We all have moments where we freak out—some more than others—so what are the things that people who tend to regulate pretty well do? What are the 4 essential habits to regulate emotions?
It might seem like emotional stability just comes naturally to some people, but when you look closely, it becomes clear there are 4 essential habits that help them regulate their emotions. I’m going to tell you what those four things are, and then I’m going to break those habits down into tiny, actionable steps.
Habit 1 to Regulate Emotions: Pause
People with good emotional regulation skills don’t react when they’re highly emotional. And they don’t just suppress their feelings. It’s not that emotionally stable people don’t have feelings—they do, plenty of them.
Instead they’ve trained themselves to pause. They notice when they’re highly emotional, and then they slow things down.
Instead of having a Trigger > React, They’ve paired Trigger > Pause
Viktor Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
So if it’s not about trying harder, how do you train yourself to pause?, how do you practice that? Let me teach you some strategies for this.
1) They don’t just “stop it” They have an action that they DO. They’ve practiced this over and over until they get better at it. What do they do?
- Close their mouth
- Have a filler response: “Hmm, let me think about that.”
- Put their hands behind their backs
- Take a long, slow breath. Even a 5-second breath can give your nervous system time to settle before you speak or act.
Regulate Your Emotions by Building Systems
They also build systems to slow themselves down.
- No big decisions without sleeping on it (ie quitting a job, a really big purchase)
- They have to consult with their spouse before buying anything over $200
- They write about the problem before making a decision
- Mindfulness practice can help you to “sit with” these feelings and tolerate them without needing to act on them.
So pick a pause behavior that you like, and start to practice it. Practice it every day in tiny situations, and you’ll start to get really good at it even in intense situations.
This is something that you learn like muscle memory. The old trigger was, when I feel emotional, I react. The new trigger has to be re-wired: when I feel emotional, I pause.
Predicting Feelings to Improve Emotional Regulation
One of the best ways to train yourself to slow down is to get better at predicting your emotions. Surprise exaggerates emotions; but if you know a big emotion is coming up, then you won’t be surprised. If I told you I was going to jump out at you from behind the bushes when you walk by, you’ll probably not scream in such a high pitched way–haha.
So get to know your triggers. Be aware of the things that start getting you worked up, before you’re already at a 10. You know that when you’re hungry, tired, or stressed you’re more likely to be emotionally reactive. You know that when you’re around certain people you’re more likely to be tense or reactive or impulsive. You know what times of day you’re more sensitive, etc.
Once you know what your triggers are, this is not just an excuse to avoid these situations. It gives you a chance to prepare yourself to respond to them in a better way.
One of the best ways to build this skill is to reflect and get perspective. This is why therapy can be so powerful, but at the end of the video I’ll teach you a method you can also do on your own.
Habit 2 to Regulate Emotions: Don’t Believe Every Thought
OK, here’s another habit for emotional regulation.
Have you heard this story? A woman is sitting in an airport waiting for her flight. She buys a bag of Oreos and sits down next to a man. As she reads, she notices that the man keeps reaching into the bag and eating the cookies.
She becomes more and more irritated, thinking, “How rude! He’s stealing my Oreos!”
Instead of confronting him, she silently judges him while continuing to eat from the bag herself. She’s fuming with anger.
The man calmly keeps sharing the cookies, without reacting to her annoyance.
Eventually, there is only one oreo left. The man breaks it in half and offers her a piece. She is shocked by his audacity, but takes it anyway.
Finally she boards her flight, sits down in her seat and opens her purse—and finds her own unopened bag of Oreos.
Suddenly, she realizes the truth: she was the one eating his cookies all along.
All those feelings of anger, self-righteousness, indignation, were all based on a false story—one where she was the victim to his rudeness. When in reality, he was actually being very patient, generous and forgiving towards her.
Healthy people get to know the stories they tell themselves. Victim stories. Angry Stories. Self-Righteous Stories. Check out my video on labeling your stories.
Emotionally stable people don’t believe everything they think (or feel). Emotions are like smoke alarms: they are loud and sometimes come on fast. Sometimes they mean that there is a fire. Sometimes they’re going off because you took a hot shower or they’re low on batteries.
That’s how emotions can be. They feel intense and they feel real.
- If I’m angry, it feels like I’m being mistreated.
- If I’m panicking, it feels like I’m in danger.
- If I’m sad, it feels like everything it awful.
But just because I feel something, just because I think something, doesn’t mean it’s true.
When a smoke alarm goes off, it’s a warning that we need to check if something is wrong. It doesn’t always mean that the house is burning down.
When I feel a big emotion, it means that I need to take a minute and ask, “Is something wrong?” And if so, “What steps should I take to fix it?”
Emotionally healthy people know, from experience, that their feelings and thoughts lie all the time. So if our thoughts and feelings aren’t always accurate, what are we supposed to do with them?
Let’s learn how to create space so that thoughts and feelings don’t run your life.
Here are a few ways people with good emotional regulation do it:
- They hold their thoughts at arm’s length and ask, “Is this thought helpful? Is this feeling accurate?”
- They question their stories. Instead of “They’re disrespecting me,” try “They might just be stressed—this isn’t about me.”
- They look at the big picture and ask, “How will this feel tomorrow or next week? Do I want this feeling to control me? To make my decisions?”
- They name it to tame it. Simply labeling what you feel (“I’m noticing anger rising,” or “This feels like shame”) calms the brain and creates space between stimulus and response.
- Notice your body. My hands are clenching. I’m talking fast. I’m getting sweaty.
You can train your nervous system to be less reactive through practice and somatic work.
The easiest way to do this is to start using the phrase “I’m having the thought that…” or “I’m noticing a part of me…”
- “I’m such a loser.” → “I’m having the thought that I’m such a loser”
- “No one loves me.” → “Part of me feels really lonely and scared right now.”
- “This is never going to work out.” → “I’m catastrophizing right now.”
- “She makes me so angry.” → “My chest feels tight with anger.”
You can do this with an outward focus too.
- “You never take out the trash.” → “Part of me thinks that you don’t even care about me. But there’s another part of me that knows you’re making a lot of sacrifices for our family.”
When you can create some space between yourself and your thoughts and feelings, it gives you freedom to choose what actions to take. Instead of letting your thoughts or feelings make your decisions, you constantly ask, “What is most important to me? What kind of person do I want to be?” These are your values, and when you pause, and don’t believe everything you think or feel, it gives you space to make choices that line up with your values for the good life that you do want.
Learn Emotional Regulation in My Course
These are a few of the skills I teach in my How to Process Your Emotions course. You get 31 bite-sized lessons that will help you build emotional regulation skills. The course is included with the monthly membership.
So first, we pause.
Second, you don’t believe everything you think.
Habit 3 to Regulate Emotions: Don’t Repress, Process
Third, don’t struggle against your feelings. Emotionally stable people process instead of Repress.
A feeling is something actually happening in your body. Just because the thoughts around it might not be true, the sensations and nervous system activation are actually happening, here in this present moment. Healthy people allow feelings to be there, and they give themselves time to process them in their mind, and in their body.
Emotions are like an overfull refrigerator. The more stuff we shove in there, the more likely it is that something will fall out, spill over, or go rotten and smell bad. When our default reaction to an emotion is to just stuff it, ignore it or distract from it, big, stinky emotions are going to build up and make it much more likely that they will explode later.
Processing emotions takes 4 steps: Observe, Explore, Choose, and then Act or Accept
Don’t react. After pausing, we observe our emotions, we slow down,we get curious. We allow them to be there. We notice them in our bodies, we name them, we show them compassion.
Then explore them. You might take your thoughts and feelings that you noticed (in the step above) and sift through them. Which thoughts are helpful? Which ones aren’t? It can be really helpful to say them out loud, or write them down, and to check for cognitive distortions like catastrophizing or black-and-white thinking.
An important part of this process is that we don’t shame ourselves for having feelings or for our past reactions. That usually trains us to be more reactive. Instead of shaming, we treat ourselves with compassion—and this trains us to be more patient and calm with ourselves and others. Harsh self-criticism makes you more reactive. Talking to yourself like you would to a good friend (“This is hard, but I’m okay”) lowers the emotional charge.
You could also do some body-soothing, self-care, do something you enjoy.
And when there is a problem, healthy people figure out what they can change and they take some action to make things better, making choices based on values, not feelings. I can feel terribly angry and choose to speak with kindness. I can feel terribly angry and choose to take rapid and forceful action to create a boundary. One time this involved shoving away someone. Most of the time, it involves setting a verbal boundary and then choosing to leave or report a situation. The difference is, I’m making a choice. I have agency. I’m deciding. My feelings are informative, but they don’t make my decisions for me.
So emotions might show up in a big loud way. Ask them if they’re trying to tell you that something needs to change, and then take an action, and then soothe your body. After a stressful event, you allow your body time to shake, run, cry, soften, soothe, relax, laugh, connect, and share the story.
Habit 4 to Regulate Emotions: Growth Mindset
And here’s the fourth habit to regulate your emotions. This is the one that transforms every emotional experience into a win.
Healthy people don’t label themselves as “This is just how I am.”
They treat every experience as an opportunity to learn. You don’t have to be perfect, that’s not the purpose of life. It’s to learn and grow through experiences. The difficult or painful experiences are all opportunities to deepen your capacity, to get better at feeling. How do we do this?
- Treat yourself and your mistakes with compassion.
- Get good at making repairs and learning. (You know how you get good at this? Practice. Messing up). If you do overreact, apologize and re-center. This trains you to bounce back faster rather than aiming for perfection.
- Reflect later: Journaling or debriefing helps you learn from the situation without judgment.
- Rehearsing and practicing out loud how you would respond to a reactive situation in the future can also be a good way to train yourself to be less reactive.
How do we get to the point where we respond to feelings instead of reacting to them? Practice.
Every single day you’ll get a chance to practice responding to feelings.
How to Regulate Your Emotions
To put it all together, here’s a quick way to practice:
- Bring to mind a mild frustration from your day (not the biggest one yet!).
- Notice and name. Say to yourself, “I’m noticing anger/stress/fear is here.”
- Imagine putting that feeling on a shelf—it’s present, but you don’t have to pick it up right now. You could say “I’m having the thought that…” or “I’m having the feeling of…”
- Reflect: What were the triggers or precursors? What kinds of thoughts are you having? Do these thoughts help? Are they accurate?
- Write: How would you have liked to handle that better? What was in your control?
- Practice: Now say it out loud. Build some muscle memory, say it out loud.
This might seem super basic, but it’s really essential to emotional regulation. And as you practice this every day, you’ll find that you’re able to pause and not freak out when something triggers you. You’ve got this!
