Mental Fitness Mondays: Emotion Regulation
Emotional rollercoaster or calm and collected… how well do you manage emotions?
How in tune with your feelings are you? How are you feeling right now - do you know? You might notice that you feel a mix of different feelings rather than just one emotion at a time. In this post I’ll share my take on what emotion regulation is, and why it matters.
Regulating your emotions means that first of all, you’re able to feel them! As we said last time, you can’t improve on something you’re not aware of. The second part is being able to ‘sit with’ your emotions; meaning you are aware of the emotion but don’t irrationally act upon it. Generally, if you're feeling happy, excited, peaceful, or positive in some way, then you’re probably okay sitting with those emotions.
Less pleasant emotions like anger, irritation, frustration, jealousy, sadness - tend to be the ones that are not so easy to sit with.
You hurt the ones you love
Quite a lot of people try to get rid of the less pleasant emotions by (for example) reaching for a drink, comfort food, or their phone. Or if you're feeling angry maybe you give somebody a piece of your mind. Sometimes that person had nothing to do with the situation in the first place… ever taken a work stress out on your partner?!
Time to get curious
When you’re emotionally regulated you can feel and observe your feelings, even the difficult ones. Getting good at this means really noticing how you feel; it’s stopping and pausing for a moment to work out what's going on and what’s a helpful next step. You can then release that emotion instead of storing it up or doing something you later regret.
The body keeps the score
When we regularly experience unpleasant emotions, these become apparent in our body. They show up as aches and pains, tension or feeling weighed down. I encourage you not to fear your less pleasant emotions. It’s normal to experience a range of different thoughts and feelings. Please seek mental health support if you’re having trouble regulating yours. If you’re not feeling good, a simple technique is to focus on breathing better. Take 60 seconds to stop and breathe. Try writing your thoughts and feelings down, or I find using a voice recorder helpful to clear my head.
Everybody hurts… sometimes
The healthiest, happiest, most mentally fit people are not happy all the time. What makes them mentally fitter is that they have good habits of sitting with negative emotions and working to release them in positive ways, instead of allowing them to fester, or pretending they’re just fine.
So how are you feeling right now? And what can you do today to regulate your emotions better? The more you practise, the easier it gets.
A coaching question to get you thinking: What helps you to manage your emotions?
