How to regulate emotions: what helps in the moment

Part 3 — What helps when an emotion takes hold?

Suppose you are about to send a message you have rewritten five times. You are angry, but also worried about how it will be received. You have already tried to reason yourself out of the feeling, and it has not worked. Should you breathe, send the message, talk to a friend, sleep on it, or ask yourself why it upset you so much?

There is no technique that can answer that question on its own. The same action can be helpful in one situation and a way of avoiding the real issue in another. A pause before sending an angry reply may allow you to express yourself more clearly. If you have spent months pausing and never saying what needs to be said, another pause may only extend the problem. Emotional regulation involves noticing what is happening, knowing what options you have, and checking whether the one you chose helped you move toward what matters.

It may help to think of several places where you can influence the course of an emotion. These are possibilities, not steps that must happen in order. Often you will use more than one.

Before things build up

Some of the most effective choices happen before an emotional moment becomes intense. You can decide not to have a sensitive conversation while rushing out the door. You can make a difficult phone call when you have time to recover afterward. You can change an arrangement that repeatedly leaves you overwhelmed, ask for clearer expectations, or set a boundary before resentment accumulates.

This is not an invitation to arrange life so that you never feel discomfort. Avoiding every uncertain conversation would eventually cost you a great deal. It is an invitation to notice when the situation itself can be changed. If someone regularly speaks to you in a way that leaves you distressed, calming yourself after each encounter may be useful, but it does not address the entire problem. Sometimes regulation means changing the circumstances that keep producing the reaction.

Our starting conditions matter as well. Sleep, pain, hunger and a long stretch without rest can affect how much room we have for frustration or ambiguity. We cannot always correct those conditions before life asks something of us. We can at least recognise when we are trying to handle a difficult conversation with very little capacity left, and adjust what we expect of ourselves in that moment.

When your body is already activated

Once you are shaking, flushed, short of breath or struggling to listen, the first useful response may have little to do with analysing the situation. Put your feet on the floor. Loosen your jaw. Get a glass of water. Step outside for a few minutes if you can. Let an exhale last a little longer without trying to force your breathing into a perfect pattern. None of these actions proves that your interpretation was wrong or that the situation is harmless. They may simply make it easier to take in what is happening and decide what to do.

For some people, focusing inward or controlling the breath feels uncomfortable, particularly during intense anxiety or after difficult experiences. Grounding can also mean looking around the room, feeling the chair beneath you, walking, or speaking to someone. The point is not to perform a particular exercise correctly. It is to find a way of giving yourself enough steadiness for the next decision.

Sometimes the emotion does not need settling first. Grief may need company more than calming. Anger may need to be acknowledged because something genuinely has to change. Anxiety may remain while you do something you care about. We can ask the body for a little support without making the disappearance of the feeling a condition for action.

Before the impulse becomes an action

The brief space between an urge and an action is often where a meaningful choice becomes possible. Before sending the message, you could ask: What do I want the other person to understand? What do I know, and what am I assuming? If I send this as written, will it help me say what matters? You might still send a firm message. You might change one accusatory sentence into a question. You might decide that this deserves a conversation rather than a text.

If the feeling is less about the message and more about uncertainty, seeking reassurance may help once. Repeatedly asking someone else to settle a question that cannot yet be answered may keep the anxiety going. Support from another person can take many forms: being heard without advice, getting a different perspective, asking for practical help, or having someone sit with you while you do something difficult. It helps to say which kind you need. “Can I tell you what happened? I don’t need you to solve it; I just need to sort out what I’m feeling” gives the other person somewhere to begin.

Afterward, when you can see more

We sometimes imagine that regulation ends when the difficult moment has passed. Yet afterward may be the first time you have enough distance to understand it. What set the reaction in motion? Did you miss an early sign that you were becoming overwhelmed? Was there something true in the emotion that you need to address? What helped, and what made things worse?

Reflection is most useful when it leads somewhere. If you spoke harshly, you can repair that without pretending your concern was invalid: “I meant what I said about the problem, but I’m sorry for the way I spoke to you.” If you stayed silent about something important, you can return to it. If you handled a hard moment reasonably well while still feeling distressed, you can notice that too. The measure is not whether you experienced the right amount of emotion. It is whether you were able to respond with some care for yourself, the other person, and the situation.

There will also be times when these small adjustments are not enough. If emotions repeatedly become overwhelming, lead you to harm yourself or someone else, make everyday life feel unmanageable, or seem closely tied to trauma, persistent anxiety or depression, it is worth seeking appropriate professional support. The same applies when your environment is unsafe or a relationship is repeatedly harmful: the task should not be reduced to becoming better at tolerating it. Asking for help is one of the available responses, not a failure of the others.

The message is still there, waiting to be sent. Perhaps, after a pause, you send a shorter version that names the issue plainly. Perhaps you realise you need to sleep and speak tomorrow. Perhaps you ask someone to listen before you decide. What matters is that you no longer have to treat the first impulse, or the first technique that comes to mind, as your only option.

This is the third and final article in the emotional regulation series. You can begin with part 1 or read part 2 on suppression, avoidance and rumination. Next come six weekly experiments: noticing early signals, naming a feeling more precisely, pausing before an impulse, changing what can be changed, asking for the kind of support you need, and reflecting or repairing afterward. Each experiment offers one small way to try these ideas in ordinary life.

Continue your Health Shift

I regularly explore practical ways to better understand and support your health—without rigid rules or health advice overload. Subscribe at the bottom of this page to receive new articles and practical shifts in your inbox.

References and further reading

• Paul and Eve Ekman, Atlas of Emotions — especially its emotional episode timeline and its distinction between a feeling and possible actions.

• Bonanno, G. A., & Burton, C. L. (2013). “Regulatory flexibility: An individual differences perspective on coping and emotion regulation.” Perspectives on Psychological Science.

• Zaki, J., & Williams, W. C. (2013). “Interpersonal emotion regulation.” Emotion.

• Wang, X., et al. (2025). “Effects of cognitive flexibility on dynamics of emotion regulation and negative affect in daily life.” Anxiety, Stress, & Coping.