Emotional Regulation: Key Skills for Regulating Emotions
Regulating your emotion is an ability of exerting control over your own emotional state. This might involve behaviors like rethinking any challenging situation for reducing anxiety or anger, hiding any visible signs of fear or sadness, and focusing on various reasons to feel calm and happy. Hence, it becomes important to find better ways for emotional regulation.
Why Is Emotion Regulation Important?
Unlike small kids, adults can also manage the emotions—particularly anger and anxiety —in such a manner that it is acceptable socially. When the emotional control fails, often people say and do things that they later regret or wish they could keep the emotions in proper check.
Basically, emotion dysregulation is an important component of some types of the mental illness. With time, it can have the negative impact on your personal health and well-being and even social relationships. So, here are a few skills that will help to cultivate emotional regulation & sustaining this during tough times in your life.
There are various reasons that somebody loses total control of emotions. They are genetically predisposed to such rapid changes. They might never have seen any good emotional regulation to be modeled and learned the skills. Also, they will lose control while they experience any triggers for the negative situations that took place in the past. Also, there are physical changes that can cause the person to lose total control of emotions, like drop in the blood sugar and exhaustion.
Create better space
Emotions happen quickly. We do not think “now I am going to be angry” — we’re just suddenly furious and clench-jawed. Hence, the first skill in regulating such difficult emotions, gift we will give ourselves, will be to pause. Just take a long breath and slow down your moment between the trigger & response.
Self-awareness
Next is to notice what we feel & naming it is the best step toward your emotional regulation. For instance, when you are feeling very bad, then ask yourself –are you feeling hopeless, sad, ashamed, and anxious? Give yourself a few options and explore all the feelings.
Name certain specific emotions you will feel intensely in yourself at that moment, and note this down if you wish to. You do not have to act and judge the effect and cause of your emotions during such stage; so all you require is total awareness of every feeling that controls your mind.