A Guide to Regulate your Emotions

We all experience emotions, positive and negative, every single day. We feel excited to see someone we’ve missed. We get angry when we’re stuck in traffic. We feel sad when someone disappoints us. Our everyday lives are full of emotion - we experience at least one emotion 90% of the time (Trampe et al., 2015).

Sometimes, these emotions can be overwhelming and make us feel out of control. We may experience higher highs and lower lows, which can negatively impact our lives. And in times like that, it is good to practice emotion regulation.

What is Emotion Regulation?

Emotion regulation is the ability to manage and respond to an emotional experience.

It can be an automatic or controlled process, involves both positive and negative feelings, and follows one of two processes (Li et al., 2018).

Up-regulation

Up-regulation involves the intensifying of our emotions. In certain contexts, such as when we feel sad, this can make us feel worse. However, it may also be useful when faced with a physical threat that requires us to experience a rational level of anxiety and respond with appropriate caution.

Down-regulation

Down-regulation refers to the reduction in the intensity of our emotions. Again, it may serve beneficial functions in situations where we experience negative feelings which may be relieved by distracting ourselves through activities we enjoy. On the other hand, if we suppress how we are feeling when working through that emotion could be easier short-term, but this can lead to worse well-being.

Healthy vs unhealthy emotion regulation strategies

We all use a variety of emotion regulation strategies in response to different situations, but not all of them are so helpful.

• Healthy emotion regulation strategies, such as engaging in a breathing exercise, do not cause harm. Some techniques can allow us to down-regulate negative feelings, process the situation that contributed to their development, and develop greater emotional awareness.

• Unhelpful strategies, such as ignoring the problem, can be harmful to our well-being.

The strategies you want to use

James Gross, a pioneer in the field of emotion regulation, suggested that there are five clusters of strategies that are responsible for different stages of emotion generation (Gross, 2015).

1. Situation selection

This involves purposefully choosing situations based on how they will make us feel. For example, if someone you like invites you to grab a coffee, you decide to meet with them because it makes you feel good.

2. Situation modification

This occurs when you are already in an emotional situation and try to change how you feel about it. This may be recognising that a conversation is getting heated and choosing to walk away.

3. Attentional deployment

This involves shifting your focus to another aspect of a situation or something else entirely. For example, you may have a fear of needles, so when you go for a vaccine, you imagine being in a place that makes you happy.

4. Cognitive reappraisal

It is the change in how we think about a situation or event. This is done so we change the way we feel. If someone is out-of-the-blue rude to us, rather than seeing them in a negative light, we may attribute their behaviour to them having a bad day.

5. Response modulation

This is the last emotion generation process as it involves responding to an emotion once we have experienced it. This may involve trying to ignore how we feel or using breathing techniques to try and calm down.

Within each of these clusters are several strategies, some being more helpful than others.

• Acceptance entails allowing ourselves to accept the experience of emotion without trying to challenge or alter it. This falls within the cognitive reappraisal category.

• Expressive suppression, the active avoidance of externally showing our emotions (e.g., trying not to cry), is a response modulation strategy.

The good news is that emotion regulation is a skill that can be improved over time by practising techniques and strategies that are helpful to you. It is important to stress that every emotion, even those that are painful, serves a function.

Feeling these emotions and accepting them is part of good mental health, and every day you can get closer and closer to feeling your feelings.