Emotional Regulation: The Skills, and Where Each One Works
Reviewed against the published research cited at the end of this article.Most advice about managing emotions fails for a structural reason: it recommends a technique for one moment and you try to use it in a different one. The timing turns out to matter more than the technique.
You have been told to reframe the situation. You have been told to breathe. You have been told to feel your feelings, and separately, not to be so reactive.
All of that advice is real, and most of it fails in practice for the same reason: it is offered without a time stamp. Reframing works beautifully thirty seconds before a feeling arrives and is almost useless at full intensity. Sitting with a feeling is excellent at peak and is a way of stewing if you do it for two hours.
The most useful thing in this area is not another technique. It is a map of when each one applies.
The model that organises this
James Gross, at Stanford, spent much of his career on this and produced what is now the standard framework: the process model of emotion regulation. Its central observation is that an emotion is not an event. It is a sequence, and you can intervene at different points along it, with different costs and different success rates.
The sequence runs roughly: a situation occurs, you attend to some part of it, you appraise what it means, and a response follows. Each of those is a place you can act.
The five, with what each one is actually for
1. Situation selection
Deciding not to be in the situation. Not going to the thing. Taking a different route. Not opening the app at midnight.
Where it wins: for predictable, repeated triggers with low cost of avoidance. If reading a particular person's messages at 11pm reliably ruins your night, the cheapest regulation available is to read them at 9am.
Where it goes wrong: when it becomes the only strategy. Avoidance scales badly. Applied to everything uncomfortable, it shrinks a life while feeling like competence.
2. Situation modification
Staying, and changing something about the conditions. Asking for the conversation to happen after dinner rather than now. Suggesting a walk instead of sitting opposite each other. Taking notes so you are not holding it all in your head.
Where it wins: genuinely underused. A large proportion of unmanageable feelings are manageable feelings in bad conditions: at the wrong time of day, on no food, in a room with an audience.
Where it goes wrong: when modification becomes control of other people rather than of conditions.
3. Attentional deployment
Changing what you are attending to. Grounding in sensory detail. Absorbing distraction. Deliberately moving the focus off the loop.
Where it wins: at high intensity, when the appraisal-level techniques are offline. Also for problems that have no available action, where rumination adds nothing.
Where it goes wrong: when the distraction is ambient rather than absorbing. Scrolling leaves most of your attention free, so the loop keeps running underneath it. The distraction has to be demanding enough to occupy the channel.
4. Cognitive change, usually called reappraisal
Changing what the situation means. Not pretending it is fine. Genuinely considering a second reading that fits the same facts: they did not reply because they are drowning at work, not because this friendship is over.
Where it wins: before the feeling peaks, and afterward for the next occurrence. In the research it is one of the better-supported strategies for long-run wellbeing.
Where it goes wrong: attempted at peak intensity, where the machinery you need for it is exactly what is unavailable. This is why "just look at it differently" mid-panic feels insulting. It is not bad advice, it is well-timed advice given at the wrong time.
5. Response modulation
Acting on the feeling once it has fully arrived: slowing the breath, changing posture, going for a walk, or suppressing the outward expression of it.
Where it wins: the physiological versions genuinely work and are available when nothing else is. Extended exhale, cold water, movement.
Where it goes wrong: expressive suppression, meaning holding the face still while feeling it all, which turns out to be the expensive one.
Why suppression is the expensive one
This is the finding from Gross's programme that most changes how people think about the topic, because suppression is what most of us were taught to do.
In experimental work comparing strategies, expressive suppression, meaning inhibiting the outward signs of an emotion you are having, does reduce the visible expression. It does not reliably reduce the internal experience. And it carries costs: increased physiological arousal, and impairments in memory for what happened while you were doing it.
There is a social cost too. Suppression tends to fare worse than reappraisal on measures of interpersonal functioning, which makes intuitive sense: a person who is visibly composed while internally at capacity is not very available to the people around them, and other people can usually tell that something is off without being able to name it.
None of that means never hold a face still. Sometimes you are in a meeting and composure is the correct professional move. The point is that suppression is a short-term tactic with a running cost, not a strategy, and using it as your primary approach is why some very self-controlled people are also very tired.
Reappraisal, and its actual limits
Reappraisal is the strategy the research is most enthusiastic about, and it is worth being precise about what it is and is not.
It is not positive thinking. It is not telling yourself the situation is fine when it is not. Reappraisal is the deliberate consideration of an alternative interpretation that fits the same evidence, and its power comes from the fact that most emotionally loaded situations are genuinely ambiguous.
The first reading"She read it and didn't reply. She's finally decided I'm not worth the effort."
Not reappraisal"It's fine, I don't care." (This is suppression wearing a reframe costume.)
Reappraisal"She read it and didn't reply. She read it at work, where she reads everything and replies to nothing. Both readings fit. I don't currently know which is true."
Notice that the third one does not conclude that everything is fine. It restores uncertainty, which is usually the accurate state, and uncertainty is far more tolerable than a verdict.
Two limits worth knowing. First, it needs cognitive resources, which means it works poorly at peak arousal and after a long day. Second, it should not be applied to situations that actually require action. Reappraising your way into tolerating something that ought to change is not regulation, it is talking yourself out of a signal.
Choosing the right one, in the moment
A rough decision rule that fits how the model actually behaves.
- Feeling is at 8 out of 10 or higher: nothing cognitive will work. Go to attention and physiology. Move, cold water, long exhale, absorbing task. You are not solving anything; you are buying access to the rest of your brain.
- Feeling is at 4 to 7: reappraisal is available. Ask for the second reading that fits the same facts, and stop at restoring uncertainty rather than pushing for a positive conclusion.
- Feeling is low but recurring: go upstream. Situation selection and modification. What are the conditions under which this keeps happening, and which of them can be changed?
- Feeling is signalling something real: do not regulate it. Act on it. The purpose of these skills is to make you able to respond well, not to make you comfortable with things that should change.
Trying to reappraise at intensity 9, failing, and concluding that emotion regulation does not work for them.
It is not a failure of the technique or of you. It is the right tool at the wrong point in the sequence. Come down first with attention and physiology, then reappraise. In that order it usually works.
Building the capacity
Four things move this reliably, none of them dramatic.
- Name states precisely. This is upstream of everything else. "Bad" gives you nothing to work with. "Dreading the conversation on Thursday, plus embarrassed about last time" gives you two specific things, each with a different move attached. Research on emotional granularity suggests people who differentiate their emotions more finely regulate them more effectively.
- Practise at low intensity. You cannot learn a skill at intensity 9 for the first time. Run reappraisal on a mildly annoying email. The pathway you build is the one you will reach for later.
- Protect the conditions. Sleep, food, and daylight are not a moralising aside. Every strategy above except the physiological ones requires cognitive resources, and those resources are materially reduced when you are tired or hungry. A large amount of what people experience as poor emotional control is a resource problem wearing a character costume.
- Expect it to be uneven. Capacity varies by day, by domain, and by how much has already been asked of you. Regression under stress is normal rather than evidence that nothing has changed, and it has its own article.
Which strategies are you actually using?
Check what you recognise. There are no wrong answers here, only expensive ones.
0 of 8 checked. Nothing checked. If that is accurate, you are running a fairly flexible set of strategies, which is what the research actually associates with good outcomes: not one favourite tool but the right one for the moment.
Regulation is one of six capacities the test measures separately, which is more useful than a single score: it shows you which one is currently limiting the others.
Take the emotional age testFree. 8 scenarios, about 2 minutes. No signup, nothing stored.
The reframe
Emotional regulation is often described as control, which makes it sound like a struggle between a sensible you and an unruly one. That framing does not match the research and it does not help.
A more accurate description: emotions are information arriving with a volume dial, and regulation is the set of skills that lets you hear the information without being deafened by the volume. The goal was never to feel less. It was to remain able to act well while feeling whatever you actually feel, which is a different and much more achievable thing.
What is emotional regulation?
The set of processes by which people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them. James Gross's process model describes five points where you can intervene: selecting the situation, modifying it, changing what you attend to, changing what it means, and changing what you do with the response.
It is not the same as suppressing feelings, and treating it that way is one of the more expensive mistakes in this area.
What are the best emotional regulation techniques?
There is no single best one, and that is the practical finding. Reappraisal has the strongest research support for long-run wellbeing, but it requires cognitive resources and works poorly at very high intensity.
At peak intensity, attentional and physiological strategies work better: absorbing distraction, movement, extended exhale, cold water. For recurring problems, the cheapest interventions are upstream, in changing the situation or its conditions.
Why doesn't reframing work when I'm really upset?
Because reappraisal needs the cognitive machinery that high arousal makes least available. It is the right tool at the wrong point in the sequence.
The fix is order rather than effort: bring the intensity down first using attention and physiology, then reappraise. Most people who conclude that reframing does not work for them have only ever attempted it at peak.
Is suppressing emotions bad for you?
As a primary strategy, it is costly. In Gross's experimental work, expressive suppression reduced the outward display without reliably reducing the felt emotion, while increasing physiological arousal and impairing memory for events that occurred during it. It also tends to fare worse than reappraisal on interpersonal measures.
As an occasional tactic, holding composure in a meeting is entirely reasonable. The problem is using it as the whole approach.
Can emotional regulation be learned as an adult?
Yes. These are skills with a describable structure rather than fixed traits, and they respond to deliberate practice and to therapies built around them, including CBT and DBT.
The two changes that raise the ceiling fastest are learning to name emotional states with more precision, and protecting sleep, because most of the strategies depend on cognitive resources that fatigue removes.
This article is for education and self-reflection. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified professional.
References
- Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: an integrative review. Review of General Psychology.
- Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Richards, J. M., & Gross, J. J. (2000). Emotion regulation and memory: the cognitive costs of keeping one's cool. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Barrett, L. F., Gross, J., Christensen, T. C., & Benvenuto, M. (2001). Knowing what you're feeling and knowing what to do about it. Cognition and Emotion.