How to Regulate your Emotions
Do you often feel overwhelmed by your emotions? This article is for you.
What is emotion regulation? Emotion regulation refers to a person’s ability to manage and respond to their emotional experience in a way that is effective. (1)
Many factors contribute to how you have learned to manage your emotions throughout your life: your upbringing, your family of origin, the messages we received from media, peers and teachers. Some of the ways you manage your emotions served you as a child; kept you safe. Now, these ways of managing may no longer serve you. Perhaps you had learned to manage your emotions by keeping them pushed down, locked up and held back. This worked for you so that you wouldn’t get in trouble. Now, this may be causing you prolonged feelings of depression, physical ailments, or to eventually explode and feel extremely overwhelmed.
When we talk about emotion regulation here, we are referring to healthy and supportive strategies in the way you respond to your emotional experience. We want to be able to process our emotions as they come up.
1. Prevent emotions from becoming extreme or overwhelming by ensuring the following:
Enough sleep
Listening to your needs
Movement
A balance of fun and work
A healthy diet
Reducing overall stressors
** Know that if your life circumstances are preventing you from implementing the above, you are not alone and you are understandably more susceptible to emotion dis-regulation.
2. Understand the fight, flight, freeze response.
It’s important to understand that experiencing a range of emotions is adaptive and natural. This is an evolutionary mechanism that is essential to our survival as humans. Understanding this process will allow you not to add additional self criticism and shame to your emotional experience.
Here is a resource all about this process : https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response
3. Learn about your triggers.
Reflect back on moments where you lived an emotional experience that was overwhelming. See if you can find similarities/patterns in these situations and what came just before the overwhelming emotional experience.
4. Use an emotion regulation scale.
This can be a 0-5 or 0-10 scale. Define each level of emotion and what this looks like for you (thoughts, emotions, body sensations). Check in with yourself throughout the day. Where are you at on the scale? This will increase your awareness and will allow you to notice when you are more vulnerable to emotional overwhelm/explosiveness.
5. Be attuned to your choice point.
Once you have determined your triggers as well as what happens for you (thoughts, emotions, sensations) right before emotional overwhelm/explosiveness, I want you to then be able to be attuned to your choice point. It is at this moment that you have a choice to make. How will you respond to this tipping point? Will you lash out toward others? Will you harm yourself with critical words? Will you shut those feelings down? Alternatively, will you make a choice that aligns with your values and what is important to you? Perhaps you will choose to pause and breathe, perhaps you will walk away and allow time to bring you back to your baseline.
6. Get to know your “window of tolerance”.
The window of tolerance is your optimal zone of arousal. It is the zone in which you will be best able to respond to stressors. There are many ways in which you can learn to stay within your zone of tolerance and even widen it. Here is a resource for you to get o know more about this principle:
https://www.psychologytools.com/resource/window-of-tolerance/
7. Learn to ride the wave.
This is a hard one. When you notice a difficult emotion coming up, one that is likely to overwhelm you and feel very unmanageable, I want you to:
1- Sit down (if you can) or just stop what you are doing.
2- Notice where this emotion is showing up in your body.
3- Focus on this. Notice your breathing alongside the feeling/ body sensation.
4- As you notice your mind trying to take you away from the sensations/feelings, come back to them.
5- Watch and wait. Notice the wave of emotion coming over you and washing away.
I hope you found this helpful. Know that I am here to support you in integrating these emotion regulation tools, and many more!