Emotional regulation is a necessary life skill that can help you identify, manage, and respond to different emotions. But when you are constantly unable to regulate your emotions, you become at risk of developing emotional dysregulation. This means that you may have trouble with diffusing or managing strong emotions. Especially the negative ones, such as jealousy, frustration, and anger. Fortunately, there are certain strategies you can use that teach you how to improve emotional regulation. Here they are.
How to Improve Emotional Regulation: 7 Strategies that Work
1. Practice Stress Management
Whenever possible, try to give yourself a little dose of relaxation to help you de-stress. And it doesn’t have to be anything luxurious at all. Just taking a hot bath can be more than enough to help you reduce stress levels and feel more refreshed.
You can also try doing other simple yet effective things, such as:
- Getting 7- 8 hours of sleep every night
- Eating nutrient-rich food
- Dedicating 30 minutes a day to a physical activity of your choice (preferably 4-5 times a week)
2. Start Mindfulness
The great thing about mindfulness is that it comes with a variety of benefits that can make your life easier. And one of them includes the improvement of emotional regulation.
More specifically, mindfulness-based activities can make you better prepared against emotionally challenging times.
They teach you how to stay in the present moment as you decide how to respond to a specific situation or thought. And there are only two choices; allowing your automatic reaction to lead you or carefully choosing a response of your own.
The more often you choose the second option, the better you get at emotional regulation. In other words, mindfulness can decrease your emotional reactivity, helping you regulate emotions better.
3. Know When to Accept Your Emotions
Whenever you become too overwhelmed by your emotions, don’t attempt to search for the cause immediately.
Instead, you should accept the way you feel, even if it makes you uncomfortable in the moment. And then you can also try asking yourself certain questions, such as:
- What are your options in this situation?
- What things can you do to make it better?
- Will you be able to handle it on your own or will you also need someone else’s help?
- Is the situation really as complicated as it seemed in the beginning or was it your emotions that made it appear so?
This will help you avoid suppressing your emotions, making sure you express them in a healthy way. It can also teach you how to objectively assess a certain situation without your emotions clouding your judgment.
4. Do Fact-Checking
This one ties to the previously mentioned point. So this means that first, you need to accept your emotions before you try to do fact-checking. Otherwise, using this technique may not end with success.
Once you get a hold of your emotions, try asking yourself various questions that can help you check the facts. Such questions can include:
- What caused you to feel the way you did? Was it the specific situation itself or something else? (For example, other people’s view of it).
- Now that you’ve calmed down, does the situation still seem as bad as it did in the beginning?
These questions can help you make a better sense of the situation and boost your emotional regulation skills at the same time.
5. Keep an Optimistic Mindset
There are two types of mindsets you can have in life. The helpful mindset that assists you in your personal growth and the harmful mindset that sabotages your personal growth.
Which type of mindset you end up having depends on various factors, such as your upbringing, the environment you are exposed to, or different life experiences you acquired throughout the years.
As you can tell, the optimistic mindset belongs to the category of helpful mindsets. Maintaining a hopeful outlook boosts your stress resilience levels, making you less likely to be easily overwhelmed by negative emotions. This in turn helps you become emotionally stronger in life and better at emotional regulation.
But when you have a negative mindset, the opposite happens. You become easily overwhelmed by negative emotions and lose hope that things will ever get better. So you should do your best to prevent that from happening. Because the moment you lose hope is the same moment you lose inner strength.
And once this happens, you will find yourself getting more and more demotivated as time goes by, keeping you stuck in the cycle of negativity and powerlessness.
That’s why it’s crucial to keep positivity in your life by adopting an optimistic mindset. This way, you’ll always have the inner strength you need to overcome difficulties in life and move forward.
6. Try Journaling
Journaling is a simple yet effective method that can help you process all your thoughts and emotions. It is especially great for ridding yourself of negative emotions and anxious thoughts.
So start journaling about the things that currently bother you and the way they make you feel. Then carefully read everything you just wrote. This will help you reflect on your problems and concerns, providing you with new perspectives and insights you may have missed previously.
7. Be More Compassionate Toward Yourself
Are you one of those people who is kind to others but rarely shows any kindness to themselves, if at all? If so, you may continue to struggle with emotional regulation.
After all, your inner voice plays a major role in the way you perceive, process, and feel things. When your inner voice is negative, you are more likely to blame and criticize yourself for everything.
So instead of processing and regulating already difficult emotions, you end up with new negative ones you have to deal with. And if it continues for too long, it may turn into an emotional dysregulation that will be hard to tackle.
To prevent this, you should show yourself the compassion and kindness you deserve. You can do this by encouraging yourself during difficult times and showing patience and understanding toward yourself. Just like you do with your loved ones.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, there are many wonderful strategies that teach you how to improve emotional regulation. All that’s needed is for you to implement them into your daily life so you can become better at managing your emotions.
