Regulating Emotions
Introduction
"...Emotion regulation refers to an individual's attempt to increase, maintain, decrease positive and negative emotions, the ability to effectively regulate one's emotions can be seen as a crucial skill..."
Seph Fontane Pennock et al, 2019
A lack of emotion regulation can contribute to all major forms of psychopathology. However, effective emotion regulation has shown positive outcomes for mental health, physical health, relationship satisfaction, work performance, etc..
Most people regulate their emotions to help facilitate achieving goals, eg
- feeling happy
- reducing anxiety
- avoiding conflict, etc.
Types of emotion regulation
i) changing the intensity of the emotion (involves suppression, distraction and progressive muscle relaxation, eg to reduce the intensity of fear, you can suppress the thoughts of an upcoming stressful event)
(source: Seph Fontane Pennock et al, 2019)
ii) changing the individual's relationship with the emotion at hand ((involves acceptance-based coping and meditation that focus on your ability and willingness to allow an emotion to be present; it doesn't aim to change the intensity)
(source: Seph Fontane Pennock et al, 2019)
iii) altering the individual's perspective (involves
"...Cognitive reappraisal, cognitive restructuring and cognitive dissidence reductions are all examples of strategies that focused on looking at the emotional state or trigger from a different angle..."
Seph Fontane Pennock et al, 2019
For example, after making a mistake, you could reframe the mistake and associated regret as something to learn from; similarly you can look at emotional thoughts as beliefs, rather than facts.
Focus: changing perspective on an emotion or emotional trigger
(source: Seph Fontane Pennock et al, 2019)
NB Varying amounts of effort are required to apply the strategies; suppression requires more effort than others and can be counter-productive.
"...people's general repertoire of learnt self-regulation skills is essential for goal attainment......'learned resourcefulness' to indicate the acquired regulatory skills that people regulate their behaviour..."
Rosenbaum as quoted by Seph Fontane Pennock et al, 2019
Many people develop a diverse range of self-regulation strategies to choose from to handle daily life. However, less resourceful people develop a limited range and are less successful.