How to Regulate Your Emotions: 9 Emotional Regulation Skills

Emotional regulation is the set of skills you use to change how strong a feeling gets, how long it lasts and what you do with it. It does not mean staying calm or never getting upset. In practice, you regulate your emotions by noticing the feeling early, naming it precisely, settling your body, looking at the situation another way, and choosing an action instead of a reflex.

Nine emotional regulation skills, in the order they usually help:

If you struggle to find the right word, the feelings wheel takes you from a broad feeling like "bad" or "stressed" to a precise one like "disrespected," "dreading" or "left out," so you know what you are actually dealing with. Naming is the skill most people skip, and it makes the others easier.

What is emotional regulation, exactly?

Psychologists describe emotions as having a life cycle: a situation happens, you notice something about it, you interpret it, and your body and behavior respond. You can step in at any of those points. That is the core of the process model of emotion regulation, the most widely used framework in the research.

That gives you five places to act:

• The situation you walk into: skipping the party where your ex will be, or bringing a friend.
• The situation itself: asking for a break in an argument, or moving the hard conversation to the morning.
• Where your attention goes: looking at something else, or focusing on the part that went fine.
• How you read what happened: "She's ignoring me" versus "She's in back-to-back meetings."
• How you respond: taking a slow breath, keeping your voice level, waiting before you reply.

People who seem good at this are rarely feeling less. They are stepping in earlier and in more places. If you want to see where you are starting from, the emotion regulation test shows how easily you bring a strong feeling back down.

How to regulate your emotions in the moment

Notice the body signals first

Most emotions show up in the body before you have words for them: heat in the face, a tight chest, a clenched jaw, fast typing, a sudden urge to leave. Learn your two or three early signs. The earlier you catch a feeling, the less work it takes to steer it.

Name the feeling, and be specific

"I'm upset" is a start. "I'm humiliated because he corrected me in front of the team" is far more useful. Research on emotion differentiation, sometimes called emotional granularity, has found that people who describe their negative feelings in finer detail are less likely to turn to binge drinking, aggression or self-harm when they are very distressed, and tend to have less severe anxiety and depression.^[3] A precise word tells you what the feeling is about, and so what might help.

Calm your body before you try to think

When you are flooded, reasoning with yourself rarely works. Breathe in through your nose and out slowly through your mouth, with the out-breath longer than the in-breath, for ten rounds. Splash cold water on your face or hold something cold. Press your feet into the floor. How to calm down fast covers these in more detail, and the vagus nerve reset guides you through a five-minute calming routine.

Put a gap between the feeling and the action

The feeling is not the problem. Acting on it at full volume usually is. A simple rule: no sending, quitting, breaking up or deciding anything important for 20 minutes after a spike. Write the message in your notes app if you need to get it out. If you still want to send it later, you will at least send a calmer version.

How to regulate emotions over time

Reframe the situation, not just the feeling

Once your body has settled, ask what else could explain what happened. A large review of 306 experiments found that changing how you think about the situation itself, or looking at it from someone else's point of view, was one of the more effective ways to change how you feel. Reappraising only your own reaction ("I shouldn't be this upset") worked less well.^[1]

Useful questions:

• "What would I tell a friend who told me this story?"
• "How will this look in a week? In a year?"
• "What is the most generous reading of what they did?"

The thought record walks you through this step by step, from the thought that set you off to a more balanced one you can actually believe.

Distract on purpose, then come back

The same review found distraction effective, while concentrating on the feeling made things worse.^[1] Distraction is a skill when you choose it for a set time ("I'll watch one episode, then decide what to do") and a problem when it becomes how you avoid every feeling. Pick something absorbing that does not make things worse later: a walk, cooking, a game, a call with someone.

Solve the part you can solve

Some feelings are information. Anxiety about a deadline goes down fastest when you make a plan for the deadline. Ask: "Is there a problem here I can act on?" If yes, pick one concrete step and a time. If no, move to the next skill.

Let the rest pass without feeding it

Some things cannot be fixed tonight: grief, a rejection, a diagnosis, someone else's choices. Here the skill is to let the feeling rise and fall without adding a story to it. Notice where it sits in your body, breathe, and let it be there. Feelings you stop arguing with usually lose strength faster than feelings you fight.

Protect the basics

Short sleep, skipped meals, alcohol and long stretches of stress all make emotions faster and stronger. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), which teaches emotion regulation as a set of named skills, treats looking after your body as a regulation skill in its own right, not an extra. If you are on four hours of sleep, the best skill of the day might be going to bed.

Which strategies backfire?

Some of the most common ways of handling feelings are also the least helpful in the long run. A meta-analysis of 114 studies found that rumination, avoidance and suppression were more strongly linked to symptoms of anxiety, depression, eating and substance-use problems than reappraisal and acceptance were.^[2]

Venting is a special case. A review of 154 studies on anger found that calming activities such as slow breathing and meditation reduced anger and aggression, while activities that raised arousal, such as hitting a bag or going for a run, did not help overall.^[4] As for suppression, keeping a straight face in a tense meeting is fine. Trying never to feel the feeling is the version that backfires. If replaying is your main habit, rumination and depression covers how to break the loop.

Emotional regulation in relationships

Emotions spread between people, and partners can calm or wind each other up. A few things help:

• Call the break before you hit the wall. "I'm getting too heated to listen. Can we take 20 minutes and come back?" Say when you will return, so the break does not feel like punishment.
• Say the feeling, not the verdict. "I felt dismissed when you checked your phone" lands better than "You never listen."
• Calm together when you can. A slow walk side by side, a hand on the back or sitting close often settles both people faster than talking it out while flooded.

How to regulate your emotions after a fight goes through the hour after an argument in detail.

Track it: find your patterns

You cannot change a pattern you cannot see. For two or three weeks, write down your biggest emotional spike each day in one line: what happened, the feeling word, how strong it was from 1 to 10, and what you did next. Add how you slept.

Patterns usually jump out fast. Most people find their spikes cluster around the same few things, such as a certain person, a certain time of day or a short night. The mood tracker takes one tap a day and shows what tends to come before a drop, and the 60-second mental health check-in adds stress, sleep and energy so you can see how they move together. Once you know your top two triggers, how to identify your emotional triggers helps you plan for them.

When to get help with emotional regulation

Everyone loses it sometimes. Consider talking to a doctor or a licensed therapist if:

• Your emotions often feel out of your control, or swing hard within hours. Emotional dysregulation in adults describes what that looks like.
• Anger leads to yelling, breaking things or scaring people.
• You use alcohol, food, spending or self-harm to get through feelings.
• Relationships or work keep falling apart over the same reactions.

Strong, fast emotions are part of several conditions, including ADHD, PTSD, bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. Only a professional can sort out what is going on, and these skills can be taught directly in DBT, CBT and related approaches. If ADHD is part of your picture, ADHD emotional dysregulation covers tools that fit how your brain works.

The hardest part of regulating an emotion is often the first ten seconds, when you notice it and say what it is. If something set you off today and it is still sitting in your chest, say it out loud to Lovon, an AI coach you talk to by voice, and work out together what the feeling is and what you want to do with it.