Behavioral Regulation

What is behavioral regulation? How is it related to your well-being and why is it important to work on improving it?

By Tchiki Davis, MA, PhD

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What is Behavioral Regulation​?

Behavioral regulation refers to your ability to resist using unhealthy behaviors to regulate emotion. Sometimes people use behaviors like eating, drinking alcohol, or self-harm to reduce negative emotions, but these types of behaviors end up doing more harm than good and don’t end up making these people any happier.

Why is it important to have this skill?

When you use unhealthy behaviors to change your emotions, you never learn how to change your emotions in healthy ways. You become reliant on that extra beer or chocolate dessert to make you feel better and you can even end up developing unhealthy addictions. But by learning behavioral regulation, you can reduce your reliance on these unhealthy behaviors.

​Activities to develop this skill:

Emotional processing

To better regulate your behaviors you need to work on stopping the unhealthy processes that generate negative emotions. In this activity, you learn emotion skills to stop a variety of unhealthy emotional processes.

Positive Reappraisal

Negative emotions are inevitable. But positive reappraisal can help you reframe a negative event as more positive so that you hopefully don't rely so much on unhealthy behaviors.

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