Most people know how to manage, express, and cope with emotions in a healthy way. In fact, knowing how to regulate emotions is important for everyone. But what is emotion regulation, and how can you improve your emotion regulation skills?
Many researchers view emotion regulation as the ability to enhance or reduce your emotions as needed. Others define it as a set of skills that help keep your emotional system healthy and functioning. We can learn to adjust what emotion we have, how intense it is, when we have it, and how we react to it. The defining aspect of emotion regulation is that it occurs when a goal is activated.
Goals are highly individual. They're what we picture in our heads. Your goals can be activated by your environment. You may regulate your emotions to influence a change in someone else. For instance, when your boss treats you poorly at work, you act as if it doesn't bother you because you're hoping for a job promotion.
Mindfulness is the practice of being present in the moment. Mindful people learn to be aware of the breaths they take, the tension in their muscles, and even their pulse rates. They can objectively observe themselves in difficult moments, confident that even these times will pass.
In and of themselves, emotions are not good or bad, though they may be scary, especially when they're intense. But the more you do it, the more natural it becomes. Mindfulness skills can help with this too.
A. Learning how to accept your emotions takes practice.
B. Being mindful can help you to deal with your emotions.
C. There is no one agreed-upon definition of emotion regulation.
D. Emotion regulation goals vary strongly from situation to situation.
E. For some people, though, emotion regulation is much more difficult.
F. Emotion regulation refers to the ability to control one's own emotions.
G. Sometimes you may regulate your emotions to achieve another end goal.
