Emotional Regulation: Why “Getting Your Emotions Under Control” May Not Be the Real Answer

At work, Palm is the person everyone praises for being calm and unshakeable.

However difficult a client becomes, however hard her manager pushes a deadline, she takes it with a smile and swallows every flicker of irritation behind a sentence in her head: “it’s fine, don’t overthink it, don’t make it a big deal.” She has been proud of how well she manages her emotions.

Then one evening she comes home tired and finds the dishes her partner left piled in the sink, unwashed. And Palm erupts — loudly enough to startle herself, saying things sharp enough to startle herself further. What follows is a flood of guilt.

“What is wrong with me? Why can’t I control my own emotions at all?” she asks herself, thoroughly confused.

If you have ever felt as Palm does — unable to control your emotions despite having held them down the whole time — this is an invitation to understand emotional regulation together. And it begins from an angle that may overturn the usual assumption: good emotional regulation does not mean suppressing yourself into feeling nothing. Often, the attempt to “control” in the way Palm does is itself part of the problem.

What emotional regulation actually is

Emotional regulation, in the sense researchers use, is the process by which we influence our own emotions — which emotion we are feeling, when, how intensely, and how we express it. Note the word: influence, not eliminate. The goal is not to have no emotions, or to be serene at all times.

The important thing to see is that emotion is not the enemy. It is information and energy telling us something. Anger may be reporting that a line has been crossed; fear may be warning us of something. Good emotional regulation is therefore not silencing these messengers. It is learning to be with them and to direct their energy where we choose.

Think of riding a horse. A horse is an animal of enormous power. The aim of a good rider is not to hurt it or to shut it in a stall until its strength is gone — which is what suppressing an emotion amounts to. Nor is it to let the horse drag us wherever it likes until we are thrown, which is what being flooded by emotion and acting without thought amounts to. It is to learn, gradually, to ride: to work with that power and hold the direction together.

Why suppression tends to turn back on us

Research on emotional regulation has found that suppressing emotional expression — particularly holding feelings down repeatedly until it becomes a standing pattern — is generally associated with worse outcomes. Even so, temporary suppression in certain situations is both necessary and appropriate: an emergency physician, a firefighter, or a police officer has to gather themselves and deal with what is in front of them first.

The problem is therefore not temporary suppression at a moment that calls for it. It is suppression that has become a habit. Holding an emotion down does not make the feeling inside disappear; we still feel it exactly as much. And in many cases the suppressed emotion does not go anywhere at all — it accumulates pressure and waits for a moment we did not intend.

Accepting an emotion is not surrendering to it

If suppression is not the answer, many people fear the only remaining option is letting emotion take them wherever it wants. It is not. There is a middle path, and it is called emotional acceptance.

The distinction that has to be clear: allowing an emotion to exist is not the same as letting an emotion take control. Allowing it to exist means noticing the feeling and making room for it, without hurrying to push it away and without judging yourself for having it — while still choosing what to do next. Letting it take control means the feeling makes every decision on our behalf. Acceptance therefore sits between fighting to suppress and being dragged along.

A number of contemporary therapeutic approaches — ACT, DBT, emotion-focused therapy, and mindfulness-based work — all treat emotional acceptance as central, because what they find in common is that an emotion we allow to exist and to move through tends to resolve on its own with time, while an emotion we fight and keep pushing away tends to lodge more firmly and stay longer. To return to the horse: acceptance is sitting with an animal that is agitated, aware of the power there, neither whipping it into submission nor letting it bolt, before gradually steering together.

Approaches that work better than suppression

Once it is clear that suppression is not the answer, there are other tools that work considerably better.

The first is simple and powerful: naming the emotion you are feeling, known academically as affect labeling. Research has found that translating a feeling into words — telling yourself “I am angry right now,” or “I am anxious” — reduces the intensity of that emotion. It is like seeing what is happening more clearly instead of being swallowed by it.

The second is looking at the situation from a new angle — reinterpreting an event in order to change its emotional weight, known as cognitive reappraisal — a strategy research generally finds effective, because it works upstream, before the emotion has fully formed. In fairness it must be said that reappraisal is not appropriate to every situation. Where something is genuinely unjust, trying to reinterpret it as acceptable can become self-deception, or the suppression of a feeling that deserves to be heard. Flexibility in choosing the tool that fits the situation therefore matters more than having a fixed formula.

The third, for moments when emotion spikes suddenly, is attending to the body — because emotion and body are tightly linked. Breathing slowly, particularly lengthening the out-breath, signals the nervous system to ease its arousal, and opens room for the thinking part of the brain to come back online.

The window we can still work within, and a skill that can be practiced

One concept that helps here is the window of tolerance. Each of us has a zone within which we can stay with an emotion and think clearly. When we are pushed beyond the edges of that window — either spiking into overwhelm or dropping into numbness and shutdown — our capacity to regulate and to think declines. The skills discussed here help bring us back inside the window, and with continued practice, that window gradually widens.

What is worth emphasizing is that emotional regulation is a skill that can be practiced, not a disposition fixed for life. Many people who find it difficult never had the opportunity to learn the skill in childhood. Not yet being good at it is therefore not a defect of character. It is a skill, and it is never too late to begin.

Where hypnotherapy comes in

Because emotional regulation involves nervous-system arousal and automatic patterns of response, hypnotherapy has a role it can play. It works at a level deeper than reasoning: helping to ease chronic arousal in the nervous system, and gradually adjusting automatic responses such as an emotional surge too fast to catch, or a habit of suppression practiced for so long that it now runs by itself.

At NBRH we work on the principle of Neuro-Behavioral Repatterning & Hypnotherapy: adjusting the nervous system’s patterns of response, and behavior, systematically. Because lasting emotional regulation does not come from forcing yourself to stay serene at all times, which is impossible and tends to turn back on us. It comes from gradually training the nervous system and the mind to know how to be with an emotion. That is what lasting change means.

If you would like to understand how anxiety and arousal send their signals down into the body, “Why the Brain Reads Everything as a Threat” takes that up. And if the feeling that needs holding is grief rather than anger, “Grief After Loss” approaches that from another angle.