest punch?
- And which comes with the lowest cost?
For me, the answer to question 1 would be taste and sound—food and music are both powerful shifters for me—but question 2 helps me hone my go-to shifter, because for me leaning too far into taste does come with a cost.
The sensory delight of dessert, I admit, has a potent effect on my emotional state: My worries and cares melt away as soon as the chocolate peanut butter cup hits my lips. But if I used this tool every time I felt stressed, my health would suffer, undermining the whole point of the tool. Taste (and chocolate peanut butter cups) are one of the great pleasures of being alive, so I’d never deny myself completely, but as my sensory shifter go-to music is the one. It’s immediate, it’s effective, it’s zero cost. I have a playlist on my phone for different moods I want to shift into, and I use them multiple times a week. And the key is that they’re already there on my phone, just a button tap away.
In the midst of big emotions, we’re often blind to where these doors are, or even that they exist. So I’d suggest identifying a few sensory shifters right now that you’d like to try using intentionally and give them a test drive.
The real tool here is often just noticing these opportunities and focusing on the sensory experience of that task, instead of letting it slip by unnoticed. And look for those “sensory bundles,” such as cooking or immersion in nature; experiences that braid more than one sensory channel together activate multiple sensory pathways in the brain, generating a multipronged experience.
From Shift: Managing Your Emotions—So They Don’t Manage You by Ethan Kross, published by Crown. Copyright © 2025 by Ethan Kross. All rights reserved.
Disclosure: Evan Nesterak of the Behavioral Scientist worked as an editorial consultant on Shift.
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