By: Lauren Chee
As a Psychologist, an important part of my role is helping my clients regulate emotions.
Human beings are equipped to experience a diverse array of feelings. Our emotions are normal and important. They help us in a variety of ways. However, sometimes we can experience distressing emotions that are hard to manage. In this blog I describe three emotion regulation strategies that I use as a Psychologist to assist individuals to regulate their emotions.
1. Label Emotions As States of Feeling, Not States of Being
We often treat emotions as states of being. We might say “I am anxious”, “I am so sad” or “I am absolutely furious”. One emotion regulation strategy is to describe our emotions as things to hold, rather than states that define you: “I am carrying anxiety”, “I am sitting with sadness”, “I am holding anger”. This language shift helps you see that emotions are transient in nature and will ease over time.
2. Expand Your Emotional Vocabulary
You may have heard of the emotion regulation strategy “Name it to tame it”. Simply naming your emotions can increase your awareness of them and create distance, allowing you to regulate your feelings mindfully rather than reacting impulsively.
Expanding your emotional vocabulary can help you go beyond broad emotion categories to name your emotions in a specific and nuanced way. Emotions are data, so labelling our emotions accurately can help us identify the particular cause of how we feel and give us more information on what to do next. If you’re feeling happy, is it more of an optimism for the future or sense of pride in what you have done? If you’re feeling sad, can you describe the feeling as being disappointed in how someone treated you or powerless to make a change?
An emotion wheel is a helpful tool I often share with my clients to expand emotional vocabulary. Emotion wheels describe broad emotion umbrellas in the middle with the emotional categories becoming more nuanced moving outwards.
3. Reframe Emotions With Curiosity
Our emotions are real and worth paying attention to – but we also have control over how we reframe and interpret our emotions. Imagine you’re about to sit for a big exam. You see the exam paper in front of you, feel a surge in energy and a fluttering sensation in your stomach. You think to yourself “I’m feeling anxious”. But what if you pause with curiosity and ask yourself whether you are feeling another emotion too? You might find that you are also feeling energetic or determined.
There is amazing research that shows that when students are trained to recategorize what they called test anxiety as feeling determined, it makes the feeling of anxiety more manageable and it boosts their exam performance. What this research tells us is that human beings have the ability to reframe their emotion labels, which can help them regulate their emotions.
So, when you’re in an unfamiliar situation and you notice your heart beating faster, try being curious about whether you’re feeling excited as well as nervous. If you end a big day feeling like you’re seeing life through a negative lens, be curious about how much of that is because you’re fatigued instead of depressed. If you’re feeling more alert, I wonder if you’re feeling interested as well as some level of stress.
A Balanced Approach to Emotions
Our emotions are an important part of our lives that feed us important data and we shouldn’t ignore them or pretend they are not there. So be curious about your feelings. Although we can’t change our emotions like how we change our clothes, we might have more control over them than we think.
If you’d like to learn more about managing emotions, click here to read a four step guide to managing challenging emotions written specifically for teens.
Therapy is a great place to be curious and make sense of your feelings with professional support.
Article supplied with thanks to The Centre for Effective Living.
Feature image: Canva
About the Author: Lauren Chee is a psychologist who understands the importance of forming a caring therapeutic relationship with her clients, and uses evidence-based skills that can lead to positive and lasting change. She has a special interest in anxiety-related disorders, OCD, social skills, parenting and attachment, child mental health and learning difficulties.