Emotion Regulation: Definition + 21 Strategies to Manage Emotions

What is emotion regulation? What can you do to regulate your emotions? Here are science-based, high-impact emotion regulation strategies you can start using today.

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What Is Emotion Regulation? (Emotion Regulation Definition)

Emotion regulation is defined as the ability to affect one's own emotional state. It can involve either increasing positive emotion, decreasing negative emotion, or both. Emotion regulation is sometimes considered to be a type of coping mechanism, as it is often used in response to stress. Generally, emotion regulation means changing your thoughts or behaviors, sometimes in conscious and sometimes in unconscious ways. For example, both focusing on the silver linings in a situation and removing yourself from a difficult situation are considered to be types of emotion regulation. Generally, when you regulate your emotions with healthy strategies, you feel better and can more quickly recover from stressful experiences. And, when you regulate your emotions with unhealthy emotion regulation strategies, you feel better for a short while and then worse later on.

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Is Emotion Regulation the Same as Emotional Control?

Controlling our emotions is one type of emotion regulation, but it is not the only type. Accepting our emotions or doing something non-emotional are other types of emotion regulation that don't directly involve control. In fact, emotional control may not always work and may not always be beneficial. For example, certain types of emotional control such as suppression—or cramming down your feelings—can actually have long term negative impacts on your well-being [1].

Video: Emotion Regulation: Definition & Strategies

What Are the Impacts of Emotion Regulation?

Most emotion regulation strategies make you feel better in some way, at least in the short term. A few emotion regulation strategies may actually make you feel worse. For example, worrying is a common emotion regulation strategy that people use to help avoid future problems, but this strategy is completely ineffective in that it makes us feel worse in the short term and often does not help us in the longer term.

Short-Term Versus Longer-Term Emotion Regulation
Many emotion regulation strategies help us feel better in the short term but not the longer term. For example, drinking alcohol is a pretty effective short-term emotion regulation strategy—it makes us feel good for a bit. But it often makes us feel worse in the long term, especially if we are using it to manage emotions that we can't effectively manage with healthier strategies.

Read on to learn more about the many types of healthy and unhealthy emotion regulation strategies.

Video: What Is Emotion Regulation?

Healthy Emotion Regulation Strategies:

Healthy emotion regulation strategies are strategies that help us feel better in the moment and don't have negative long-term effects. They usually help us feel more positive emotions (and fewer negative emotions) both now and later. Here are a few healthy emotion regulation strategies.

1. Self-Awareness as Emotion Regulation

Self-awareness is sometimes considered an emotion regulation strategy. More often, it is thought of as a useful, but not necessary, part of the emotion regulation process. For example, when we know we have an emotion to regulate, awareness of our thoughts and emotions makes it easier for us to engage in healthy emotion regulation.

If we are not self-aware or not aware of our emotions, we may still engage in emotion regulation. However, we may do so in ways that don't work very well. For example, maybe we yell at people when we're sad or cry when we're angry. These mismatched responses to our emotions make it harder to get our needs met. Or, we may regulate our emotions in less conscious ways. For example, we may find that we've eaten an entire tub of ice cream or drank an entire bottle of wine without knowing why.

2. Acceptance as Emotion Regulation

Emotional acceptance is the ability to experience your emotions without judging them or having metacognitions (i.e., thoughts or emotions about your initial emotion). However, there is some debate in the field about whether acceptance is even an emotion regulation strategy. In some ways, it's the lack of emotion regulation. You just let your emotions be as they are and they spontaneously dissipate on their own.

I would argue that acceptance is indeed a type of emotion regulation because just accepting emotions is not our natural mode of operating. Because of social influences, cultural influences, and upbringing, we automatically judge emotions—especially emotions like anger and sadness. Women tend to judge themselves more for feeling anger; men tend to judge themselves more for feeling sadness, but we all tend to have a difficult time accepting some negative emotions. For these reasons, acceptance takes conscious effort for most of us. When we are unpracticed, we have to actively let go and accept. To my mind, that's emotion regulation.

3. Mindfulness as Emotion Regulation

Mindfulness is thought to be the combination of awareness and acceptance. Mindfulness can be an effective way to regulate emotions, particularly to induce calmness and relaxation. Mindfulness is very popular these days, and it has been shown to have a positive impact on many aspects of well-being. However, mindfulness can be a difficult skill to learn and doesn't appear to work equally well for everyone. For example, people who struggle with rumination should use caution when doing mindfulness, as focusing on their internal processes may cause them to get stuck in their negative feelings.

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4. Emotional Memory Affects Emotion Regulation

Memorizing and recalling positive words forces your brain to activate the regions associated with these words. So memorizing positive words can help strengthen the brain regions responsible for positive concepts, memories, and ideas. As a result, these concepts may be more accessible in your day-to-day life. Overall, you may train your brain to have slightly more positive emotions or when it comes time to regulate your emotions in response to something negative, your brain may be more effective at doing so.

5. Emotional Attention Affects Emotion Regulation

Another way to change how we experience emotion is to re-direct our attention towards the positive. If we're focusing on the bad things in a situation, we can shift to instead focusing on something else or paying attention to the less threatening parts of the situation. Research shows that our attention can, in fact, be trained. One study trained participants to focus on neutral instead of threatening faces in a computerized task, and this training resulted in significant reductions in social anxiety [2].

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6. Positive Reappraisal as Emotion Regulation

The distinctions between positive and negative reappraisal are not entirely clear from the research, but generally, positive reappraisal is an emotion regulation strategy that involves cognitively reframing an experience as more positive. For example, let’s say that you lost your job. A positive reappraisal might be that this situation will push you forward and help you begin building that business you always wanted to start.

Other definitions of positive reappraisal include reframing an event in ways that increase positive emotion. I know the distinction is subtle, but this definition focuses on the outcome of the reappraisal being more positive (versus less negative).

7. Negative Reappraisal as Emotion Regulation

Negative reappraisal is an emotion regulation strategy that involves cognitively reframing an experience as less negative. For example, if you lost your job, a negative reappraisal might be: at least you don't have to deal with your jerk boss anymore. Rather than focusing on the good in the situation, you focus on what's "less bad".

Like positive reappraisal, negative reappraisal is sometimes defined more in terms of emotional outcome. Negative reappraisal, then, would be defined as reframing an event in ways that decrease negative emotion (versus increasing positive emotion).

Don't worry too much about these definitions, though, as both positive and negative reappraisal tend to increase positive emotion and decrease negative emotion simultaneously.

8. Self-Distancing as Emotion Regulation

Self-distancing is an emotion regulation strategy that involves mentally removing yourself from your situation. You may look at your situation as if you were “a fly on the wall” or as if you were someone else who is witnessing your situation from afar. These days, we are so immersed in our experiences—what we feel, what we think, even what we had for dinner. But it turns out that emotionally distancing yourself from your experience and looking at it from an outsider’s perspective helps you from getting stuck in your negative emotions. As a result, you don’t feel quite as bad [3].

9. Temporal Distancing as Emotion Regulation

In addition to shifting to another person’s perspective, we can shift to another time perspective by looking at our situation from another point in time. Temporal distancing is an emotion regulation strategy that involves looking backwards at our present experience from the eyes of our future self. This technique helps dampen our emotions because we see that our negative emotions are not permanent, so we feel less afraid of them [4]. To use this emotion regulation strategy, just remind yourself that this too shall pass.

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10. Positive Imagination as Emotion Regulation

You probably already know that when you think about something bad happening in the future, you start to feel all sorts of negative emotions—it's as if that bad thing already happened. Just the thought of your romantic partner leaving you or losing your job might lead to intense feelings of anxiety, anger, or sadness. Our brains react to our thoughts as if they are real. So thinking about negative scenarios that haven’t even happened tends to increase negative emotions.

But on the bright side, our brains do the exact same thing if we imagine positive scenarios. So, positive imagination is an emotion regulation strategy that involves imagining a positive future or present moment. By imagining all the positive things that could happen in our future, we can create the positive emotions that would arise in those situations—remember, our brains think our thoughts are real. For example, maybe you imagine your boss finally praising you for something you did well, maybe you imagine spending all afternoon at an amusement park with your family, or maybe you imagine flying around town on a purple dragon. It's almost magic how you can create positive emotions out of your imagination.

11. Savoring as Emotion Regulation

Savoring is an emotion regulation strategy that is all about mentally holding on to the positive emotions we get in our day-to-day lives. Too often we let the good moments and positive emotions pass by without truly savoring or celebrating them. When we savor these moments, we pause and attempt to fully experience the positive emotions that have arisen in that moment, and as a result, we up-regulate our positive emotions, creating longer-lasting positive experiences [5].

12. Capitalizing as Emotion Regulation

Capitalizing is an emotion regulation strategy that involves sharing our positive events with others. This enables us to extend our positive emotions, feel closer to others, and lead them to feel closer to us. To extend a positive moment even longer, show it, tell it, or share it with others right away. You might call or text a friend or talk to the people around you about what you’re feeling. Just be sure when that you’re sharing your emotions and not humble bragging.

13. Gratitude as Emotion Regulation

Gratitude is an emotion regulation strategy that involves simple thankfulness. When we express gratitude, we not only make ourselves feel good, we make others feel good too. Gratitude appears to increase positive emotions in both the short and longer term by improving the quality of our relationships. Here are some gratitude activities to try:

14. Growth Mindset Affects Emotion Regulation

The belief that you can grow and improve, often referred to as growth mindset, has a surprisingly big impact on your ability to reach your goals. In fact, the more you believe that you can improve a skill, the more likely it is that you actually will improve that skill.

Although growth mindset is often not thought of as an emotion regulation strategy, its impact on emotion suggests it is at least an important part of the emotion regulation process. How? Well, it turns out that believing that you can regulate your emotions makes it more likely that you will. So if you have a growth mindset for emotion, you put yourself in a frame of mind where all other emotion regulation strategies are likely to be more effective [6].

15. Opposite Action as Emotion Regulation

Opposite action is an emotion regulation strategy used in Dialectical Behavior Therapy. When we're feeling a certain way, we tend to act in ways that are congruent with those feelings. By acting in the opposite way we can begin to shift our mood to the opposite as well.

Video: Opposite Action & Emotion Regulation

16. Distraction as Emotion Regulation

Distraction can be a healthy emotion regulation strategy when used properly. There are all kinds of unhealthy ways to distract ourselves (we'll talk about these more later). But some types of distraction can be beneficial. One good example is exercise. If we're feeling sad or frustrated, exercise is a good distraction that helps us feel better in the short term and longer term. Another good distraction when we're feeling anxious is to take a cold shower or swim, as this helps activate our parasympathetic nervous system—or our rest and digest system. So distraction can be used effectively, as long as it's done thoughtfully.

Unhealthy Emotion Regulation Strategies

Now that you have a good idea of some of the more popular healthy emotion regulation strategies, let's talk a bit about unhealthy emotion regulation strategies. Unhealthy emotion regulation strategies are strategies that may help us feel better in the moment (or we think they will make us feel better) but they tend to make us feel worse in the longer run or have negative long-term effects. We may even feel even worse later on because we have avoided, suppressed, or otherwise improperly processed our negative emotions.

1. Rumination as Unhealthy Emotion Regulation

Rumination is an emotion regulation strategy that involves overthinking something again and again. Rumination and worry are often used unconsciously to help us regulate our emotions. We think—incorrectly—that continuous thinking or worry about our issues will help us solve them. But we rarely find solutions and instead think ourselves into depression or anxiety. That's why this is an ineffective emotion regulation strategy. It doesn't help reduce our negative emotions in the short term or longer term.

2. Substance Use as Unhealthy Emotion Regulation

Drug and alcohol use does not always serve as an emotion regulation strategy, but it does so more than we might think. Just ask yourself, did you have that drink to boost your mood, enjoy the party more, or forget about your problems? Then you used alcohol to regulate your emotions. Occasionally, we consume these substances as part of socializing or ritual. But more often than we realize, these substances are used to increase positive emotions--Whoohoo, let's party!—or to decrease negative emotions--That day was horrible; I just need a drink!

When we use substances as emotion regulation, we actually do ourselves more harm than good. Because we aren't learning other ways to increase positive emotions or decrease negative emotions, we can become reliant on substances to regulate our emotions for us. And that's a dangerous game that gets harder and harder to correct over time.

3. Self-Harm as Unhealthy Emotion Regulation

Non-suicidal self-harm is often considered to be a maladaptive (unhealthy) emotion regulation strategy. Although many people are shocked to discover people deliberately hurt themselves by way of self-cutting or burning, many of us actually hurt ourselves as a form of emotion regulation, albeit in more socially acceptable ways. For example, a man may punch a wall when he's upset, hurting his hand. Someone may get a tattoo in an effort to "feel something". Or, we may push ourselves extra hard at the gym to avoid our emotions.

Although it's unclear whether these different types of self-harm share common emotional undertones, the research suggests that self-harm is frequently practiced in the context of intense, overwhelming negative emotions. Most interestingly, research has shown that self-harm does reduce negative emotions and alter physiology in ways that induce a sense of calm [7]. So, like substance use, this emotion regulation strategy improves emotions in the short term, but not the longer term, and it prevents us from learning healthy emotion regulation strategies that would help us effectively regulate our emotions in the future.

4. Expressive Suppression as Unhealthy Emotion Regulation

Expressive suppression, or hiding the expression of our emotions on our face, is one way we attempt to squash emotions. Unfortunately, this strategy doesn't work. We actually end up increasing physiological activation associated with negative emotion and do ourselves more harm than good.

Video: Emotions on the Face and Experience of Emotion

5. Avoidance as Unhealthy Emotion Regulation

Experiential avoidance is thought to be an unhealthy emotion regulation strategy. Experiential avoidance involves avoiding the situations or experiences that we know will cause us negative emotions. Perhaps we are afraid to fly so we avoid it. Maybe we have social anxiety so we avoid people. Or maybe we're afraid of failure so we avoid challenging ourselves. But by avoiding these situations, we avoid key experiences that can help us learn to more effectively manage these situations.

I do believe there is a caveat here, though. Sometimes it's okay to avoid. In fact, it can be beneficial to avoid toxic relationships, to end friendships that hurt our self-esteem, and to avoid foods that we are intolerant to. The goal here is to be mindful about what you're avoiding. Ask yourself, is avoiding a certain thing going to be good for you in the longer term?

6. Retail Therapy as Unhealthy Emotion Regulation

Retail therapy is an emotion regulation strategy that involves shopping with the intent to improve our mood. In American culture, we commonly hear that "retail therapy" is a tool we can use to feel better. In graduate school, I was interested in studying whether this was actually an unhealthy emotion regulation strategy. Indeed, my research showed that shopping makes us feel better in the short term, but worse in the longer term. So using retail therapy to regulate emotions is not generally a good idea.

Articles Related to Emotion Regulation

Want to learn more about emotion regulation? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Emotion Regulation

If you’d like to keep learning more about emotion regulation, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Emotion Regulation

In this article, we explored a wide variety of emotion regulation strategies to help you better understand how and when we regulate our emotions. Hopefully, you'll be better able to put to use the healthy emotion regulation strategies we discussed and bring more awareness to the times when you use unhealthy emotion regulation strategies. As a result of these efforts, you are nearly guaranteed to experience at least a small boost in well-being.

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References

1. Wenzlaff, R. M., & Wegner, D. M. (2000). Thought suppression. Annual review of psychology, 51(1), 59-91.
2. Amir, N., Beard, C., Taylor, C. T., Klumpp, H., Elias, J., Burns, M., & Chen, X. (2009). Attention training in individuals with generalized social phobia: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 77(5), 961.
3. Ayduk, Ö., and E. Kross. 2010. “From a Distance: Implications of Spontaneous Self-Distancing for Adaptive Self-Reflection.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98 (5): 809–829. http://doi.org/10.1037/a0019205.
4. Bruehlman-Senecal, E., and O. Ayduk. 2015. “This Too Shall Pass: Temporal Distance and the Regulation of Emotional Distress." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108 (2): 356.
5. Quoidbach, J., E. V. Berry, M. Hansenne, and M. Mikolajczak. 2010. “Positive Emotion Regulation and Well-Being: Comparing the Impact of Eight Savoring and Dampening Strategies.” Personality and Individual Differences 49 (5): 368–373.
6. Tamir, M., O. P. John, S. Srivastava, and J. J. Gross. 2007. “Implicit Theories of Emotion: Affective and Social Outcomes Across a Major Life Transition.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92 (4): 731–744. http://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.4.731.
7. Nock, M. K., & Mendes, W. B. (2008). Physiological arousal, distress tolerance, and social problem-solving deficits among adolescent self-injurers. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 76(1), 28.

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