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Key points
- Mental health improvement begins with regulating emotions.
- Emotional wellbeing includes an interplay between mind, body, and behavior.
- When it comes to emotional health, social connections matter.
To my amazement, this August marks my first decade of teaching psychology. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that regulating emotions is a paramount skill for every aspect of life. Many of my students have voiced how this topic made a bigger impact on them than several other psychology concepts. The better students, professors, parents, coworkers, and community members learn to recognize and regulate their emotions, the better their health and relationships will be.
Emotion regulation is what we do when we want to manage our emotional state. This includes changing, taking control of, or fully processing our emotions. There are a host of ways we change our emotional state using unhealthy tools such as illegal drugs, excessive alcohol consumption, overeating nutrient-lacking foods, or lashing out at others. Thankfully, psychologists have found dozens of ways to regulate emotions that lead to better long-term mental, physical, and social health.
In honor of the hundreds of incredible students I’ve had over the years, here is my Ultimate Emotion Regulation Kit. Not every tool will work for everyone or every situation, but we can focus on one or two new strategies to experiment with. When we have healthy options at our fingertips, the self-destructive ones are less enticing.
Slow Your Body
Strong emotions can make us feel out of control. We’re especially likely to succumb to our impulses when our physical health is neglected. The first step is to prioritize good sleep hygiene. Turn off devices an hour before bed, end caffeine consumption by midday, keep a consistent sleep schedule, and avoid late-night meals. These are the steps psychologist Lisa Dimour finds to be crucial when helping clients. She said,
Why is getting sleep necessary before turning to anything else? Because sleep is the glue that holds human beings together. Even in the absence of a tragedy, people who aren’t sleeping soon find that they struggle to regulate their emotions…and it has been amply demonstrated by research. (p. 160)
In addition to sleep, many tools can help us engage our parasympathetic nervous systems and bring us into a calm and clarifying state. These include:
- Breathing exercises
- Yoga
- Mindful eating
- Various types of meditation
- Fostering feelings of awe, especially while in nature[1]
- Taking a warm aromatherapy bath
- Bonus: Engage in compassion meditation to get the added benefit of cognitive empathy
Move Your Body
Exercise is one of the most underutilized tools when it comes to regulating emotions. As Myers and Dewall said, “Exercise is like a drug that prevents and treats disease, increases energy, calms anxiety, and boosts mood—a drug we would all take if available. Yet few people take advantage of it.” The important thing is that we do something we enjoy and can do consistently. Here are a few ideas:
- Go for a walk, jog, or hike
- Rock climb
- Play a sport
- Box or kickbox
- Attend a local spin or other exercise class
- Follow an online workout video
- Exercise using interactive video games or virtual reality
- Bonus: Exercise with a friend for greater accountability and coregulation
Work Your Mind
Our minds are powerful meaning-making machines. The emotions we experience are determined by how we interpret internal and external cues. With practice, we can be more intentional with how we interpret and act on those cues. To hone this skill, we can:
- Label emotions out loud or on paper and aim for granularity (that is, the more specific the better)
- Learn new emotional expressions from other languages[2]
- Talk with a therapist
- Reframe a difficult event in a way that brings new meaning or insight
- Use a gratitude journal
- Intentionally invite feelings of flow through art, music, writing, activism, or other hobbies
- Bonus: If we find ourselves ruminating (that is, rehashing the same negative emotions over and over without progress), we can avoid thinking about the triggering circumstances surrounding the emotion except during specific scheduled times
Foster Connections
Decades of research have revealed how insidious loneliness can be on our health and emotional wellbeing. We have evolved as a cooperative and social species. As child psychiatrist Bruce D. Perry said, “One of the most helpful forms of regulation is other people.” Social activities strengthen our relationships and often bring feelings of transcendence and fulfillment. To use social connections as a tool for emotion regulation:
- Join a book (or other interest) club
- Participate in a community choir/band/theater
- Attend a church service
- Support a local sports/dance team
- Take a community class
- Join an online group with shared interests
- Volunteer with a local non-profit or school
- Start a regular meetup with friends for games/coffee/movie nights
- Bonus: Visit aging neighbors, relatives, and nursing home residents to give both parties a needed social boost
Sometimes the best thing we can do for our emotional wellbeing is to change large environmental stressors. This might look like quitting a job with a toxic environment, arranging to have a shorter commute time, finding reliable transportation and childcare, increasing our income, ending harmful relationships and nurturing healthy ones, or getting access to affordable healthcare.
These mental health tips are inadequate when it comes to needed societal shifts—we can’t cognitive-behavioral therapy our way out of oppressive systemic issues. However, intentionally using emotion regulation strategies can make us more capable of taking on the seemingly insurmountable barriers to emotional health.
References
[1] Awe often comes when we feel the vastness of the world around us, of which we are a small part. Gaze at the stars and the towering trees around you, or picture the earth from a tiny spaceship in orbit. “The physiological profile of awe documented thus far—elevated vagal tone, reduced sympathetic activation, increased oxytocin, and reduced inflammation—is associated with enhanced mental health. This is evident in studies of increased optimism, sense of connection, and well-being; an openness to others and prosocial tendencies; reduced anxiety, depression, social rejection and cardiovascular problems and autoimmune disease.” (see the report on awe here)
[2] For example, try incorporating the Japanese emotion concept “arigata-meiwaku” into your vocabulary, which describes how you feel when someone has done you a favor you didn’t want, and then you feel pressured to be grateful. See p. 147 of How Emotions are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
