Have trouble coping with your emotions? Here are 5 factors that get in your way and make regulating your emotions harder.
Have trouble coping with your emotions? Here are 5 factors that get in your way and make regulating your emotions harder.
Hosted by Dr. Monica Johnson. Read the transcript.
Check out all the Quick and Dirty Tips shows.
Subscribe to the newsletter for more psychology tips.
Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.
Links:
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe
https://www.facebook.com/savvypsychologist
https://twitter.com/qdtsavvypsych
Do you struggle to regulate or cope with your emotions? Ever wonder what’s getting in your way? Welcome back to Savvy Psychologist, I'm your host, Dr. Monica Johnson. Every week on this show, I'll help you face life's challenges with evidence-based approaches, a sympathetic ear, and zero judgment.
Last week we discussed the functions of emotions and this week we are going to talk about 5 factors that make it hard to regulate your emotions. You might be walking around thinking you’re the only one who has trouble coping with their emotions, and that’s part of the problem. What’s worse, you might be thinking that there isn’t anything you can do about it, which is also false.
I share tips that can help every week on this show and there are thousands of mental health professionals who would be ecstatic to help you on your journey to well-being. Keep that in mind as we run through this list!
1. Biology
Yep, genetics! There are many biological factors that get in the way of regulating emotions. Some babies are born more emotionally sensitive than others, and emotional intensity varies across people. If you’re a parent with multiple children or know anyone who has them, you’ll notice that within the same family there can be significant differences in temperament.
This was true in my family. My brother and I were completely different growing up. I was in AP classes and all I wanted to do was read and play video games. My brother was a star football player and all he wanted to do was jock stuff and play video games. So I guess we did have some things in common. He had a more social disposition, enjoyed team-based activities, and I preferred solo activities and quiet. This was true despite growing up in the same household. In another family, you can have one child diagnosed with ADHD and all the emotional struggles that surround that diagnosis, and their sibling can be without a mental health diagnosis and have a more natural proclivity toward modulating their emotional experiences.
My point here is that biology plays a factor and even if you look around and think you’re the black sheep in the family, your biology still came from the same genetics fun bag as your parents and other elders. For most of us though, mental illness or any sensitivities in earlier generations went undiagnosed due to stigma and was very hush-hush, so it can often be difficult to understand the family history that goes into our own emotional difficulties.
2. Not knowing how to cope
Another factor that gets in the way of regulating your emotions is not having any skills. Not skills like you might put on your resume, but coping strategies for emotional regulation. When you have skills deficits, you don’t actually know what to do to change your emotional experience of the actions that are associated with them. This is why therapy and legitimate self-help tools are so important.
Using coping strategies like the ones that you can learn in therapy is effective in improving your emotional regulation. In fact, researchers have looked at people's brains before and after learning and consistently using these skills and have seen actual changes in brain activity. A lot of people falsely think that therapy is just sitting in a room and talking. With the proper interventions, therapy is changing how your brain functions. This means you can learn how to feel better and do better despite your biology.
3. Reinforcement of emotional behavior
Do you feel like you’re in an environment that encourages you to act out? Patients often report to me that they grew up in environments or are currently in environments that reinforce them for being emotional. “No one will listen to me until I’m screaming at the top of my lungs!”
Environments like this encourage you to stay on edge and to be intense, which is obviously unhelpful when you’re trying to work on your namaste vibes. Look around you. Are your close ones peace and love or more chaos and destruction? When I ran an anger management program, my patients were aware of the 3 Ds to avoid: “drugs, drama, and downers.” Broadly speaking, these are all factors that increase emotional intensity.
Drugs can have a negative impact on your emotional state and cause you to act out in ways that you may not have if you were sober. Additionally, many drugs have the opposite effect as what the user intended. For instance, a person may use alcohol to cope with sadness without realizing that alcohol is going to increase low moods in the long run.
Drama was our shorthand for interacting with people or engaging in behaviors where the only obvious outcome is to bring chaos and stress into your existence. For those who grew up in these types of environments, you might feel uncomfortable when things get too quiet. This isn’t because quiet is bad, it’s because you’re not used to it. You may feel the action urge to whip up some drama or hang out with that friend that ended you up in county jail last year, but please resist. Being in this type of energy will also lead to more emotional dysregulation.
Lastly, downers was our shorthand for people who seem to only want to cut you down and make you feel bad about yourself. There are many ways to handle these situations. You can be assertive and let people know that their comments or actions are hurtful. Honestly, there are times when people don’t realize they are being harmful. You can impose boundaries in the situation to protect yourself. You can also increase distance in the relationship. This can mean literally spending less time and less energy on the relationship. You can also create distance by reframing how you view the person. For instance, if it’s your father, you may stop taking his comments to heart as often so they don’t bother you as much.
No matter what environment you’re in, look around you and ask, “Am I being rewarded for blowing my top?”
4. Emotional overwhelm
It is possible to get emotionally overloaded. When high emotional arousal occurs it can lead to what we call a skills breakdown point. In the past, before 24/7 cable and streaming, TV had a bedtime. They would show this multicolored screen and play white noise to let you know the channel wouldn’t be back online until the morning. This is the image that comes to my mind when a person hits a skills breakdown point. It’s like your brain has been short-circuited and you can’t follow basic instructions or figure out what to do or how to handle a situation.
The TIP skill episode I did several weeks ago is great for this situation! This is definitely a moment where dipping your face in cold water or engaging in deep breathing will help. As previously mentioned, your biology can make you more likely to be overloaded by emotions, but practicing skills not only changes how you respond externally, but internally as well. What this means is that not only can practicing emotion regulation skills change how you respond in the external world, but how you feel about things on the inside.
If you haven’t listened, scroll back to my episode “3 TIPs to Reduce Emotional Overwhelm” from February for more advice on how to handle these moments.
5. Faulty beliefs about emotions
Another factor that gets in the way of coping with emotions is having mistaken beliefs about emotions or what is needed to regulate emotions. For example, you might believe that some emotions are bad or having certain emotional experiences make you weak. Or you might believe that negative feelings are bad or destructive when in fact negative emotions just are–meaning they exist, they aren’t good or bad, and they serve a function the same way that a positive emotion does.
When we say negative or positive, what we really mean is wanted vs unwanted. I want to feel joy as often as I can and I want to feel disappointment as little as I can. However, if I felt joy when someone hurt me, that means my emotional signals are totally off and we don’t want that.
There are some that think that having extreme and unwieldy emotions are necessary and that you shouldn’t try to manage your emotions. They may think, “my emotions are who I am,” instead of realizing that your emotions are one part of your experience as a human being. It’s an aspect that takes up a lot of real estate for many of us, but it’s not all of who we are. A person who is a runner is not solely their legs the same way a singer isn’t solely their voice. When Ariel’s voice in The Little Mermaid was taken away, it definitely made things interesting, but who she was and what encapsulated her as a person was still there.
Remember that emotions are signals and they respond to you and your environment. Your emotional responses can grow with you over time. If you learn to cope effectively with unwanted emotions, you don’t stop being you, you simply stop experiencing those emotions as often.
What are some faulty beliefs that you hold about emotions? Let me know on Instagram @kindmindpsych. You can also reach out to me via my email at psychologist@quickanddirtytips.com, or leave a voicemail at (929) 256-2191.
The Savvy Psychologist is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. It's audio engineered by Steve Riekeberg, with script editing by Adam Cecil. Our Podcast and Advertising Operations Specialist is Morgan Christiansen. And our marketing and publicity assistant is Davina Tomlin. Follow Savvy Psychologist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. That's all for this episode of Savvy Psychologist. Thanks for listening! I'll see you next week.