We brought resilience, self-care, and grit. But if you’ve spent any time on the internet lately, you may have noticed that the spotlight is now on a completely different term: emotional regulation.
You’ve probably seen its virtues extolled here and there. Some are touting it as a new form of intergenerational wealth. Especially if you’re a parent, you’ve probably been told to control your emotions and be able to respond in a balanced way before taking care of your child. Mothers and fathers are encouraged to attend classes to learn emotion regulation skills and are given scripts to repeat and strategies to follow so as not to unbalance and traumatize their children. .
But as parents, we’ve all had moments where we lost it and then blamed ourselves for having dysregulation. I know. However, humans are not machines that can be easily readjusted. Even if I tell you to discipline yourself, it will have the opposite effect than you intended. As the saying goes, “No one in the history of calming down has ever calmed down by being told to calm down,” so how does this differ from the recommendation to control your emotions?
Like many other similar ideas that have entered the ranks of so-called therapy language, such as “toxic” people, “triggers,” “narcissism,” or “gaslighting,” emotion regulation has some scientific basis. There is a basis. Research on this topic began in the 1990s and has grown rapidly since then. “I used to go to conferences about emotions, and that was one of the topics among many, and now when I go there, everyone is talking about controlling their emotions. “I feel it,” says Yulia Chentsova Dutton, a cultural psychologist at Georgetown University who studies emotions.
As researchers became interested in this research, the term began to be filtered out, becoming one of the countless psychological terms that crept into the mainstream, especially as research findings began to be applied to treatments, from which it became known as wellness. It gradually penetrated into public consciousness through health and education. Self-help books, etc. But the problem, as the researchers I interviewed pointed out, is that the common idea of ”regulation” fosters a rigid and narrow conception of what emotions actually are.
“I think of emotions as changes in how we feel and how our bodies react. And there are different types of emotional responses, and we can describe them as anger, fear, sadness, happiness, etc. ,” says James J. Gross, professor of psychophysiology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory. Emotions are not always pleasant, but they are usually beneficial to us.
But if they have the power to make us act foolishly, or if we are experiencing the wrong kind of emotions, there are things at hand to change the way we feel. Resources need to be considered. According to researchers, that’s what emotional regulation is all about.
“Emotional regulation is the effort to change emotions in some way, by up-regulating them, increasing their intensity, or down-regulating them,” says Chentsova-Dutton. This definition is particularly interesting because, contrary to the common understanding of the term, regulation does not necessarily mean an “attempt to keep calm.”
Often, we use emotion regulation strategies to reject negative emotions, but this is not always the case. “It depends on your emotional goals. Some people may have goals of feeling sad in certain situations, or feeling alert and alert, so they regulate towards that state. ” said Centsova Dutton. For example, an athlete may want to get a little angry before a match in order to feel energetic and ready when it matters.
The main purpose of emotion regulation is to change someone’s mood, and it happens on several levels. First, Gross says: “There’s a situation and you pay attention to it. You can evaluate it or evaluate it. And then a physical reaction occurs.” Emotional regulation can occur at all levels. . For example, you can leave the situation as is or change it. You can fine-tune what you’re focusing on. You can change the way you think, you can change the way you react.
Social media makes it easy to think that regulating all emotions is beneficial, but that’s not always the case. For example, when the people these researchers studied tried to suppress emotions they considered “bad” (a common emotion regulation strategy), they had little effect on improving their mood. “We’ve found over and over again that suppressing expression comes at a pretty high price. It takes up a lot of cognitive resources, so it becomes a kind of stupidity,” Gross says. Rumination, or getting stuck in a cycle of negative thoughts, is also a harmful emotion regulation strategy that only adds to people’s distress rather than addressing it.
However, even helpful methods of controlling emotions often backfire. For example, reappraisal, a technique that focuses on helping people change their emotions by changing their thoughts, is not always best in situations that require quick reflexes, such as the case of firefighters rushing into a burning building. It wasn’t necessarily a reaction.
But most importantly, as Centsova Dutton points out, “we do not live in separate bubbles.” We live in a culture. ” The way people express emotions and which emotions are considered functional varies across the world, as does the degree to which people feel in control of their emotions. Centsova Dutton herself, when asked about the idea of controlling emotions, asked, “Why would you try to control the weather?” She studied Eastern European subjects who commonly expressed emotions.
When people held such beliefs, they didn’t even try to control their emotions because they felt it was worthless. But on the other hand, especially in an individualistic society like the United States, people felt they had to be in complete control of their emotions at all times.
“This requires great caution, because no one has perfect control over their emotions, or at least most people, even the most well-trained, can’t control their emotions. “,” Gross said. This is a phenomenon known as emotional perfectionism, and it can make us feel like we’re never good enough, even when it comes to things as natural as our emotions.
Additionally, individuals vary in their ability to control their emotions, with some people having a harder time than others. “Think of a car that has a gas pedal and a brake pedal. Some people are sitting in the car with the gas pedal depressed, so they have a lot of negative emotions,” Gross explained. I will. If emotions are like the weather, some people are naturally stormy.
Emotion regulation is part of executive functioning, and many people with neurodivergent disorders, such as those with ADHD, struggle with it. Racism is another reason why emotional regulation can be more difficult for some people, who may experience more difficult situations than others. “The negativity is so big and unmanageable that trying to give it a positive spin will backfire,” explains Centsova-Dutton.
This is why blaming individuals for real or perceived dysregulation is unhelpful at best and harmful at worst. For example, if someone is feeling depressed or anxious and you try to tell them that it’s their fault because they should have been more regulated, you might say, “That’s not a good message. Because we couldn’t do it,” Gross said. There may be a reason why so many parents are stressed, but it’s not all due to parental dysregulation.
The common idea about emotional control “presents an image of someone who autonomously masters the realm of emotions. And I think a little that emotions are like muscles. But emotions are like a bicep. It’s not like biceps. Emotions are more complex, ”explains Centsova-Dutton.
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The opposite of emotion regulation is dysregulation, but the term seems to be used online to describe a variety of emotional states, including stress, anger, irritability, and feeling overwhelmed. But placing all these emotions under the umbrella of dysregulation is doing us a disservice. Some theorize that being able to practice emotional differentiation, or emotional granularity, that is, being able to describe emotional states in detail and name emotions accurately, is good for our well-being. Calling all negative emotions dysregulated is doing just the opposite.
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Given all of the above, emotional regulation is a very useful concept for many people. Researchers who study it, such as Gross, consider it an important skill to learn. For example, when parents try to calm their children in a stressful situation, they are doing the important job of preventing their fears from being transmitted to their children. The concept is not nonsense. It’s just misrepresented and completely blown out of proportion. And that can add to the distress and fatigue that many parents are feeling today, so much so that even the U.S. Surgeon General mentioned it in a recent advisory. Parents need concrete support, not more advice or criticism.
The important thing is to balance ’emotional regulation’ with other strategies that may be needed to cope with the challenges of daily life. Not all strategies need to be directly aimed at changing the way we feel. Rather, some may think of individuals as part of a broader culture. “You could say that I would rather concentrate and regulate my body, or I would rather concentrate and regulate my relationships with other people. Or I would rather concentrate and regulate my actions,” Chentsova・Dutton explains.
“You have to experiment and you have to have a big repertoire and a lot of tools in your tool bag so you can choose the right one for the situation you find yourself in.”
In the meantime, don’t beat yourself up if you don’t handle every situation with your kids perfectly. And if someone tells you something different, you can tell them to regulate themselves.
