What is Emotional Regulation?

Simply stated, it is the autonomous capacity to make oneself happy. Our natural human state is confident, joyful, aliveness and spontaneity. If this isn’t currently you, then it is worth examining things that are keeping you in an unhappy state.

Regulation is autonomously loving yourself

If you are someone that has lived in a perpetual state of fight or flight, or you are perpetually anxious, depressed or just having a tough time with yourself, this notion may be hard to believe, especially if it has been a conditioning for decades. You might be asking, why do I need to be taught to emotionally regulate myself if it is an autonomous process?

Notice that there is already an intrinsic desire within you to reach this place of wholeness and to feel good. It is that same inner desire for wellbeing that has made you interested in this article. Some part of you is already looking to heal itself. This part of you knows that happiness is the default, and it is trying its best to get there. My hope for you, by the end of this short read, is that you will have gained a little more confidence towards this progress which is already in motion within yourself. The intelligence of the whole human body is immense. It is even more intelligent than the mind by itself. It doesn’t need you to over-think. The intelligence of your body is able to keep your cells full of oxygen while you are asleep. It beats your heart, and breathes for you. It has the capacity to create within itself another human body. There are thousands of miraculous processes that do not require the thinking mind. In fact, most things in daily life do not require the thinking mind.

And yet, despite everything going on, you are still given the option to contemplate on your problems. How miraculous is that!? Knowing that your body is already fighting for you, already trying to take care of you, the best thing you can do is have faith in yourself and get out of its way. From this place of faith, start to cultivate trust in your innate capacity for healing. Can you get out of the way and let your body re-learn to emotionally regulate all by itself?

Remember, it's the thinking mind that often interferes with this self-healing, autonomous process. If you can really begin to trust in yourself, and stop strategizing or having an agenda for how to make yourself happy, you will automatically start the process of re-learning how to emotionally self-regulate. Simply sit in stillness with no distractions (no cellphone, no journal, no music, no company) on a periodic basis, then healing will happen all on its own. You’ll know that the healing is happening because it is uncomfortable.

Healing is Painful

When the process of healing begins, you will undoubtedly feel pain.

If you eat poison, or eat something bad, you will throw up. The process is dreadful. There is nausea, and you will feel burning in your throat. It will be unpleasant for a few minutes, and yet it is good for you.

When you undergo surgery, you will be lucky to go under anesthesia. The following days, however, your tissue will ache, and you will be bedridden depending on the type of surgery. Again, it's a dreadful process, and it's painful, and yet it’s good for you.

When you go see a therapist, they help you release trauma. They get you to experience very painful emotions and memories including grief, rage, guilt, and dread. Dealing with past hurt or trauma can also be emotional and physically painful. And yet, it's good for you. There is an emotional release, and a sense of relief that follows. Emotional work makes you happier as a person.

So too, when the body is given permission to heal itself for the sake of re-establishing autonomous emotional regulation, pain will come. The body has to let go of the stored emotional energy which it has been storing for a long time. This is why emotional regulation requires courage. This is why hardly anybody is willing to learn how to emotionally self-regulate, and we’d rather delegate our happiness to things outside of us.

The bottom line is that emotional self-regulation requires a great deal of courage and trust. Not only is it very scary to “let go,” but the pain will mislead you into believing that you are doing something wrong. Pain is not bad. Pain is part of the journey of healing. Muster the courage to be your most authentic self. Through this painful, self-healing process, can you truly be free, and ultimately happy.

You will learn how to trust yourself

We often look outside ourselves for solutions on how to fix ourselves. If we have a medical issue, we’ll go to the doctors. If we need reassurance, we’ll go to someone we trust, and we’ll seek their validation. If we need an answer to our questions, we’ll scour the internet until we find an answer.

While it's not wrong to look to others for help -and we really do need each other’s communion- if we default on a habit of looking outside ourselves for answers on how to make ourselves happy, we will inevitably start to lose faith in ourselves. This tendency can be seen as benign. However, there are powerful implications to relying on other people to tell you what is right for you. Lack of self-trust leads to people-pleasing, perfectionism, low self-worth, confusion, lack of confidence, perpetual states of fear, anxiety, and depression.

Why do these states arise? In short, it’s because there is a disconnect between the felt emotion and the solution that is being implemented. When someone makes a suggestion for what you need to have or do to solve your issue (of feeling bad), and you choose to trust them over yourself, you are reinforcing a subconscious belief that says, “I can’t trust myself, and since I can’t trust myself, then I have to look outside of me to find an answer.” It is a false belief that we are incapable of managing our emotional experience and that we need something or someone outside of us in order to finally resolve it. How do you know? If you look real closely, you will see this self-regulating machine is already at work all the time. It tells you when you are hungry, so you go eat. It tells you when you are tired, so you stop working and nap.

Learning how to emotionally regulate yourself is the capacity to listen to your own emotions, and then from these signals, understand what needs to be done. There is no middleman. Its about tuning into your emotional experience more and more. That, in it of itself leads to a re-establishment of self-trust.

Then, when you can re-learn how to make yourself happy, there is nobody to rely upon to make yourself happy. You’ll have reclaimed the full capacity to make yourself happy at any time.

Procrastination, Perfectionism, and other resistances will end

After learning to emotionally regulate, any sort of resistance to a task, whether starting it, ending it, or switching between tasks, will automatically dissolve by itself.

Procrastination is a resistance to starting a task. That resistance arises due to an unwillingness to feel out an underlying emotion associated with the task. Perfectionism is kind of the opposite. It is the resistance to stopping the task because of fear of the emotions that could arise when we stop the task. These emotions could range anywhere from rejection to low-self-worth to panic that we didn’t do a good enough job.

In short, resistance to tasks arises from an unwillingness to emotionally self-regulate oneself for the task. In other words, it's the unwillingness to prepare oneself adequately for the task at the emotional level. It's actually not so different as forgetting to drink water before going out for a run.

Lubricating the autonomous self-regulating machine that is your body, will more adequately prepare yourself for the task at hand, and resistances to those tasks weaken automatically.

You will think less

The overthinking mind is an obstacle to being able to emotionally regulate oneself. Our modern world encourages us to strategize, plan ahead, have goals, and to strive for those goals. In other words, we’ve been conditioned to make heavy use of our noggins, and to come to rely on our noggins to figure out how to make ourselves happy. It's the reason we are constantly trying to figure out, and hence strategizing, how to make ourselves happy. Subsequently, it's how we come to lose touch with our bodies. We over-activate the mind, rather than tune into the body.

A emotionally self-regulated person will always ask the body first: “Honey, what do you need?” Remember that emotional self-regulation is an autonomous process. That instinctual drive to just be our most natural self and simultaneously be successful at what we do is not an accident. It is a yearning from our bodies to return to our most natural state of being, which is that we should be able to express ourselves wholly and completely without thinking on whether our behavior was the “correct” behavior. Things should come naturally.

A confident, joyful human being is almost like a child; innocent and expressive. There really is no after-thought regarding anything that is done. In this state of being, there is only joy and appreciation for the sublime experience of being alive. What a relief it is to move through life and not have to second-guess every single thing!

It is almost the same as painting. A painter doesn’t judge a stroke. They don’t say, “this is the right stroke, or this is the wrong stroke”. No. A stroke is a stroke. It is part of the grander scheme of the image. Likewise, a thought is just a thought. Most of it is mindless chatter that makes up a small part of the grander totality of your lived experience.

When you learn to tune into your emotional experience, and then act according to what you need based off of that sensorial data, there will be an automatic drop in the tendency to be up in the head. Ultimately, the head is trying to figure out how to emotionally self-regulate anyway. At the core of almost all desires, there is a need to express ourselves out at the emotional level.

In summary, almost every behavior begins at the emotional level. Our bodies are begging for us to feel out our emotions. However, because of underlying beliefs that emotions aren’t safe, that same energy is diverted up into our heads, and is instead allowed to manifest in the form of thinking. How about we just get to the root of it, and start tuning into our emotions?

Ease because the default

Not only will resistances drop, allowing you to engage in tasks with less resistance, but the tasks themselves will be engageable through a state of flow, and with greater ease.

In fact, the body is constantly trying to get engaged in a state of flow. However, many fears about doing things improperly get in the way. When we criticize our work and our actions every moment, we are also criticizing ourselves, and we are preventing ourselves from doing the task from that state of flow. Fear of judgment, of not doing things properly, and of rejection, can inhibit our natural ability to be at ease. The fear is that if we truly expressed ourselves authentically, that we will experience those things which we fear.

If a person is contractually bound in an agreement with an employer to be at an office for 8hrs of the day, and yet the body is saying, “I don’t want to sit here for 8 hours of the day,” then there can be an internal struggle. There can seem to be an all or nothing decision to be made in which we are deciding to either submit to our employer’s wishes and neglect ourselves, or we listen to ourselves and leave the job.

If a person is willing to trust in themselves, they will eventually reach a turning point in which they will have decided for themselves that they will no longer allow someone else to control their time. For each individual, it may or may not mean leaving the job or may mean staying. A person will recognize the value in staying employed, and that employment opportunity may be what they need at the point in their life. At the end of the day, every circumstance in life can be enjoyed without that nagging voice in the back of the mind telling you whether you made a bad decision or not.

Your life’s purpose will be easier to see and follow

Have you ever been grocery shopping in a rush? I remember once going to a store with only 5 minutes of allocated time, as I was already running late for another event. I ended up passing by the item I needed three times before I finally gave up and decided to ask the clerk. Of course, the clerk pointed to the item sitting on the shelf right underneath my nose. In my frantic state of rush, I somehow overlooked it several times.

This perpetual state of being rushed, of believing that there seemingly isn’t enough time in our day to do what we need to do, can make us emotionally dysregulated. In the same manner that we might squeeze out an exercise run, and forget to drink water before walking out the door, we can be so rushed that we forget to perform those exercises or make those choices which will down-regulate us again. For example, our job might place deadlines on us. We might have a quota, or large assignments that have been allocated an unreasonably little amount of time. Again, we can easily fall into this trap of neglecting our needs in favor of earning money or pleasing our employer. The more we neglect ourselves, the more we stop listening to what we really want, and instead do what our employers want us to do for them. We start to loose contact with our own sense of direction and purpose.

When a person takes control of their own time, they will undoubtedly spend it more wisely. They will recognize when their nervous system is over-activated and take pro-active measures to down-regulate themselves. They will have the courage to say No when their employer is being overly demanding. Since they are able to trust themselves more and more, they will also depend less and less on their employer to support them. They will realize the appropriate amount of value that they have within a given organization, and leave it if they recognize that they are being exploited.

A regulated person who has a lot of self-trust knows what they value more acutely than someone who doesn’t, and that’s because they are attuned to themselves more keenly. They are not reliant on somebody else or something outside of them to tell them what to value. Consequently, they are often “troublemakers”. They don’t play by anybody else’s rules, and instead follow the light of their own sense of intuition. These people are internally driven and their confidence is fueled by an automatic self-regulating body. In a state of fear, of dysregulation, a person will lose self-confidence and self-trust. They will inevitable become still so that they can get an opportunity to recalibrate behaviour.

In summary

The body is already and always trying to recalibrate itself to be confident and with joy. Emotional regulation is autonomous. You can help it along in various things and we will be exploring those things throughout the readings and exercises. However, the ultimate thing to do is to let it regulate itself. Give yourself the gift of being yourself!