Imagine you’re in the middle of a presentation when somebody cuts you off mid-sentence. Or imagine if someone you’ve been texting for a while, ghosts you. How would you react  in these situations? Would you lash out, not say anything, freeze, or react to the situation calmly? But why does that matter right, people can react in different ways and it’s alright. Yes, it is, but the way you react also tells how well you are able to manage emotions, which also tells how easily you get stressed and overwhelmed. So this is why emotion regulation is important. But I’m sure since you’re here you’re curious about it. Read on to explore what emotion regulation is, why it matters, and ways you can get better at it.

What is Emotion Regulation?

Let’s start with the basics and understand what emotion regulation is. According to psychology (unlike those cliche Instagram posts) emotion regulation is the ability to control your emotional reactions to a variety of situations and experiences, in a way that is healthy. It does not, however,  mean suppressing emotions. Imagine, you are walking from a nearby store to your house when it starts raining. Will you be able to stop the rain? No. Then what would you do to protect yourself? You would use a shed nearby, or if you have a raincoat or an umbrella you’ll use that. But of course you won’t stop the rain. Similarly, we are bound to feel emotions– we cannot stop them. But we can shield ourselves from the negative effects of those emotions by regulating them. 

In this situation, you had two options - use a shed (depend on an outside help) or use your own umbrella and raincoat (depend on yourself) to protect yourself from the rain. Similarly, depending on the strategies you use, emotional regulation can be intrinsic - where you rely on yourself for managing your emotions and dealing with stress; and extrinsic - where someone else helps you for a while till you can calm down. For example, spending every night with your ‘dear diary’ might mean you’re using intrinsic regulation whereas calling your bestie to vent it out would mean you’re using extrinsic regulation. 

Why is Emotion Regulation Important?

Again, how people react to things, take help, everything can be different and you might ask why does it even matter? Who cares if you vent to your bestie or choose to smoke instead, right? Well, your body and mind definitely do, and so do others. Healthy emotional regulation keeps your nervous system calm and prevents extreme stress and anxiety. Which means that journalling might help you stop overthinking, but something like smoking might make it worse over time. 

But again, we’re not used to listening to our bodies. We’d rather listen to our friends, right? Even then emotional regulation is important. Dealing with your emotions in healthier ways is important to prevent those ‘I didn’t mean to shout, I don’t know how it happened’ outbursts. In the long run, it leads to better relationships, and improves decision making as you become better at self control and you start thinking before acting. 

Imagine you’re stuck in traffic and the car behind you starts honking. You’re already frustrated by the traffic and now there’s more to add. If you are able to regulate your emotions then you might take a breath and try to distract yourself till the light turns green. However, if you’re not so great with emotional regulation, your blood will boil, you might want to get into an argument with the person and abuse him. In both cases you would have been angry and frustrated, but the way you dealt with it was different, and ultimately the long term consequences you would have would be different. What if that verbal fight turns to violence, or increases your blood pressure? So, to avoid such longer consequences, its better to learn how to regulate your emotions. The next section tells you a few of the strategies you can use for the same.

Strategies for Emotional Regulation

So far we have understood the meaning of emotional regulation and have also learned the importance of incorporating it in our daily lives. But how exactly do we do it? Of course, it is easier said than done but here are some of the key strategies that can be used to regulate your emotions everyday:

Name it and Tame it 

The first step in emotional regulation is to recognise and label the emotion you’re feeling. This involves a little self awareness and that’s important. I’m sorry to say that wanting to regulate your emotions without even knowing what you’re feeling is a long shot and might not happen. 

This technique involves naming the emotion you’re feeling and acknowledging the situation you’re feeling it in. Something like, “I am feeling (emotion) because I am in (situation). For example, in that traffic situation we described earlier, you might say something like, I feel angry because I don’t like the extra noise when I am in traffic. This way you’ve recognised the emotion and given it the attention it wants. Just like an excited child, you’ve calmed it down - so basically, you’ve made the first step towards regulation just by naming an emotion. 

The Traffic Light for emotions

Okay so what next after naming the emotion? You can’t just sit and do nothing about it, that won’t be emotional regulation. So, what you do instead is, you pause and think about what would be a constructive response to the situation. This method helps you in not reacting impulsively to the situation and remain calm. To do this, you can imagine a traffic light for your emotions. Each of the light tells us to do a different action about the emotion:

• Red: Stop and recognise the emotion (name it and tame it)

• Yellow: Get ready to move and think about how you want to respond

• Green: Respond in the best way possible.

Giving yourself and your emotions this pause can help you decide the best and the calmest response to the emotion, and gives you more control over them. Continuing with our traffic example, the healthy emotional response was to calm yourself down and distract yourself till the traffic moves instead of engaging in a fight. 

Calm down (Yes, sometimes even this works if done right)

I know it sounds funny and you might think that it won’t work. But calming yourself down is a sure shot way to regulate your emotions. It’s just not done by saying ‘calm down’. There are different techniques to calm yourself down when you’re stressed.

• Grounding Techniques: These are techniques that take you out of your head and bring you back to reality. They help in shifting your focus from the emotion to your surroundings and things you can control, helping you think clearly about how you want to respond. Some of the common grounding techniques include deep breathing, box breathing, 5-4-3-2-1- technique and guided imagery. All these techniques either make you focus on your breath, some safe visualisation or the tangible things around you. 

  
  

• Relaxing your senses: Although grounding techniques can help, they require a lot of effort to focus, and motivation to focus. A simpler, more extrinsic way to regulate your emotions is to use things that calm your senses down - things you like the feel of, songs you like, photos you love to see, food you love to eat, fragrances you love. These small activities signal your brain that something nice is happening and that it can calm down. Which is why listening to your favourite songs works for a lot of people when they are stressed. 

Journaling 

Sometimes, just talking works (or writing it down). It might seem something simple and useless, but what you’re really doing while talking to your diary is a combination of everything above. You’re naming and writing about your emotions, you’re pausing yourself and taking the time to think about your emotions before you do anything, and you’re keeping yourself connected to reality by not analysing everything in your head. Sure, writing pages for just a day might not be for everyone, but that’s not the point as well. The point is to combine all these regulation strategies as we saw. And you can do that through various ways - use reflection prompts and write just one line about your emotions, draw your emotions out (like the Inside Out characters) and make your own story about them, just use single words to describe each day, list down 5 positive 5 negative things of the day/week, etc or even just scribble. Do what works for you, as long as it's somewhere other than your head, it's your journal. 

Final Thoughts

I would like to end this blog by mentioning that emotional regulation is a skill that improves with practice. Just like Rome wasn’t built in a day, emotional regulation also cannot be achieved overnight. Start small- recognise and label your emotions, use grounding techniques, incorporate positive self-talk and express yourself in healthy ways. Remember that emotional regulation is a journey, and not a destination. And if you need any assistance in starting this journey, then please visit our page and checkout our upcoming workshop on the same.