14 Nov 3 Science-Based Techniques to Regulate Your Emotions
Everyone gets upset.
It’s normal and appropriate to get upset.
The so-called “negative emotions” are not “bad”, but it can be helpful to know how to regulate or master them.
And this great article via Psychology Today by Arash Emamzadeh outlines 3 simple but powerful strategies for doing so …
KEY POINTS
- How we regulate our emotions (i.e. how we try to manage and control our emotions) affects our mood in daily life.
- The emotion-regulation strategies of acceptance, problem-solving, and reappraisal are associated with positive mood.
- The emotion-regulation strategies of rumination and suppression are related to negative mood.
Published in the August issue of Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, a recent review paper by Boemo et al. examines the relationship between emotion-regulation strategies and affect (i.e. emotions or mood).
Specifically, the paper explores the association between the use of emotion-regulation strategies in daily life and both current and future mood.
Emotion-regulation strategies
For context, these are the most commonly used adaptive and maladaptive emotion-regulation strategies:
- Acceptance: Accepting the fact that the unpleasant situation in question has occurred and being open to (as opposed to avoiding or judging) one’s uncomfortable emotional reactions to the situation.
- Distraction: Directing attention away from the source of stress and toward unrelated activities.
- Problem-solving: Conscious attempts to alter the stressful situation or its consequences, by finding effective solutions.
- Reappraisal: Reframing and reinterpreting the aversive event in order to alter its meaning and to see it in a neutral or positive light (e.g., viewing something not as a problem but as a challenge or opportunity).
- Rumination: Focusing, repeatedly, on one’s negative mood or on the depressive symptoms and what they might mean. Rumination has been shown to increase the vulnerability for depression.
- Suppression: Conscious attempts to inhibit the expression of emotions (e.g., “poker face”).
- Worry: Repetitive and often uncontrollable thoughts concerning an undesirable but uncertain future outcome. Though misguided, worry is essentially an attempt at problem solving.
Note, rumination and worry are related but they are not the same. Compared to worry, rumination is focused more on loss (as opposed to anticipating potential threats) and on the past (as opposed to worrying about the future)…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE