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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
Behavioral Regulation
*This page may include affiliate links; that means I earn from qualifying purchases of products.

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
Activity for Behavioral Regulation
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
Activity for Behavioral Regulation
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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About Dr. Tchiki Davis
Dr. Davis is founder of The Berkeley Well-Being Institute. After getting her PhD in psychology at Berkeley, she started creating online content & programs to boost well-being—some of these have reached more than a million people. As author of Outsmart Your Smartphone, and contributor to Psychology Today, The Greater Good Science Center, and Shine Text, Dr. Davis aims to share her insights on happiness & health with people all across the world. Learn more about Dr. Davis.
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