emotion regulation process

The core essence of emotional regulation has never been to eliminate negative emotions and force yourself to maintain "emotional stability" at all times, but a full-chain adaptation process from emotional signal capture, judgment stripping, to independent selection of response methods - the essence is to make your emotions work for you, rather than being manipulated by them.

A case I received last week just illustrates the problem: a girl who works in operations at an Internet company changed eight versions of her activity plan but was rejected by Party A. She threw her mechanical keyboard on the table on the spot. Everyone in the office looked at her. She froze for two seconds, turned around, and rushed into the toilet to cry. When she came out, she told me, "Why can't I control my temper? My emotional intelligence is so low." I handed her a piece of paper, but instead of trying to persuade her to "don't be angry", I first asked her if she felt anything different in her body the moment she dropped the keyboard. She thought for a while and said that her heart was beating so fast, her face was hot, and her hands were shaking. In fact, she regretted it the moment she fell, but her mind was completely blank at that time, and she took action without thinking.

This is actually the normal situation when most people lose control of their emotions: when the amygdala is hijacked, the rational brain cannot come online at all, and any talk of adjusting emotions is in vain. Interestingly, in the current mainstream research on emotion regulation, the entry points of different schools are quite different, and no one has an absolute "standard answer". Traditional cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) advocates adjusting irrational cognitions. In this girl's case, it means changing the thought of "Party A is deliberately targeting me" to "Party A may not have received the logic of the user research we did before." When the cognition is transformed, the emotions will naturally go smoothly. However, the limitations of this method are also obvious: when emotions really get to the point, most people can't calm down and sort out any logic. I came across a comment from a netizen a while ago, saying that every time he gets angry, he forces himself to recite "Don't be angry" silently, and by the end of the recitation, he commits breast hyperplasia, and becomes even more angry. This is the misunderstanding that he is forced to carry on.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which has become more popular among practitioners in recent years, takes the completely opposite path: it does not require you to reason when your emotions arise. Just do "de-judgment" first - you don't have to think "I am angry because I have low emotional intelligence" or "I am sad because I am fragile". Just put a label on the emotion first: "Oh, I am angry now because the fruits of my labor are not respected" "I feel wronged now because no one sees my hard work after staying up for several nights." There is no need to fight, and there is no need to force yourself to get better immediately. Accept the existence of the emotion first, and then choose how to respond after the impulse has passed. There are also colleagues who do somatic therapy who are accustomed to starting from the body. For example, asking an emotional person to first clench and then unclench their fists 10 times, or do 3 times of 478 breathing to reduce the tension in the body first, and the emotions will also calm down. The essence is to use physiological reactions to affect the mental state, which is especially useful for people who are prone to being depressed and silent.

Speaking of this, I have to mention the "emotional stability theory" that is very popular on the Internet. It is almost being praised as the most advanced self-cultivation of contemporary people. However, many practitioners in our circle actually have reservations about this statement. Survey data from the Chinese Psychological Society last year also showed that nearly 60% of patients with mood disorders have a behavioral pattern of "habitually suppressing negative emotions" before illness. In order to maintain a "emotionally stable" personality, they have to hold back when they are wronged, and pretend to be calm even when they are angry. In essence, emotional regulation is turned into "emotional suppression", which instead suppresses small emotions into big problems. I have seen too many clients who haven’t blushed with anyone for several years. In the end, they broke down because of a trivial matter. When they went to check up, they were already moderately depressed. In fact, the previous emotions were never really dealt with, but were just suppressed and stored in the subconscious.

In the past few years that I have been doing consulting, I always keep two mints in my bag. When I get emotional, I take one out and suck one in. The moment the cool taste spreads from the tip of my tongue to the top of my head, it can just pull me out of the state where I am about to explode. It's not a fancy method, it's just an "emotional buffer zone" for yourself. A mother who couldn't help scolding her child came to me before. I asked her to touch her chest before getting angry next time to feel if her heartbeat was getting faster. Later, she told me that she was just about to get angry because her child was struggling with homework, and her chest started to beat loudly when she put her hand on it. Suddenly she realized, "I'm anxious now. It's not that the child really made a big mistake." She turned around to drink a glass of water, and she didn't curse when she came back. You see, in fact, the first step in emotional regulation is not to learn any methodology at all, but to learn to "see" your own emotional signals.

After all, there is no unified standard process for emotional regulation. Some people like to break stress dolls to vent, some people like to sit there and write diaries, and some people just want to find friends to scold them for half an hour to feel comfortable. As long as you choose actively and will not hurt yourself or others, you can do it any way. After all, the purpose of our life is not to be a wooden person without emotions, but to be able to fully grasp every feeling we have - those emotions of happiness, anger, grievance, and loss that are piled together are the real you.