7 Therapist-Backed Self-Regulation Strategies to Manage Your Emotions

Let’s say you’re on vacation with your partner. It’s the last night of your trip, and you’ve just sat down to a nice dinner. The restaurant has one of those QR code menus, but as you reach into your back pocket to grab your phone, you’re startled to find it isn’t there. You check all your pockets, your partner’s pockets, your bag – nothing. You’ve been all over the city today, and you haven’t used your phone since this morning. You check your location on your partner’s phone: the dot shows a place on the map you’ve never been, an hour away in the next city over. You realize with a sinking feeling that it must’ve fallen out of your pocket at some point that day, and someone found it and pocketed it. You can use your partner’s phone to lock yours from afar, but that’s not going to help you get it back, and you’re leaving tomorrow. Your phone is gone, for good. (This may or may not be based on true events.)

The emotions you’re feeling in response to this situation are likely strong. You might feel panicked about the logistics of navigating travel without a phone, anger or frustration with yourself for being careless, sadness over the photos and notes you’ve lost (yes, in this example you’re foolish enough to not have an up-to-date backup - it happens, okay?) Let’s just say it’s late enough in the evening that no shops are open, so there’s not much you can do to address the logistical side of the situation in this moment – there’s nothing practical to channel these emotions into – you just have to cope with them. What do you do? How do you respond to these strong emotions, and how much do you let them affect the last night of your trip? The answer probably says something about your ability to self-regulate. 

What Is Self-Regulation and Why Does It Matter?

Emotional self-regulation is a person’s ability to control their responses to their emotions. While we cannot control what happens to us – like, for example, whether our phone gets stolen or returned – we can control how we respond to those events and the emotions that come along with them. Emotional self-regulation is incredibly important for our personal wellbeing and for the wellbeing of our relationships. Poor emotional self-regulation can lead to increased conflict, increased external blame, and self-destructive behavior. It can also lead to more general unhappiness – like, for example, if your whole vacation feels ruined because of something that happened on the last day. 

Thankfully, emotional self-regulation is a skill that can be learned and strengthened. This blogpost will go through seven emotional regulation techniques that I practice with my clients. If you’re wondering how to stay calm when triggered, looking for help coping with emotional overwhelm, or seeking tools to calm down after a fight (all forms of emotional self-regulation), keep reading.

Strategy 1: Take a Moment

It’s just hit you – your phone is gone gone, and you’re never going to see it again. Your partner is frozen, unsure of what to say or do. You feel a sudden rush of competing urges: shoot up from the table and retrace every single one of your twenty-thousand steps of the day; yell at your partner; burst into tears. Before you do any of these things, I’d like to invite you to take one incredibly simple, incredibly powerful step: pause. 

When you’re hit by a strong emotion, it’s probably accompanied by a powerful urge to react equally strongly. Giving into this urge immediately may have negative consequences –  you might hurt somebody’s feelings, act in ways that are very illogical, and, in extreme cases, even put yourself or others in danger. 

Simply taking a pause to decide what to do and how you want to proceed can make or break the moments that follow. It allows you to respond to the issue instead of react. It may be helpful to physically distance yourself from the situation and take a minute to be by yourself. Here are some phrases you can use to excuse yourself in moments of high emotion:

• “I’m going to step outside and calm down a little bit. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
• “I don’t want to say something I’ll regret, so I’m going to step away for a moment.”
• “I’m going to the bathroom; I need a minute to be alone and gather myself.”‍

Strategy 2: Name What You’re Feeling

While this strategy may also seem quite simple, its effectiveness is backed by science. Affect labeling is the scientific term for putting one’s emotions into words, and it has been shown to change one’s experience of emotion as well as their autonomic response (sweating, breathing, heart rate).

Emotional granularity refers to the ability to specifically identify and differentiate emotions, which allows us to better manage and communicate them. For example, if you’re only able to identify that you’re angry that you lost your phone, you might find yourself snapping at your partner when they try to offer comfort. Maybe now your partner retreats, because your anger feels frightening and personal. However emotional granularity allows you to identify that you’re not exactly angry, but more frustrated at yourself for leaving your phone behind, and also even a little betrayed that somebody took it instead of turning it in. Identifying those emotions helps you better understand what to do with them – now you can respond to your frustration with self-compassion (mistakes happen, and traveling is chaotic) and your feeling of betrayal with a wider perspective (for someone to steal your phone, they are probably not in a very financially fortunate situation). Similarly, communicating these feelings will allow your partner to understand you better and respond with more empathy.

Some find it a bit corny, but if you struggle with affect labeling and emotional granularity, the use of an emotions chart or wheel can help. 

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[From https://feelingswheel.com/]

Strategy 3: Grounding Techniques

Grounding refers to the process of directing attention to something neutral or soothing in moments of emotional distress or disconnection, often by observing the present moment and physical space. Grounding techniques can provide a distraction from one’s overwhelming emotions and help one let go of looming thoughts or memories that are causing distress. When you shift your attention from your emotional pain to something that does not trigger negative emotions, it gives your body and mind a chance to calm down. There are many ways to practice grounding yourself, and different strategies are going to work for different people.

Some common grounding techniques are: using one or multiple senses to observe your environment (5-4-3-2-1 method), reciting anchoring statements, describing your surroundings in words, or visualizing a comforting place. Here’s a list of 30 grounding techniques to help you get started.

You realize that you’ve lost your phone and get hit by an overwhelming anxiety. All of a sudden your head is in a million places: you’re trying to picture where you last had it, attempting to recall when you last backed it up and if you ended up getting that replacement insurance, imagining all the things that could go wrong tomorrow as you try to travel home without it, etc. 

In order to deal with the issue at hand, you first need to calm yourself down so that you can make a rational decision about what to do next. You place your feet on the floor and use the 5-4-3-2-1 technique to observe your surroundings through your five senses. You consciously direct your attention away from the scenarios you were imagining, and the anxiety those scenarios were creating starts to fade away. Now that you’re in a calmer headspace, you can get a clearer picture of the situation, rather than responding to panic. 

Strategy 4: Deep, Intentional Breathing For Nervous System Regulation

Breathwork strategies such as box breathing or cyclic sighing are also highly effective for reducing the physiological arousal that comes with intense emotions; they can lower your heart rate and slow your breathing. As you calm your body through breath, your mind will become calmer as well. 

To get started, you can look up follow-along guided breathing exercises on YouTube or use an app like Insight Timer. 

Strategy 5: Body Awareness and Somatic Check-Ins

Somatic exercises focus on the mind-body connection. As we talked about in the case of grounding techniques and intentional breathing (both of which are somatic practices), calming the body can have a powerful effect on the mind. 

In order to improve your bodily awareness, you can perform body scans to practice observing physical sensations in your body. 

Body awareness can help with Strategy #2, or naming your emotions. For example, let’s say your immediate physical reaction to realizing you’ve lost your phone is your heart rate picks up and your face flushes, letting you know that you’re experiencing stress or anger. Then a bit later you check in with your body again and notice that while your heart rate and body temperature are back to normal, your limbs now feel heavy and there’s a lump in your throat. This information might mean that you’re now feeling sadness or disappointment over the loss, as opposed to the initial anger you felt. 

Strategy 6: Self-Compassion, Not Self-Criticism

Certainly you’ve heard it before: to practice self-compassion, speak to yourself the way you’d speak to a loved one. It may be easier said than done, but why is it important to practice self-compassion in the first place? In the context of emotional self-regulation, avoiding self-criticism will prevent the snowball of negative emotions that result from first feeling a strong emotion, then judging yourself for feeling or reacting to that emotion, and then feeling worse about yourself as a result. 

There are multiple opportunities to practice self-compassion after realizing you lost your phone. First off, you can be gentle with yourself for making a mistake. You can remind yourself that traveling tends to scramble your brain a bit, and that this is something that happens to everybody at some point, although some people have better or worse luck with it than others. Perhaps you immediately reacted in a way that you’re not proud of, but rather than digging yourself deeper into your pit of frustration, you can forgive yourself and tell yourself that you’ll do better next time (and apologize, if appropriate). 

If you find them helpful, you can use the self-compassion affirmations below (or come up with your own).

• “I’m doing the best I can with what I have.”
• “I’m human, and it’s okay to make mistakes.”
• “I deserve the same kindness I offer to others.”

Strategy 7: Create a Self-Regulation Toolkit

As you start to explore and learn what helps you self-regulate, I highly recommend creating a list of self-regulation strategies that work for you. In moments of intense emotion, it’s a lot easier to be able to look at a list than rely on your mind to recall what you need to do.

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Learning what emotional self-regulation is, how to do it, and then having the desire to practice it are all amazing first steps. It’s important to remember that self-regulation is a skill that takes time to develop, and in the meantime, you’re still going to make mistakes and react in ways that you’re not proud of. Just know the process will get easier with time, and you’re doing yourself and all the people in your life a massive service by starting to put the work in. 

Therapy can help you practice and strengthen every single one of the strategies listed in this blogpost. If you think you might benefit from therapy for emotional dysregulation, schedule a free consultation with one of our therapists today.