As talking therapy is prescribed to more than two million every year...top psychologist who says the key to curing UK's mental health crisis is to STOP banging on about our feelings!

Britain, it's plain to see, is in the grip of a mental health crisis. More than a million people are sitting on waiting lists for counselling, the NHS estimates one in five children and young people are likely to have a serious mental health condition, and nearly nine million people are prescribed antidepressants each year.

For years, the prevailing advice for those suffering from poor mental health has been to talk about their emotions – to therapists, support groups or friends and family.

'Just talking can help,' a recent NHS ad campaign claims. The slogan is accompanied with images of mental health patients with quotations emblazoned across their faces in which they warn of the dangers of not expressing one's feelings.

'I just bottled it all up,' says one man. 'I just kept it all inside,' says a woman whose eyes looked red from crying.

By not talking about feelings, many experts claim, negative thoughts remain in our subconscious and eventually get released in destructive ways.

But now, a top American psychologist has put forwards a fascinating – and controversial – theory.

By talking and thinking about our emotions all the time, says Dr Ethan Kross, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, we may actually be making our mental health worse. Instead, he argues, people need to learn how to switch negative feelings off when necessary.

Dr Kross, who makes the argument in his new book, Shift: How To Manage Your Emotions – So They Don't Manage You, claims that there is plenty of research to back up his theory.

People who are better at managing their feelings are less lonely, live longer, maintain more fulfilling romantic relationships and report having better mental health as a whole, says Dr Kross.

But there is also a personal element to his argument. He says that his own grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, is a prime example of the importance of managing our emotions. Despite the trauma she experienced as a young woman, her later life was contented and happy – which Dr Kross believes was due less to any denial of the past and more to her choice to talk and think about it only at certain times, such as Holocaust Remembrance Day.

If his grandmother, who went through some of the most horrific events in history, can learn to manage her emotions, Dr Kross argues, surely the rest of us can do the same.

But many experts disagree. Instead, they say suppressing our feelings is at the root of the current avalanche of anxiety, depression and other stress-related illnesses. So what's the truth?

Depression, an extended period of sadness, and anxiety, feelings of stress or worry that can impede your daily life, are not new conditions. But rates have skyrocketed in recent decades – and experts aren't sure why.

Some suggest the stress of the Covid pandemic is to blame. Others argue the rise of social media has created a socially isolated and deeply self-conscious population.

Regardless, the prevailing wisdom of how to treat these conditions tends to be the same.

Patients with depression and anxiety are often prescribed medicines that increase serotonin – the chemical in the brain that regulates mood. These tablets, called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), are one of the most commonly prescribed drugs on the NHS. Patients are also offered cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT – with about two million appointments made every year – where they talk about their emotions with a specialist who helps them recognise and change negative patterns in their thinking and behaviour.

And NHS guidance encourages all patients to seek out support groups – or, more simply, to talk about their feelings with a friend, family member or counsellor.

But Dr Kross, who has researched emotions for the past 20 years, believes that all this talking may actually be contributing to the mental health crisis.

In his opinion, the idea that suppressing your emotions is always a bad thing is based on a common misconception: that it's hard to control how you feel.

Astonishingly, about four in ten people believe it's not possible to control our emotions at all, according to research.

'If you think that it's impossible to manage your emotions – why would you ever make the effort to try?' Dr Kross tells The Mail on Sunday. 'There's a myth that managing our emotions is difficult. Actually, most people are just lacking the right tools.'

Research shows the most successful people in life tend to be those who do have this ability to control their feelings – meaning they are able to tune out negative emotions or, at the very least, not dwell on them too long.

It's not that managing your emotions means you don't feel them at all, Dr Kross argues, but that you are able to easily swap between them – going from feeling anxious about the future to happy about the present, for example.

Research from the 1970s, tracking a cohort of more than 1,000 children over 50 years, found that participants' ability to manage their emotions predicted a lot about their lives.

Not only were the children who were adept at regulating their emotions less likely to drop out of school and commit crimes, they were more likely to advance further in their careers, save more money, plan better for retirement and were even physically healthier – with scans showing that their internal organs aged more slowly than their peers.

Dr Kross argues that talking about our feelings does not improve emotional regulation. In fact, sometimes venting about them to friends or family can actually make them harder to handle.

'There's this idea that getting everything out will help manage life's difficulties,' he says. 'But the data doesn't support the utility of doing that over time – often we're just bathing in the feeling rather than actually working it out when we vent to others, especially if they're just agreeing with us.'

One criticism of this argument is that some people are naturally better at controlling their emotions than others. However, Dr Kross says this resilience can be taught.

When faced with difficult emotions, he says, it helps not to dwell on them for too long. Rather than complaining to a friend or becoming introspective, try to shift attention away from your feelings by focusing on different sensations.

That might mean listening to an upbeat song, going for a walk, or to a coffee shop, or reframing how you speak to yourself in your head by simply giving yourself a pep talk in the third person.

'Find a way to zoom out of the problem,' says Dr Kross. 'The trick is to get some perspective on the issue rather than just ruminating on it.'

But other experts argue it is not this simple.

'People can't always control their emotions and it's not productive to always be working to control them – we're not robots,' says Dr Carolyne Keenan, a registered psychologist based in Manchester. 'Pushing down feelings of anger, for example, make us more likely to take it out on others as our body tries to find ways to express it.

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'Avoiding emotions like sadness causes an emotional backlog that can lead to numbness, low mood and disconnection.'

This opinion is based on a series of studies from the 1980s that claimed repressing emotions could cause and worsen anxiety and depression.

Instead, Dr Keenan argues, people should express their emotions regularly in order to stay happy and healthy.

On the contrary, Dr Kross says the best tool for dealing with distressing feelings can often be pushing them to the side. And research seems to back him up.

A recent Cambridge University study found asking people to suppress thoughts about negative events that worried them not only diminished emotions but also improved their mental health more generally.

'What we found runs counter to the accepted narrative,' wrote lead researcher Professor Michael Anderson, head

of the Memory Research Group. 'It seems it could be beneficial to actively suppress our fearful thoughts.'

While emotions such as stress and grief cannot be avoided, Dr Kross says the key to managing these is a tactic he calls strategic avoidance.

This might involve waiting a day or two to reply to an irritating email, or stepping away from a heated argument. This allows people to think more rationally and form a more considered response.

If shifting attention away from a feeling is relieving, and it doesn't continue to resurface in your subconscious, that's a productive way to deal with it, Dr Kross argues.

'My grandmother did not 'face' her trauma the way many today consider healthy: no therapy, stages of grieving, or displays of being 'in touch' with her feelings,' he writes in the book. 'She compartmentalised her grief and faced it sporadically. And by all accounts that worked for her.

'Imagine if [she] second-guessed her coping strategies. What if her family had made her feel bad about suppressing painful memories? I can't help but believe she would have been worse off.'

• Shift: How To Manage Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You, is available at waterstones.com for £22.
• Did you find your own way to beat a mental illness? Write to us at [email protected]