Emotional Regulation 101
Emotional regulation skills every people-pleaser need to learn (+ get your emotional tracking sheet)
People-pleasing isn't a sustainable way to regulate your emotions!
If you’re serious about recovering from people-pleasing, you must start to pay attention to your emotions because they drive your behavior. If you often automatically put the needs of others before your own, learning how to manage and regulate your emotions will help you regain control of your life.
Today, I will give you the tools you need to take charge of your emotional well-being and build more authentic and fulfilling relationships with others and with yourself, of course. We’ll cover the key elements you need to learn to understand your emotions, talk about the impact of mismanaged emotions, and finally explore strategies for emotional regulation so you have all the tools you need to build a healthier and more fulfilling life.
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Understanding Your Emotions
To break free from people-pleasing, it’s important to understand your emotions, which are often the drivers of your behavior. Becoming aware of yourself, your thoughts, feelings, and actions will allow you to implement lasting change and gain a deeper understanding of yourself, allowing you to truly be compassionate toward yourself instead of beating yourself up for past mistakes made. Here are practical steps and exercises to help you better understand your emotions:
Recognizing triggers: Become a spy in your own life and try to identify or unveil situations, events, or thoughts that provoke a strong emotional response in you. Pinpoint your triggers, and identify when you’re feeling triggered!
Identifying triggers: Pay close attention to situations, events, interactions, or thoughts that provoke strong emotional responses in yourself. When you notice yourself feeling particularly emotional where your emotions try to get the best of you, take a moment to identify what feeling triggers feel like. Often, recognizing when you’re feeling triggered is much more helpful than knowing why because it allows you to control yourself before you act in ways you later regret.
Emotional journaling: It’s helpful to keep a record of your daily experiences, noting down any emotional reactions you experience and what may trigger your emotional response. While I love to journal in a traditional notebook, I find it more convenient to do it on the Notes app on my phone because I don’t always have a journal around, and life happens all the time whether we’re prepared or not.
Physical and cognitive awareness: When we talk about self-awareness, it’s often referred to as mental awareness, being aware of your thoughts, beliefs, and feelings in your head, while there is also physical awareness. Being aware of your body and the sensations in your body is important as it’s where your emotions physically take place. Notice the physical symptoms of when you’re feeling triggered or emotional. Common symptoms are a racing heart, shallow breathing, or muscle tension. So please pay attention to the physical symptoms of your body when it comes to emotions, but also note what negative thoughts might accompany these emotions and sensations in your body.
Labeling emotions: I can’t stress this enough: give your feelings a name, and try to be as specific as possible, as it will help you understand what your feelings are trying to tell you or where they are coming from. Naming your emotions can help you address them more directly.
Emotion wheel: Use an emotion wheel or chart to expand your emotional vocabulary. This can help you more precisely identify and articulate what you're feeling. It’s as simple as that: If you don’t have the words, you can’t label or understand them correctly. Here is a feelings wheel you can refer to when you’re trying to name your emotions. Start from the inner circle and identify in what category your feeling fits the best, and then try to name your feeling more specifically by moving to the next outer layer, and so on, until you’re at the outset level.
Daily check-in: Set aside a few minutes each day to check in with yourself and ask, "How am I feeling right now?" Creating this habit can help you plant more emotional self-awareness.
Exploring Patterns: Reflect on emotional patterns that you repeatedly go through. Try to identify if particular emotions surface in specific contexts (situations, events, interactions, etc). Understanding your patterns can help you identify what drives your people-pleasing and other behaviors you want to change moving forward.
Timeline of emotions: Create a life timeline and mark significant events or relationships. Reflect on how these events have shaped your emotional responses over time.
Emotional tracking sheet: Create an emotional tracking sheet where you document your daily experiences, noting any emotional reactions and the specific triggers. Include columns for the emotions felt and any physical or cognitive signs. This sheet helps you see trends and commonalities in your emotional responses. I made one for you that you can print out or take its content and make your own track sheet in your journal or on your phone.
Understanding your emotions builds the foundation for becoming more emotionally resilient and creating a healthier relationship with yourself and others. Recognizing your triggers, labeling your feelings correctly, and exploring your patterns will help you understand your people-pleasing patterns so you can create change.
Recognizing the impact of mismanaged emotions
It’s essential to understand the consequences of mismanaged emotions. Not only to motivate us but also to take responsibility for how we affect others and ourselves by not managing our emotions healthily. Let’s take a look at what mismanaged emotions can look like and the problems they can cause:
Mismanaged emotions often cause self-neglect because they can drive us to prioritize others’ needs above our own. When you have a deep-seated belief that your needs are less important and ignore your feelings of depletion, exhaustion, and burnout, you can enter the realm of self-loss.
Not managing your emotions effectively can blur the lines between where your responsibilities end and those of others begin, making setting boundaries very difficult. This can come from a deeper mismanaged or unaddressed fear of disappointing or upsetting others, which makes saying no more difficult. Which not only hurts you but also puts strains on your relationships.
When you don’t address your emotions and find ways to manage them effectively and healthily, it can strain your relationships and cause distrust within yourself. Even if we think we suppress our emotions successfully, they always find a way to the surface. Bottled-up feelings often spill over, which is when we yell at others or say or do things we later regret.
Not managing or addressing your emotions makes open and honest conversation very difficult. When you can’t control your feelings, it’s tough to share them healthily. Not being able to communicate with them often leads to misunderstandings, where you or others may feel like your/their needs or feelings don’t matter.
This is often not addressed, but not managing your emotions can negatively impact your mental health. Ignoring and suppressing your emotions usually increases stress and can lead to burnout, anxiety, and depression.
When our emotions get the best of us, we often regret things we said or did, sometimes not because we’re hurting others but because we put ourselves in danger, too. Learning how to regulate your emotions helps you cope better with life’s challenges and messiness by allowing you to make smarter choices.
What is emotional regulation?
Emotional regulation, also called emotional self-regulation, is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage your emotions effectively. It involves responding to emotional experiences in a balanced and grounded manner rather than reacting impulsively or being overwhelmed by intense feelings.
Five key aspects of emotional regulation include:
Awareness: Noticing and identifying your emotions as they arise by being attuned to your emotional state and having the vocabulary to label your feelings accurately.
Understanding: Knowing, investigating, and understanding the triggers of your emotions, as well as recognizing the involvement and impact on your thoughts, behaviors, and well-being.
Expression: Expressing your emotions authentically is essential so you can address them in healthy and constructive ways. Expressing your feelings may include communicating them and finding appropriate outlets for releasing your emotional energy.
Regulation: As you may have imagined, regulation is a part of emotional regulation! Self-regulating yourself involves finding and using outlets for your emotions that help you calm and ground yourself rather than getting lost in your feelings. (I will give you examples in the next part of the article.)
Adaptation: A part of emotional regulation changes depending on the context; maybe in a professional environment, you won’t express your stress or frustration by crying but choose different options to regulate your emotions. In that way, adaptability is an important part of emotional regulation.
Emotional regulation is a vital skill for overall mental and emotional well-being. It allows you to navigate challenges, build healthier relationships, and make more informed decisions. Developing emotional regulation skills often involves self-awareness, self-compassion, and practicing various emotional management techniques such as mindfulness, cognitive-behavioral strategies, and relaxation exercises.
Practical strategies for emotional regulation
Calm your nervous system: Our nervous system plays a crucial role in emotional regulation. When you're overwhelmed by intense emotions, your body's stress response can be triggered, leading to physical sensations like increased heart rate and shallow breathing. Here are some practical tips:
Practice deep breathing: Take slow, deep breaths to calm your nervous system and reduce stress.
Progressive muscle relaxation: Tense and then release different muscle groups to ease physical tension.
Exercise: Moderate-intensity workouts help you calm your nervous system, for example, yoga, tai chi, or dancing.
Singing: Singing or humming can help you calm your nervous system and ground you in the present moment (plus it is lots of fun).
Massage: Getting a massage can help you calm your nervous system by improving circulation and helping to reduce stress hormones.
Taking a cold shower: Cold showers can have a stimulating effect on your nervous system. The sudden exposure to cold water triggers the release of endorphins, your body's natural mood lifters. This can help reduce feelings of stress and anxiety.
Accept and validate your feelings instead of fighting them: As you may have noticed when trying to suppress or deny your emotions, you usually only intensify them. You can’t manage feelings you don’t acknowledge you have. Accepting and validating your feelings is the first step in understanding and managing them effectively. Here are some practical tips:
Mindfulness: Mindfulness is observing your emotions and thoughts without judgment but with curiosity. Paying attention to your feelings and thoughts helps you understand your patterns and your underlying belief systems. You can do so by practicing meditation, journaling, or being more mindful of how you carry yourself through every day.
Self-validate: Validating yourself means recognizing what you’re feeling and allowing yourself to feel that way, even when you don’t want to. One great way to practice self-validation is to use positive affirmations or meaningful reminders. For example, when you feel an intense negative feeling, remind yourself that “Emotions are natural. It’s human to have emotions as a response to life’s experiences. I’m allowed to feel this way, and nothing is wrong with me.”
Prioritize self-care to give you the energy to manage your emotions: Managing your feelings takes energy! So, if you’re constantly running low, you’re probably quickly irritated, frustrated, and more on edge. That’s why self-care is an essential part of emotional regulation. You are better equipped to handle challenging or intense emotions (including stress) when you're physically and emotionally well and energized. Here are some practical tips to take better care of yourself:
Create a self-care routine: Develop a set of practices that help you fulfill your needs. For example, have a morning and night routine to ensure you start your day on the right foot and end the night in a way that allows you to find the rest you need.
Set boundaries: Learn to say "no" when necessary to protect your energy so you have enough to care for and regulate yourself.
Learn to let your emotions come to an end: What we might forget when we’re in the midst of our feelings is that they are temporary; they naturally rise and fall. Resisting them is not part of their natural cycle, so resisting your feelings often prologs your pain and distress. If you’re someone who can’t naturally let their emotions come to an end, here are some practical tips:
Practice patience: Remind yourself that emotions are fleeting and will pass. Pay close attention to the language you use to describe your feelings; we often say I am angry when we mean I feel angry. Practice labeling your feelings correctly!
Stop fueling your emotions: Did you know that the physical sensations of your emotions only last for 90 sec? You probably think this can’t be right because you’ve felt intense emotions before and often for longer than 90 sec. But hear me out: Our feelings come to a natural end after 90 sec unless we keep refueling our emotions with our thoughts. That’s when we overthink past or future actions, where we drive ourselves crazy. So, next time you feel an intense emotion, remind yourself of this fact and stop your thoughts from refueling the fire. After 90 seconds, your feelings become a choice!
Techniques to reframe your negative thought patterns: As I’ve said before, your thoughts can fuel your emotions. It’s essential to recognize your thoughts' impact and equip yourself with tools and strategies that help you manage your thoughts so they impact your life positively rather than bring you down. Here are some strategies to help you reframe your thoughts so you have more control over your emotional states:
Identify your thinking mistakes: If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know that our thinking is inherently flawed. There are signs you need to look out for in your thinking if you want to be in control of yourself rather than guided by random thoughts based on past experiences or human biases. I discuss this in detail in another article here. But here are two examples of what to look out for:
Disidentify with your thoughts: Before we can question and ultimately reframe them, we must create distance between our thoughts and ourselves. This allows us to stay grounded and present and reduces our emotional response to our thoughts. While what I am about to teach you may seem simple and unnecessary, it makes a big difference (especially emotionally). Don't underestimate the effects of identifying with your thoughts. Whenever you have a thought about yourself, someone else, or something, say: I am having the thought that (insert your thought). This will help you create more distance between you and your thoughts, ultimately reducing the intensity of your emotions tied to that thought.
Take your thought on trial: Creating a visual often helps me carry out mental exercises like this one. That's why I want you to imagine that your thought is on trial, and you're taking the role of defense attorney and the prosecutor. Explore evidence supporting your thought as well as proof that disproves it. Remember that in court, only proven facts are admissible. You can't present evidence that is based on emotions and assumptions. When you have gathered all the evidence, weigh all the evidence presented and come to a verdict. I like this exercise because it helps us look at our thoughts from different perspectives, staying fair and rational. This allows you to evaluate your thoughts and gives you ideas as to what you may have to change to make your thoughts more realistic and serve you.
Get to know what soothes you: I strongly believe there are no one-size-fits-all solutions in life. I think what works for me might be torture for you and vice versa. And while that may be overwhelming initially (since it’s a lot of experimenting), I think it’s a good long-term thing. You will know what’s best for you, and I find tremendous confidence and strength in knowing that. To regulate your emotions, you’ll need to build a library of strategies that help you soothe yourself. You’ll need strategies for many different circumstances because maybe leaving is what you need in stressful situations, but if you’re on a plane, that strategy might not be an option, so you need to have something as a backup. We all share the same feelings but have different preferences regarding how we want to express them and how we soothe ourselves through them. Here are some self-reflection questions to help you identify possible ways you can soothe yourself:
What activities bring you joy?
What physical sensations are comforting?
How do you prefer to express your feelings (anger, sadness, frustration, anxiety,…)?
How do you feel in nature, and what role can it play in soothing you?
Does music affect how you feel? How can you use it as a tool to soothe yourself?
Who can you turn to when you need to talk through your feelings? How do these conversations make you feel better?
How does using your senses help you soothe yourself? What smells, touches, or sounds help you feel better?
Does moving your body help you soothe your emotions? What intensity of exercise enables you to control which emotions?
What affirmations can help you soothe yourself through intense emotions where leaving might not be an immediate option?
Remember that self-soothing is a highly individualized process. The key is experimenting with different strategies and techniques to discover what works best for you in various situations. Over time, you'll build a comprehensive toolkit for emotional regulation that aligns with your unique preferences and needs.
Build an emotional support system: Humans are social creatures. While we can self-regulate, we also can co-regulate. This means that having a support system of understanding friends and family members or access to mental health specialists (therapists, counselors, or coaches) can be a great resource in healthily regulating your emotions.
Build relationships in which you feel safe enough to open up about your emotions and experiences. Learn to trust others and yourself to let go of the masks you put on and show what’s really going on in your head and heart.
Seek professional help if you don’t have people you can talk to, or that feel safe to you. Please know that you can reach out to get help. Also, if you have people you can open up to, please know that you can always seek help, whether you need it or not. It’s more about supporting yourself.
These practical strategies empower you to take control of your emotional well-being and create healthier responses to life’s challenges. Include these techniques into your daily routine, practice them as they may feel uncomfortable at first, and remember that emotional regulation is a skill that needs to be learned and practiced over time.
Give this article a thumbs-up and become a paid subscriber if it struck a chord with you. Leave a comment below to share your thoughts, experiences, or any questions you may have. Your contributions are what turns this newsletter into a community. Subscribe, like, and share your thoughts so we can create a brighter and more empowered future together. -Klara
As I age and gain some more self awareness I have organically moved into the "feeling in my body" stage. It's becoming immensely valuable for getting out of my head.