Emotional Regulation: How To

What is emotional regulation? How can we get better at it?

Sep 16, 2024

Hey Brain Rewirers,

Welcome to this week’s newsletter! I’m going to talk about emotions, and drop some of my best emotional regulation tools.

Emotional Regulation

Let’s start with the first question: what is emotional regulation? Emotional regulation, according to James Gross, refers to ‘the process by which we influence which emotions we have, when we have them, and how we experience and express them’ (Gross, 1998b)¹. A good analogy is to think about the volume control on a TV remote: it’s about knowing when to turn down the volume, when to turn up the volume, understanding where the volume is coming from and what’s causing it!

Emotional regulation is a process; once we’re feeling an emotion, we need to recognise what is causing this, how we want to resolve it, and then regulate our bodies so we return back to a baseline state of calm².

But before we can recognize what’s causing the emotion, we need to identify that we’re feeling something! We have seven basic emotions, according to Paul Ekman³, which are Anger, Contempt, Disgust, Enjoyment, Fear, Sadness, and Surprise. These basic emotions are typically our primary emotions; what we automatically feel without thinking. A combination of these emotions often makes up our secondary emotion, which is how we feel about and react to our primary emotion (Damasio, 1994)⁴.

It’s also important to understand how we typically feel emotions: we begin in a state of calm, and then an event will trigger an emotion, leading to a peak in the emotion, before the come-down, and a slight depletion in energy and feelings (known as post-crisis depletion) and finally recovery back to calm.

Diagram depicting the crisis curve for feeling emotions. Created with BioRender.com

The amygdala is critical for perceiving emotions⁶, especially fear-related emotions, while the prefrontal cortex is important for processing emotions⁷. However, there are many more areas involved in emotional regulation than just those two. We see activation in the subcallosal cingulate during sadness, activation of the occipital cortex when visual events cause emotion, and involvement of them anterior cingulate and insula when performing emotional tasks⁷. Therefore, it is a large network of interconnected brains areas that results in our ability to perceive, process, and regulate our emotions.

Diagram of primary brain regions involved in emotional regulation. Created with BioRender.com

But why do we care if our emotions are regulated?

Emotional Dysregulation

Emotional dysregulation describes the inability of someone to control their emotions and how they act upon their emotions. Typically, this results in them having reactions to disproportionate to the situation. Coming back to our TV remote analogy, they have lost the volume control.

Common symptoms include feeling stuck in negative moods, becoming easily frustrated, mood swings, impulsive behavior, mania, prone to aggression, and persistent irritability or anger. This will often interfere with someone’s ability to pursue goals and achieve desired outcomes. Additionally, it often leads to social isolation, problems at work or school, and a lack of personal relationships.

In people with emotional dysregulation and particularly, aggressive behaviour, we see changes in the structure and function of their prefrontal cortex and their insular cortex (these both probably sound familiar as they were the key structures involved in processing emotions!).⁸

The good news is that emotional regulation is a skill that we typically learn as children; it is not an innate skill, and we have the ability to develop it.⁹

Emotional Regulation Tools

It may seem silly, but I like to start by referring to the resources we use for children first. It’s a great starting point. Tools such as the 5-point scale or the ‘how big is my problem’ thermometer highlight that one of the first steps in regulating our emotions is acknowledging the severity of the problem causing the emotions.¹⁰

Now that we get the basics, we can talk about it in slightly more sophisticated terms. There are essentially five strategies for handling emotions, targeting different aspects of the emotion crisis curve I showed before¹¹.

Situation Selection - aims to reduce the probability there will be a trigger that may cause a negative emotion. We’re not avoiding every situation, but we’re trying to be wise about healthy situations.
Situation Modification - targeting the escalation phase of the crisis curve. At this point you have identified that you’re feeling emotions and the situation is becoming tense, so you assess the problem and decide to de-escalate. If you’re arguing, just agree to disagree.
Attentional Deployment – we recognize that the problem isn’t big and focusing on it doesn’t warrant our attention, so we think about something else. For example, thinking about going on holiday while getting injections.
Cognitive Reappraisal – changing how we perceive the situation - reframing. ‘Focus on the bright side.’ In fact, in brain imaging studies, we see that cognitive reappraisal causes activation of the frontal cortex and temporal cortex, and lowers activity in the amygdala¹².
Response Modulation - at this point we have already reached the peak of our emotion on the crisis curve. What we need to do is try to de-escalate and recover. Maybe we make the conscious choice to take a few breaths and not yell at our colleague for making an innocent error.

Physiological Tools

What else can we do?

Breathwork – helps to reduce our physiological response to stress¹³.
Walking – helps dampen activity in the amygdala.¹⁴
Listening to music – helps us alter our emotional state.¹⁵
A calming smell – smell is connected to the limbic system (amygdala and insula).¹⁶
A hobby – provides distraction and activates other brain areas.¹⁷

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