Emotion Regulation

Consider this scenario: You start your day with a spring in your step, feeling energized and optimistic. Your morning coffee tastes exceptionally good, and everything seems to be going your way. But as the day unfolds, you encounter a series of frustrating challenges – a missed deadline, a critical email from a client, or an unexpected personal setback.

Life is unpredictable, and such emotional upheavals are inevitable. These regular emotional storms often trigger intense feelings like excessive worry, disappointment, or frustration.

This is where the importance of Emotion Regulation comes in.

Emotion regulation is the process of managing and responding to your emotional storms in healthy and constructive ways. It’s about recognizing and understanding your emotions, and choosing how to express and act on them.

Developing strong emotion regulation skills is crucial for navigating life’s ups and downs effectively – and aiming for the results you want to achieve.

Emotion Regulation vs. Distress Tolerance

Does the definition sound similar to Distress Tolerance? Let’s explore the difference further.

Both skills are crucial, and they help you handle your emotions in different ways. Emotion Regulation is more about managing your emotions on a day-to-day basis, while Distress Tolerance is about getting through those high-stress moments without falling apart. Here is an analogy:

In Emotion Regulation, you are a chef. But instead of food, you are cooking with your emotions. Like ingredients, you identify your emotions, know where they came from, peel them, prep them. You get to know what triggers your emotions and you learn to identify them. You also follow a recipe to cook your emotions, maybe turn down the heat at intervals and add some seasonings of various activities to find the balance. As a chef, you are also in charge of preventing kitchen accidents by employing habits like sleeping well, eating nutritious food, and avoiding your emotional triggers.

In Distress Tolerance, you are the captain of a ship. Your emotional crises are the storm and your aim is to get through them. Like the tools and parts of the ship, Distress Tolerance also equips you to brave through the storm without the ship tipping over. It also helps you employ techniques to not panic or become too emotional and make things worse. In essence, they both let you deal with emotions but in different ways.

Explore these 12 emotion regulation lessons, with videos and exercises to help you practice each skill.

• Exercise E1: Recognizing Your Emotions Recognize your primary emotions and the secondary emotions that follow.
• Exercise E2: Being Effective Set clear goals and choose practical steps to work toward them.
• Exercise E3: Emotions & Physical Vulnerability Notice how sleep, food, exercise, and other physical habits affect your emotions.
• Exercise E4: Emotions & Cognitive Vulnerability Identify thinking patterns that affect your emotions and practice more balanced interpretations.
• Exercise E5: Self Validation Practice acknowledging and accepting your emotions without judging them.
• Exercise E6: Myths About Emotions Examine common beliefs about emotions and how they influence your responses.

• Exercise E7: Emotion Exposure Practice allowing difficult emotions instead of immediately avoiding them.
• Exercise E8: Balancing Emotional Urges Notice emotional urges and explore alternative actions when those urges are unhelpful.
• Exercise E9: Problem Solving Define a problem, explore possible solutions, and choose an action to try.
• Exercise E10: Coping Ahead Prepare for a stressful situation by choosing a skill and mentally rehearsing how to use it.
• Exercise E11: STOP Skill Pause, take a step back, observe what is happening, and proceed mindfully.
• Exercise E12: ABC PLEASE Build positive experiences, practice skills, prepare for challenges, and care for your physical well-being.

These skills are especially beneficial if you are experiencing overwhelming emotions, as they provide strategies for recognizing and labeling emotions. Once you are able to recognize and label your emotions, you can reduce your vulnerability to emotional swings, and decrease your emotional suffering.

Additionally, they aid in increasing mindfulness towards current emotions and offer techniques to change unwanted emotions. By learning these skills, you can improve your emotional resilience, leading to better mental health and relationships.

How Do Printable Emotion Regulation Worksheets Help?

These printable Emotion Regulation worksheets help by:

• Providing Structure: Worksheets follow a certain order and structure to your Distress Tolerance exercises.
• Giving Tangible Lessons: Worksheets offer a tangible way for you to engage with the concepts taught in therapy, facilitating self-reflection and understanding of your emotional patterns.
• Ensuring Consistent, Gradual Improvement: By regularly completing these worksheets, you can gradually improve your ability to handle emotional challenges more effectively.

A key immediate advantage of emotion regulation is you have the ability to quickly feel better by effectively managing your emotions. This skill allows for more prompt and balanced emotional responses, leading to enhanced emotional well-being.

The long-term benefit includes better well-being, better performance at work, school and more meaningful relationships!

Consequences of Poor Emotion Regulation

Some of the consequences of poor emotional regulation are:

• Problems in Relationships: Poor emotion regulation skills often lead to overreactions or inappropriate responses in social interactions, causing strain in relationships with family, friends, and at work.
• Poor Physical and Mental Health: Ineffective management of emotions can contribute to stress, anxiety, and depression, adversely affecting overall physical health, including increased risk of heart disease and weakened immune response.
• Impulsive Behavior: Difficulty in controlling emotions often results in impulsive decisions and actions, leading to risky behavior and potential negative consequences in various aspects of life.
• Reduced Quality of Life: Chronic struggles with emotion regulation can diminish life satisfaction, leading to a pervasive sense of unhappiness and a decreased ability to enjoy daily activities and achievements.

We regulate our emotions in two overarching ways:

Suppression, which is all about pushing our negative emotions aside, trying not to feel them. This approach can be temporarily effective but may lead to increased stress and emotional build-up over time.

And reappraisal, on the other hand, involves changing how we think about a situation to alter our emotional response. This method is healthier and more effective in the long term, as it addresses the root cause of the emotions and helps you deal with them.

The DBT Emotion Regulation videos and worksheets we have in this page are made for adults. Teenagers are also old enough to follow the instructions in each exercise.

• Emotion Cards for Kids: Create a set of cards with different emotions depicted through facial expressions, colors, or scenarios. Kids can use these cards to express how they’re feeling at any given moment. This helps them identify and communicate their emotions effectively.
• Art Therapy: Set up a creative space where kids can draw, paint, or craft to express their emotions. This could be a “feelings corner” where they can go whenever they feel overwhelmed. The act of creating art can be both therapeutic and a way to tangibly express complex feelings.
• Sports and Exercise: Engage children in physical activities or sports that allow them to channel their energy and emotions. Activities like soccer, basketball, or even simple games like tag can help in releasing pent-up emotions. This also teaches them about teamwork and healthy competition.
• Mindful Breathing: Teach children simple breathing exercises that they can use when they feel anxious or upset. For example, the “balloon breathing” technique where they imagine inflating a balloon as they breathe in and deflating it as they breathe out. This can be a quick and effective way to calm down.
• Role-Playing Games: Create scenarios where children can role-play different emotions and reactions. This helps them understand various feelings and empathize with others. It also gives them a safe space to explore different responses to emotions.

• Psychology Today. “Emotion Regulation”
• Alvarado Parkway Institute. “Emotional Regulation: What Is It And Why Is It Important?”
• Your Therapy Resource. “10 Emotional Regulation Activities For Kids”
• Kelley, N. J., Glazer, J. E., Pornpattananangkul, N., & Nusslock, R. (2019). Reappraisal and suppression emotion-regulation tendencies differentially predict reward-responsivity and psychological well-being. Biological psychology, 140, 35-47.
• Peixoto, L. S. A., & Gondim, S. M. G. (2020). Mindfulness and emotional regulation: a systematic literature review. SMAD. Revista eletrônica saúde mental álcool e drogas, 16(3), 88-104.
• Wirtz, P. H., von Känel, R., Mohiyeddini, C., Emini, L., Ruedisueli, K., Groessbauer, S., & Ehlert, U. (2006). Low social support and poor emotional regulation are associated with increased stress hormone reactivity to mental stress in systemic hypertension. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 91(10), 3857-3865.