At a glance
Most people who want to regulate their emotions are already working very hard at it, which is part of the problem. You want to stop reacting, and you also want to stop having to hold so much in. This article looks at what happens in the moments before a feeling takes over, and what changes when the feeling is allowed rather than managed.
Clinical insights from 22 years in psychotherapy
I’m Mark Colclough, MA, psychotherapist in Copenhagen. Qualified at the Psychosynthesis Education Trust and the University of East London. 22 years of full-time, face-to-face clinical practice.
- Control is not regulation. Clients who describe themselves as calm people often turn out to be holding a great deal down rather than settling it.
- The size of a reaction tells you its age. When the response is far larger than the event, something older is usually carrying part of the charge.
- Naming comes before steadying. Clients can rarely calm a feeling they have not yet allowed themselves to have.
Clinical notes: My observations are anonymised and compounded from my session notes since 2004.
Why does the feeling arrive before I do?
By the time you notice a feeling, it has usually been running for a few seconds already. The sharpness is in your voice before you have decided to be sharp. The withdrawal has happened before you chose it. Then comes the part you can see, which is the regret, and the resolution to do better next time.
That gap is where most of the difficulty lives. It is not a failure of willpower, because willpower arrives late. What people call losing control is more often a question of how much warning you get, and the warning comes through signals most of us were never taught to read. Shortening the gap is slow work, and it begins earlier in the sequence than people expect.
Am I regulating my emotions, or holding them down?
Keeping a feeling off your face is not the same as letting it move through you. Both look composed from the outside, and only one of them costs less over time. If you grew up where strong feeling was unwelcome, or you now live somewhere restraint is read as good manners, holding it down will feel like the mature option rather than a choice you made.
A review pooling 48 studies and 21,150 people found that reappraising a situation went with better mental health, while habitually suppressing the outward signs of feeling went with worse, although the associations were modest and the suppression link was stronger in Western samples than in Eastern ones.1 The data are correlational, so they cannot tell you that suppression caused the difference. What I see in the room is narrower and more specific: feeling kept out of sight does not disperse, it waits, and it tends to come out somewhere less convenient.
What is my body doing while I stay calm?
The body keeps the appointment even when you cancel it. The jaw holds, the breath goes high and short, the shoulders lift a centimetre and stay there. These are not symptoms to be corrected. They are the early part of the feeling, arriving before you have a word for it, and they are the most reliable warning you have.
- Heat. Rising in the face or chest, often anger or shame arriving before either has been named.
- Tightening. Jaw, throat or stomach closing, which frequently goes with something you have decided not to say.
- Going flat. A sudden distance or numbness, which is regulation of a kind, and the kind that costs most.
- Speed. Talking faster, moving faster, deciding faster, all of it outrunning the feeling.
Learning your own two or three signals does more than any technique applied afterwards. They give you the seconds that resolutions cannot.
Why does the same small thing set me off?
A reaction out of proportion to its occasion is usually answering more than the occasion. The tone someone used, the plan changed without asking, the sense of being handled rather than heard. Something in the present moment resembles something older, and the older thing supplies most of the force.
This is worth saying carefully, because it can be heard as an accusation that the feeling is not real. It is real, and the present provocation may well be genuine. What is also true is that the volume is borrowed. In my experience the recognisable sign is repetition: the same kind of moment, with different people, producing a response you cannot talk yourself out of afterwards. When clients and I trace one of those patterns back, the first thing that changes is not the reaction but the shame about having it.
How do I regulate my emotions in the moment?
Work with the sequence rather than against the feeling. Anything that asks you to be reasonable while the feeling is at full height is asking for the one thing you cannot supply at that moment.
- Catch the body first. Find your earliest signal and name it silently, before deciding what to do about it.
- Buy seconds, not hours. One slow out-breath, or a sentence said more slowly than feels natural, is often enough to let the top come off.
- Say the feeling, not the verdict. “I am angry about this” leaves a conversation open where “you always do this” closes it.
- Let it finish somewhere. Walking, writing or speaking it to someone lets the charge complete rather than settle into the background.
- Come back to it later. Not to apologise for the feeling, but to ask what it was about, once you can be curious rather than defended.
These help with the top layer. They do not reach a reaction that has been forming since long before the current relationship, and if you are mainly going flat rather than flaring, a list of in-the-moment steps is the wrong tool altogether. If the same reaction keeps costing you something that matters, or if holding it all in has become the normal weather of your week, that is work for a room with another person in it. My psychotherapy practice in Copenhagen is where I do that work, and a first conversation can start with one moment you did not like.
Questions people ask
Is this something therapy can actually change?
Yes, though what changes first is usually the warning you get rather than the strength of the feeling. More warning is what makes a different response possible at all.
Do I need therapy if I only lose my temper at home?
Reactions that appear only with the people closest to you are worth taking seriously rather than excusing as tiredness. Home is where the holding-in of the rest of the day tends to arrive.
What does this work look like in a session?
Slowing one real moment down until you can see what happened inside it, rather than rehearsing techniques. I draw on psychosynthesis, analytical psychology and attachment thinking, which suit reactions that have been forming for a long time.
Will therapy make me less emotional?
The aim is not a smaller emotional life but a less costly one. People usually report feeling more, and being taken over by it less often.
What if I go blank instead of reacting?
Going blank is as much a regulation strategy as flaring up, and it is often the harder one to work with. It usually needs slower, gentler work than anything aimed at calming you down further.
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Sources
How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.
