The ability to exercise control over one’s emotional state is known as emotion management. It could include actions like evaluating a stressful situation to lessen anger or anxiety, covering up obvious indications of fear or grief, or concentrating on things that make you feel joyful or peaceful.

How We Control Our Emotions

While there are various strategies to improve one’s emotional state, down-regulation or lessening the strength of emotions is a common strategy used to regulate emotions. A person in grief may be able to lower their level of despair by remembering a humorous memory. Distracting oneself from the worrying idea might help an anxious person manage. Up-regulation, or amplifying one’s emotions, is a kind of emotional control that may be helpful when a threat or challenge materializes and calls for a healthy amount of fear or excitement.

James Gross’s process model of emotion regulation emphasizes that people can take action to control their emotions at various times, including before they experience an emotion (“antecedent-focused emotion regulation”) and after they have already started to react emotionally (“response-focused emotion regulation”).

What are some basic ways of controlling emotions?

Reappraisal, which is altering one’s perspective on the event that triggered an emotion to alter one’s reaction, and suppression, which has been associated with worse results, are two major areas of emotion regulation. Altering one’s environment to affect one’s emotional experience, altering what one pays attention to, and attempting to accept feelings are all other tactics.

How can I learn to control emotional outbursts?

A competent therapist might be a beneficial partner in improving emotional regulation if you practice skills like conscious acceptance of feelings, diverting attention away from the cause of unpleasant emotions, or reframing emotional circumstances (such as seeing a failure or mistake as a chance to learn).

How much can you control your emotions?

It depends on the component of emotional experience one attempts to regulate; however, emotions may never be fully under conscious control: One may rapidly feel a strong first unpleasant emotion, but one may decide whether to reconsider the emotion’s origin or accept it and let it go, preventing future discomfort and harmful conduct.

How can I help my children learn to control their emotions?

Parents may prevent their children from “acting out” by using healthy coping mechanisms. They may also act as a child’s “emotion coach,” talking to them about their feelings and showing them how to identify them, deal with them, and healthily express them.

What is alexithymia?

Alexithymia, which translates from Greek as “no words for feelings,” is a phrase for having trouble paying attention and explaining one’s emotions. It has been investigated as an individual attribute. According to studies, alexithymia is linked to discomfort and problems regulating emotions.

Why Emotion Regulation Is Important

Adults are supposed to be able to control their emotions, particularly fear and anger, in a way that is acceptable to others, unlike young children. People often say or do things when emotional control is compromised that they subsequently regret and wish they had been able to regulate their emotions better. The inability to control one’s emotions is a feature of several types of mental illness. It could eventually have a detrimental effect on a person’s social interactions and personal wellbeing.

What are the hardest emotions to control?

Everyone experiences anger, resentment, and disappointment at some time. While individuals may try to manage and lessen these emotions, they shouldn’t be unnecessarily pathologized. But sometimes, a poor ability to control one’s emotions might be a symptom of a mental illness like depression or borderline personality disorder.

What are some consequences of poor emotional regulation?

The risks of not managing strong emotions like anger, worry, or fear are obvious: strained relationships from overreacting, needless suffering, and chances passed up because they appeared too difficult. Lower well-being and relationship satisfaction may also be linked to certain methods of managing emotions, including routinely repressing them.

What makes controlling your emotions more difficult?

Emotion regulation may be hampered by several things, such as attitudes about negative emotions (that they are terrible or that we can’t control them), a lack of emotion-regulatory abilities, or circumstances that cause particularly strong emotions to the surface (which is why situation selection is considered an emotion-regulation strategy). Uncertain or dangerous conditions may increase the likelihood of emotional “flooding” and decreased control.