3 Science-Based Techniques to Regulate Your Emotions

"Emotion-regulation strategies

For context, these are the most commonly used adaptive and maladaptive emotion-regulation strategies:

Acceptance: Accepting the fact that the unpleasant situation in question has occurred and being open to (as opposed to avoiding or judging) one’s uncomfortable emotional reactions to the situation.

Distraction: Directing attention away from the source of stress and toward unrelated activities.

Problem-solving: Conscious attempts to alter the stressful situation or its consequences, by finding effective solutions.

Reappraisal: Reframing and reinterpreting the aversive event in order to alter its meaning and to see it in a neutral or positive light (e.g., viewing something not as a problem but as a challenge or opportunity).

Rumination: Focusing, repeatedly, on one’s negative mood or on the depressive symptoms and what they might mean. Rumination has been shown to increase the vulnerability for depression.

Suppression: Conscious attempts to inhibit the expression of emotions (e.g., “poker face”).

Worry: Repetitive and often uncontrollable thoughts concerning an undesirable but uncertain future outcome. Though misguided, worry is essentially an attempt at problem solving.

The study by Boemo and coauthors analyzed, as described below, the relationship between use of emotion-regulation strategies and current/future emotions in daily life.

Findings on emotion-regulation strategy use and current mood

Analysis of data on the relationship between emotion-regulation tactics employed and current mood showed the following:

Suppression was associated with negative mood but not positive mood, which suggests suppression is used mainly when people experience negative emotions. Rumination was similarly associated with negative mood. The data showed problem-solving, acceptance, and reappraisal were related to positive mood.

Emotion-regulation strategy use and future mood

What about future mood?

Greater reappraisal predicted future mood—both lower negative mood and higher positive mood. Rumination and suppression were related to negative emotions, whereas distraction was linked with positive emotions.

How to use the emotion-regulation technique of reappraisal?

So, I end with an example of how to use reappraisal in your daily life:

Suppose you receive a diagnosis of a serious disease during a yearly check-up. There is an effective treatment available but the treatment can be painful and also requires that you take two to three months off work.

But then you remember to use reappraisal and to reframe the situation in a more positive way. For instance, you try to...

• view the illness not as a problem but as a challenge.
• compare yourself to the less fortunate (those with more serious diseases or with no access to quality medical care).
• think about the benefits of early diagnosis (which was due to regular medical check-ups) and thus early treatment.
• see the time off work as an opportunity to catch up on readings or watch your favorite movies.

Remember that whatever the stressor—be it an illness, car accident, infidelity, divorce proceedings, employment termination, or bad investments or financial decisions—it is often possible to reduce the intensity of negative emotional reactions by reframing the stressful situation and changing its meaning."

Read the complete article available at Psychology Today!

Reflection:

How is your ability to regulate your emotions?

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