Emotional Regulation

A part of being human is experiencing a range of emotions, even on a day-to-day basis. You may start out your day feeling happy because you treated yourself to a special coffee, but then you can feel frustrated if traffic makes you late.

Researchers have identified about 27 distinct types of emotions that you may have throughout your day. It’s not uncommon to feel positive emotions in one moment, like joy or satisfaction, only to have negative emotions in the next moment, like sadness or disgust. However, being able to manage your emotions, especially the negative ones, is essential for your everyday lifestyle, relationships and your overall well-being. This is a skill that’s known as emotional regulation.

Emotional regulation takes time and effort to develop, but it can have a significant positive impact on your quality of life once you do. It can also help you manage mental health distress or condition symptoms, such as mood disorders, anxiety disorders and depressive disorders.

Read on to learn about the basics of emotional regulation, the benefits it can provide to your overall well-being and how to develop the skill. Then we’ll discuss how Guidelight Health helps you develop emotional regulation in our programs.

Emotional regulation is your ability to understand and take control of your emotions. It involves a few different aspects, including:

• Identifying your emotions
• Knowing what emotions are most appropriate for responding to certain situations
• Reducing the intensity of negative or unhelpful emotions
• Understanding the causes or triggers of certain emotions

Emotional regulation goes hand-in-hand with emotional intelligence. Gaining awareness of your own emotions, and being able to understand the emotions of others, gives you a greater understanding of how to navigate situations that spark a range of emotional responses.

Emotional regulation can bring you benefits in many different facets of your life, including:

• Reduced stress
• A more positive attitude
• Increased confidence and self-assurance
• Ability to work through challenges
• Effective communication and conflict resolution
• Reduced impulsivity that can lead to negative consequences

Dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, is a branch of cognitive behavioral therapy that’s used to help people manage intense emotions, with emotional regulation being one of the main goals. DBT can be especially helpful for individuals who struggle with intense emotions, including those with:

• Borderline personality disorder
• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• Self-harm behaviors
• Suicidality

Here are some key DBT skills used to help emotional regulation:

 ABC PLEASE

ABC PLEASE teaches various ways to take care of yourself and improve mood so that you are less vulnerable to painful emotions.

 Mindfulness of Current Emotions

This practice helps you to experience what you are feeling without attempting to judge, change, or suppress it. This allows you to face your emotional experience without making the situation worse.

   Opposite action

This skill refers to doing the opposite of what your first emotional urge is telling you to do. It helps you to recognize the unhelpful thoughts and effectively handle stressful situations.

While DBT skills can help to make a difference in developing your emotional regulation abilities, there are also strategies that can help you put those skills into action. You can integrate these broader approaches into your everyday life as a way to adjust your overall emotional and mental well-being.

Here are a couple of strategies for improving emotional regulation:

Prioritize emotional self-awareness

When you’re feeling intense emotions, it’s not always easy to recognize the unhelpful or negative behaviors that may be occurring as a response because you feel overwhelmed by the feelings. But by boosting your emotional self-awareness, you’re able to see them for what they are. Once you’re able to identify and label your emotions, you can take an active role in regulating them.

For example, you may think, “This negative feeling is actually anxiety because this situation is out of my control.” Then you can work on adjusting those anxious thoughts.

   Focus on your physical health

Your mental and physical health are closely intertwined. By incorporating habits and routines into your everyday life, you can give your body what it needs to help regulate your emotions.

Here are three ways you can take care of your physical health to benefit your mental and emotional well-being:

• Eat a balanced diet so that your brain has the nutrients it needs to stabilize your moods and manage stress, such as omega-3 fatty acids.

• Try to regularly get 7-9 hours of sleep each night to help your body fully reset and regulate the hormones that impact your mood, like serotonin.

Exercise regularly, approximately 30 minutes of moderate exercise a day, to boost endorphins, which reduce stress.

When you’re facing a challenge or conflict, it can feel like your emotions are taking on a mind of their own. While emotional regulation isn’t something that you can develop overnight, we’re here to help you develop the skill for long-term benefits on your emotional and mental well-being.

At Guidelight, we help people with many different mental health challenges that could benefit from emotional regulation, including:

• Major depressive disorder
• Bipolar I or II disorder
• Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder
• Generalized anxiety disorder
• Panic disorder
• Borderline personality disorder
• Self-harm
• Suicidal behaviors

We offer two programs:

       Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP)

With a combination of group and individual therapy, we provide the treatment in our IOP that you need to move along your mental health journey while still providing you with flexibility to continue with your responsibilities. We also have a virtual IOP option.

       Partial Hospitalization Program (PHP)

For more intensive support for your mental health, our PHP provides additional structured support through highly specialized individual and group therapy. Medication management is also included.

Our programs incorporate CBT and DBT strategies into your individual and group therapy sessions to help you develop the skills that will help you long after your treatment with us is over. Along with emotional regulation, our therapists can also help you:

• Navigate situations that impact your mental health
• Learn about the root causes and triggers of your distress
• Develop coping mechanisms
• Strengthen your communication and problem-solving skills

Emotional regulation is a skill that an outpatient therapist can help you develop. But we’re here if you need further support on your mental health journey.

Everyone has a seat at Guidelight. Contact our team online or call us today for more information about emotional regulation or to schedule an initial evaluation.