What is Emotional Regulation and How can we Regulate our Emotions?

According to Sloan and Kring's (2007), emotional regulation refers to the attempts we make to influence the emotions we have, when to have them, and how those emotions are experienced and expressed. Regulating emotions is not an easy process, as there are several factors that make it difficult, such as biological factors, lack of skills, our emotional response being reinforced by the environment or the intensity of the emotion, among others.

There are skills dedicated to accepting emotions, which focus on discriminating emotions, accurately labeling them, and expressing them appropriately. On the other hand, there are also skills designed to help people change their emotions, that is, focusing on changing the type of emotion, its intensity, or its duration.

We found a series of objectives dedicated to the acquisition of emotional regulation skills:

1. Understanding and naming emotions: This is something very important for our mental health And it's important to learn to identify, observe, and describe emotions, as well as understand what adaptive and communicative functions they perform. One thing we can do to train this is to name aloud the emotion present at some point during the day and try to recognize the emotion's different components.
2. Change the emotional response: With this, we seek to reduce the frequency of unwanted emotions, how to stop them, or how to change them. Here are some things we can do:
   1. Check the facts: This involves changing our emotional response by changing how we think about the events that trigger it. We can ask ourselves what emotion we want to change, what event triggered it, what interpretation I make of the event, whether I'm anticipating danger or threat, what the likelihood is of it actually occurring, think about alternative outcomes to this situation, or ask ourselves if the emotion fits with what happened, among other things.
   2. Opposite action: It involves changing an emotion that doesn't fit with the facts or that we can't handle most skillfully at the moment, by learning to act against it. Some strategies we can implement include changing body posture, facial expression, thinking, what we say, and how we say it.
   3. Troubleshooting: for emotions that fit the facts

1. Reduce emotional vulnerability: Some actions we can take would include doing activities that increase our sense of self-efficacy, self-control and competence; anticipating future situations, planning the outcomes and skills that will be needed, or taking care of the body through diet, sleep, or exercise, in order to reduce emotional reactivity.

1. Managing extreme emotions: This involves reducing emotional suffering without doing things that could make the situation worse. First, it's important to observe the emotion and identify the point at which our abilities break down, where the emotion reaches such intensity that it becomes impossible for us to act by implementing the learned strategies. Once this crisis has passed, we can return to practicing mindfulness for the current emotion or try using other emotional regulation skills.

What can we do to survive crisis situations?

The following strategies are short-term solutions for coping with painful situations without taking impulsive actions that could make the situation worse. Their sole purpose is to get through the crisis.

• STOP skill: It consists of stopping momentarily, taking a step back and breathing deeply, then observing what is happening around and inside you, observing the facts without judging them to know what options we have available and asking ourselves what we want from the situation, what our goals are.
• Pros and cons from engaging in or not engaging in an unwanted behavior. You can carry the list with you to read when the urge to engage in a problem behavior increases.
• TIP Skills: These are quick ways to modify emotional activation through physiology (we must take into account specific medical recommendations).
  • Temperature: Place your face in cold water and hold your breath for 30 seconds, focusing your attention on your face and the sensations produced by the cold. This will lower your emotional arousal.
  • Intense physical exercise for a few minutes.
  • Slow breathing or muscle relaxation.
• Get distracted, with activities or other thoughts to direct your attention to. Some examples might be directing your attention to an external event (such as counting books on a shelf) or to thoughts (making a list of favorite movies or TV shows).
• Self-soothing: It involves increasing self-compassion and self-validation. To do this, we can recall an image from our childhood. Imagine ourselves entering that scene. What would we do? What would we say to ourselves? If we are compassionate with our childhood selves, why can't we be compassionate with our present selves? We can also find special things that calm us through different senses, such as cologne or mindfully sipping tea.
• Improve the moment: There are different strategies for this, such as creating a safe place in our imagination, focusing on only one thing at a time, taking reference from other situations in which we have overcome the crisis, or implementing relaxation strategies, among others.