What is emotional regulation?

Part 1 — Understanding how emotions unfold

What does it mean to regulate an emotion?

You receive a message that unsettles you. Perhaps someone has cancelled an arrangement at the last minute, or their reply sounds unusually distant. Before you have decided what to think about it, you notice that you are holding your breath. Your shoulders tighten. You read the message again, this time looking for something you might have missed. Within a minute, you have begun to imagine a conversation that has not happened yet.

We often speak about emotions as though they arrive fully formed: I felt angry, I was anxious, I was hurt. But an emotion is also a process unfolding over time. Something happens, we notice certain details, we give them meaning, and our body prepares us to respond. Sometimes that sequence takes several minutes. Sometimes it feels almost instantaneous. Either way, there is more going on than a feeling inside the mind.

Emotional regulation means influencing that process. It may involve changing a situation, shifting where we place our attention, reconsidering an interpretation, helping the body settle, or choosing how to behave while the feeling is still there. It can also mean allowing an emotion to run its course when trying to get rid of it would make things harder. The aim is not to remain calm at all times. There are moments when anger tells us that a boundary has been crossed, sadness makes room for a loss, or fear helps us take a real risk seriously. Feeling those things is part of being responsive to life.

At the same time, an emotion is not a verdict. Feeling rejected does not prove that someone intended to reject you. Feeling guilty does not necessarily mean you did something wrong. And feeling angry does not mean that the first thing anger urges you to say is the thing you most want to say. Emotions can contain valuable information while leaving us with work to do: to understand what happened, to consider what else may be true, and to decide how we wish to respond.

The body is already part of the story

Think of a difficult conversation. You may notice heat in your face, a faster heartbeat, a hollow feeling in your stomach, or the urge to interrupt before the other person has finished speaking. These changes are not merely side effects of an emotion. They affect what becomes easy or difficult in the next moment. When you are highly activated, it may be harder to listen carefully or to hold several possible explanations in mind. You might speak more sharply than you intended, withdraw, or start explaining yourself at length.

Your attention changes too. In the message you received, perhaps one sentence begins to stand out while the warmth of previous exchanges fades from view. Your mind fills in gaps. You may be right about what the message means, but at this point you have both an observation and an interpretation, and the two can feel remarkably similar. An emotion often narrows the field to what seems most urgent. That can be useful when urgent action is genuinely needed. In an ambiguous conversation, it can also lead you to respond to a conclusion you have reached before you have checked it.

Then comes the impulse. Anger may push you to confront; anxiety to seek reassurance; shame to disappear; sadness to stop trying. An impulse is a proposal from a system trying to protect or move you. Sometimes it points in a helpful direction. Sometimes following it would take you further from what you need. Pausing does not require you to argue with the feeling. It creates a little room between what I feel pulled to do and what I choose to do.

These parts influence one another. A racing body can make a thought seem more alarming. A frightening interpretation can keep the body activated. A hurried reply can turn an uncertain interaction into a real argument. Conversely, a few minutes away from the screen, a conversation with someone you trust, or one clarifying question can change what happens next. Regulation does not take place in only one part of the person.

You do not have to calm down before you can respond well

It is easy to turn emotional regulation into another demand: I should be calmer than this. I should have dealt with this already. That demand often adds shame to an already difficult moment. A more useful question might be, What is happening in me, and what does this moment require? Sometimes the answer is to wait until your body is less activated. Sometimes you can say, quite honestly, “I’m upset, and I need a moment before we continue.” Sometimes you need to act promptly despite feeling frightened. Good regulation is not always visible as calmness.

It is also affected by the conditions in which you are living. A person who has slept badly, is in pain, is carrying weeks of stress, or is repeatedly dealing with a difficult environment may have less room to manoeuvre. This is not an excuse to ignore the effects of our behaviour on others. It is a reason to look beyond the idea that every emotional reaction can be solved by finding the right thought or breathing technique.

Return to the message on your phone. You might eventually decide that you misunderstood it. You might discover that something is wrong between you and the sender. Or you might still not know. The first step does not require certainty. It may simply be noticing that your body has tightened, that your mind has supplied a meaning, and that you are about to act on it. That small piece of awareness does not make the emotion vanish. It gives you a place from which to choose.

This is the first article in a three-part series on emotional regulation. In part 2, we will look at what happens when we push feelings down, avoid what evokes them or keep thinking about them long after thinking has stopped helping.

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References and further reading

• Paul and Eve Ekman, Atlas of Emotions — an interactive map of emotional states, triggers and possible responses.

• Gross, J. J. (1998). “The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review.” Review of General Psychology.

• Palmer, C. A., et al. (2024). “Sleep loss and emotion: A systematic review and meta-analysis of over 50 years of experimental research.” Psychological Bulletin.