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Have you ever felt so overtaken by an emotion that it felt like it consumed you? Emotions are powerful, and can heavily influence our behaviors and thoughts patterns. When we’re overtaken by a positive emotion, we can feel elated. But when we’re overtaken by a more negative feeling emotion, like anger, or sadness, or jealousy, or anxiety, it can be much harder to make rational and conscientious decisions. It is in these moments that emotional regulation skills can be useful.

Emotional regulation skills are coping skills and strategies that you can utilize to identify, manage, and regulate your emotions in a way that enables you to feel more responsive than reactive in your decision making. You can get started on learning to better regulate your own emotions by trying the following:

Notice Your Emotions

First, notice your emotions without judgement. Emotions are a physiological sensation. Scan your body. How are you feeling physically? Where in your body are you feeling tension? Simply notice and acknowledge your emotion by telling yourself “I am noticing that I am feeling ________”.

Validate Your Emotions

Next, validate your emotion. Emotions are not wrong or right. They just are. How you feel is how you feel. Resist the urge to judge your emotions or label them as “good” or “bad”. Tell yourself “I am noticing I am feeling ________, and that’s valid. It is ok for me to feel this way. This is just my body reacting to something”.

Self Soothe

After noticing and validating your emotion, take a moment to self soothe. Part of regulating your emotions is regulating your physical experience. Take a deep breathe, close your eyes for a moment if you need to, change the position of your body, focus on letting your shoulders relax. Take another deep breath. Let your heartbeat and breathing slow down a bit.

What are your emotions telling you?

The final step in emotional regulation is taking inventory of the experience that caused the emotion. Emotions are often giving us information about our surroundings. What were the thoughts that caused the emotion? Did an interaction with another person cause you to feel a certain way? How can your emotions inform you?

Emotional regulation is just like any other skill. If it’s new to you, it will be clunky and foreign feeling at first. But like other skills, the more you practice, the easier it becomes to notice, acknowledge, validate, manage, and learn from your emotions.