Emotional management is one of the key skills we all need to develop over the course of our lifetimes. Feelings are a crucial part of the human experience, yet no two emotional experiences will be exactly the same. You might feel hurt and sadness in a very different way than I do, and my best friend might experience an intensity of anger that I do not. This makes it challenging for us to know exactly how best to manage emotions, especially when they are significant and overwhelmingly difficult emotions like rage, grief, hatred, guilt, or despair.
The strategies we adopt to cope with our feelings become important tools allowing us to manage emotion as a routine part of our everyday lives. Most of us want to be able to carry on with our social, working, and family lives when a strong feeling arises. And learning these strategies is also a key marker of psychological development into adulthood. Toddlers and children must stop everything when a big negative feeling arises – they don’t yet know how to do otherwise because, like everything in their lives, emotions are still very new. However as we age, and become more practiced with experiencing emotions, we learn various ways to recognise and address our feelings so that we do not need to completely derail our days when they arise.
When we have developed healthy and functional strategies for managing our emotions in this way, that is what’s known as emotional regulation. Unfortunately, in many cases what we learn to do instead is actually emotional suppression. Very often it can be hard to tell the difference between the two.
What is emotional regulation?
Psychology research tells us that our emotions are actually one of the crucial psychophysiological processes helping to adapt to the environment and achieve goals. Emotions are therefore closely linked not only to our mental health but also our physical health – the brain is a part of the body, after all. If we are able to adapt well to our environment and achieve a wide range of goals, we will benefit physically and mentally. If we are not, it will put strain on our bodies and minds. [1]
In this sense, regulation is not just a therapeutic strategy for dealing with negative emotions, but actually a key process through which we learn to deal with the emotions we have day-to-day. Good regulation of emotions is defined as “the process by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them.” [2] One of the most important things to note here is that good emotional regulation is linked to agency – that is, the power to act independently. Learning to regulate means learning to trust yourself to make good decisions about your emotions – how to recognise them, how to mould them, how to engage with them, and how to express them.
The work of good emotional regulation is complicated, however; the difficulty of regulating a feeling is directly linked to the intensity of that feeling. Research has shown that it becomes harder to take up a good emotional regulation strategy when the emotions being experienced are negative and unpleasant – like anger, fear, or sadness – or else when they are unusually intense. [3] This is likely because our brains, when confronted with unpleasant or overwhelmingly intense feelings, seek to minimize cognitive effort to keep us clear headed in order to face potential dangers. [4] And, when our brains are trying to minimize cognitive effort in this way, they will often reach for a low-effort strategy to manage the unpleasant or overwhelming emotion: suppression.
What is emotional suppression?
Emotional suppression is a way of managing feelings that involves, in some way or another, inhibiting them. This happens through the conscious choice not to feel feelings in an expressive way, that is, not let them show on the face or through the body in any way. In some situations, this can be useful: research has shown that emotional suppression probably begins as a social strategy since keeping our emotions from being seen keeps them from being communicated to others. [5]
For example: if you feel jealous of a good friend for finding a new partner while you are single, you don’t necessarily want to say so or show it to your friend out of compassion for their happiness. So when you go to dinner all together for the first time you temporarily suppress your feelings of jealousy, resentment, and sadness while at the table with them, and have a frustrated cry in the car on the way home instead.
This becomes a problem, however, if you start to rely on emotional suppression as your only regulation strategy. What if you don’t have a frustrated cry in the car on the way home, and continue to inhibit those powerfully negative feelings of jealousy all through the next day, week, and through the next dinner you have with your friend and their partner? The physical and mental toll of this suppression will be significant.
In fact, research has shown that individuals who routinely suppress their emotions experience a range of negative side effects [6], including:
- Experiencing less positive emotions
- Having worse relationships
- Physical stress and strain
- A worse quality of life overall
Choosing the right regulation strategy
Emotions are one of the critical features of our lives as human beings – they are not negative features of ourselves to be repressed, but important and powerful tools for adapting to our environments, building social relationships, and connecting with our bodies to maintain our health. Yet many of us begin to lean heavily on a strategy for regulating our emotions which involves only suppressing them, and never seek to re-evaluate that even when it comes to cause us harm.
So what makes up a good emotional regulation strategy? The answer to that question is: diversity. Learning and practicing a diverse range of ways for recognising and addressing our emotions is the best way to manage them healthily. Crucially, this involves being flexible and strategic, and trusting in our own power to negotiate what is going on in our bodies and minds. This is an approach that research calls cognitive reappraisal: when we encourage our brains to carefully and continually assess feelings and make a case-by-case decision about how to regulate them.
Maybe, like in our earlier example, there is a social need to do a bit of suppression of negative emotions, at least temporarily. But if we do, then we also have to reassess later on: that feeling hasn’t gone away just because we suppressed it! Learning how best to express and experience it is the true work of emotional regulation.
[1] Kozubal, M., Szuster, A., & Wielgopolan, A. (2023). Emotional regulation strategies in daily life: the intensity of emotions and regulation choice. Frontiers in psychology, 14, 1218694. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1218694
[2] Gross J. J., Feldman Barrett L., John O., Lane R., Larsen R., Pennebaker J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Rev. Gen. Psychol. 2 271–299.
[3] Sheppes G., Scheibe S., Suri G., Gross J. J. (2011). Emotion-regulation choice. Psychol. Sci. 22 1391–1396. 10.1177/0956797611418350
[4] Kool W., McGuire J. T., Rosen Z. B., Botvinick M. M. (2010). Decision making and the avoidance of cognitive demand. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 139 665–682. 10.1037/A0020198
[5] Srivastava, S., Tamir, M., McGonigal, K. M., John, O. P., & Gross, J. J. (2009). The social costs of emotional suppression: a prospective study of the transition to college. Journal of personality and social psychology, 96(4), 883–897.
[6] Kelley, N. J., Glazer, J. E., Pornpattananangkul, N., & Nusslock, R. (2019). Reappraisal and suppression emotion-regulation tendencies differentially predict reward-responsivity and psychological well-being. Biological psychology, 140, 35–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2018.11.005
