Stop trying to regulate your emotions

Learn how to harness the insight of your emotions to take intentional action and create lasting change.

Have you been struggling to get control of your emotions and wondering why all the calming techniques you try don’t last? If you are feeling frustrated and want to know why you haven’t been able to make the changes you want yet, this blog is for you. 

As a therapist and coach, I have been helping people for over 20 years understand their emotions and how these impact every aspect of their lives.  I have helped my clients to stop fearing and trying to control their emotions, so they can use the incredible insights they offer to become more intentional in their actions and create better experiences for themselves.

By understanding how you create your emotions you unlock the power to make changes that last – at the level of inputs not outcome.  When you identify your emotional inputs, you will see how these drive every decision and action you take. 

This enables you to discover you have more agency (capacity and capability) than you believed was possible, to make the changes you want. You can finally stop trying to regulate your emotions.

If this interests you please read on.  If you would like to find out more about how I work with clients to identify their emotional inputs and put these insights to work, you can also check out the process page on my website; or even better, book a free 30 minute consultation with me to discuss how we could work together to make the lasting changes you want, so you can enjoy your life more.

Stuck in negative emotions

Over the holidays I was asked by a young person I know, let’s call her Daisy, if I had any suggestions for ways to better regulate her emotions. I asked what she meant. “You know.” she said, “To help me calm down when I get stuck in negative emotions and don’t even notice until I am behaving in a way that others point out to me isn’t good’. 

I loved that Daisy was actively trying to improve her life.  I wanted to help her, as my happy place is helping others get to theirs.  I wanted to offer her some of the strategies I know for intentionally shifting from an agitated state to a calm one.  However, I knew that by focusing her efforts on achieving a calmer state without addressing what was creating her “negative emotions” and learning how to notice changes in her emotional state for herself, Daisy would end up in a perpetual game of emotional whack-a-mole.  She would miss the opportunity to learn how to avoid the “negative spiral” all together.

I was also concerned that if Daisy had a story, as many of us do, that part of her was damaged, a failure to achieve lasting change might be further “proof” she was “too broken to change”.  Whilst I have yet to work with anyone for whom that story is true, I am aware of the power of our stories to create our reality.  I didn’t want to risk reinforcing such a story by becoming yet another professional who was unable to help her. 

The most important step in making any change is to first believe the change for you is possible.  It can’t just be words recited as an affirmation – it must be something you believe – something that feels true across your entire being – even if you don’t yet know how.

Changing Emotional Patterns and Behaviors

If Daisy was a client, I would invite her to be more specific so I could understand what emotions she was labelling as negative and then we could explore how her thoughts, physical feelings, actions, stories and beliefs were coming together to create these emotions.  She would learn how these elements form a continuous and complex feedback loop, within her, to create her emotional state moment to moment. 

From this new vantage point Daisy could consider which thoughts, beliefs and stories were verifiable facts, where she was filling in the blanks, what was helpful to her and what was getting in the way of what she wanted.  She could consider other thoughts, beliefs and stories that may more accurately reflect her current situation than her default thoughts that may reflect past truths.  She might even consider changing her interpretation of past events, in the light of this new learning, and the meaning and significance she gives to these in her current life. 

Daisy could then experience how these new thoughts feel in her body and the shift in energy they create.  With this new understanding of herself she could choose what to update and what to leave alone to create a different experience for herself. She would no longer be limited to repeating old patterns and could become more intentional with her thoughts, beliefs and stories.  She would understand the power these have to create her emotional state, drive her decisions and actions and shape who and how she is in the world.

Working this way, the aim is not to suppress emotions, but to become more aware of when our emotional state shifts.  Then we can ask: “What created this shift?”.  “What external factors am I aware of?”.  “What sensations am I aware of in my body?”  “What thoughts may be contributing to this?”.  If we practice this self-inquiry, both when we feel good and when we don’t, we can learn what influences us, how it impacts us and what we can do about it.  We learn what to dial up and what to dial down to achieve the state we want. We become aware of just how much our thoughts impact our experience and become more intentional with these.  We can also appreciate our humanity and have compassion and kindness for ourselves and others when we understand what is going on under the surface and what it takes to become more intentional in our thoughts and actions.

Depending on your life experiences and your conditioning, you may find it easier to observe what you are thinking than what you are feeling.  People who have experienced physical trauma may have survived by dialing down their ability to receive messages from the body (sometimes referred to as dissociation).  They may find it feels very unsafe to do this kind of inquiry without first addressing this.

My intention when working with clients experiencing emotional difficulties isn’t to work on the "problem" - their description of the issue - it isn’t to fix what they feel is broken or to point out what they are “doing wrong”. My intention is to help them understand how their own systems create their sense of who and how they are so they can build their capacity to change their inputs and achieve more of what they truly want.  This empowers them to start directing their lives rather than acting from an outdated default script.  Together our focus is not on suppressing undesired emotions but on practicing thoughts that create the sensations that facilitate growth rather than stifle it – changing the inputs to achieve a different output.

As Daisy isn’t my client, I did my best to explain why I was reluctant to help her in the way she had asked. Instead I shared my understanding of how we create emotions, in the hope this knowledge might encourage her own process of self-inquiry and lead to insights that would enable her to make the lasting changes she wanted.

What is an emotion?

As I have already suggested an emotion isn’t a single thing – there is no individual molecule, part of the brain or neural pathway we can identify that creates the experience sad or joy.  We can’t cut open a body and find a droplet of disappointment. 

Each instance of emotion is created within your body, by you, moment to moment, in response to your thoughts, beliefs and stories, against which you assess external incoming data about your environment (eg sights, sounds, taste, touch, smell) and your internal physical responses (eg speed of heartbeat, level of oxygen and glucose in your blood, cell repair, waste removal). 

These internal and external monitoring and balancing systems mostly get on with their job of keeping us safe and alive without our conscious awareness or interference.  We don’t have to think about healing a cut on our finger, our body just gets on with it.  The sensation of pain may draw our attention to it if we fail to clean the wound and it becomes infected or if we try to use it before it has healed.  Then the body sends a clear signal that we need to take action – to consciously intervene – to allow the healing process.  We don’t have to consciously control our optical system so we can see, but when the sun is bright we might help ourselves to see better by putting on some shades or shielding our eyes with our hand.

So, two of the input systems to our emotions are occurring and changing moment to moment in response to our external environment and internal processes, mostly outside of our conscious awareness. In a similar way, we are not consciously paying attention to the stories and beliefs we have developed through our experience and interactions with others over our entire life.  These are the way we make sense of the world, our mental manual for who we are, how we are, how others are and how the world is.  We could call it our Book of Expectations.

This brings us to our thoughts, which can pass through our mind so quickly we may not even notice them.  A constant background hum as we go about our day.  Thoughts about what is happening, what has happened, what is likely to happen arise out of our attempt to make sense of our experience using the stories and beliefs we hold.  For example, if we have a story that we always work hard but never seem to get ahead, some of our thoughts will be about how hard we work, how unfair it is, how we never catch a break, how others seem to find it so easy to achieve success, whilst we are overlooked. The result will be that even when we do get a break we may discount, doubt or second guess it, waiting for the catch, rather than enjoy our good fortune; or worse, miss the opportunities when they arise as we are so focused on building evidence that we never catch a break. What type of emotions do you think these thoughts will give rise to?

With all these subconscious inputs coming together to create our emotional state it can feel like our emotions come out of nowhere, when we are in fact creating them ourselves.  We create our emotions in response to our expectations and experience and in turn they create our experience and expectations, which is why we can find ourselves stuck as Daisy did in unproductive cycles of thinking, feeling and taking unhelpful action.

Why we have emotions

An emotional state releases an energetic response in your body to prepare you for action.  Its purpose is to either draw you towards a thing (pleasure, comfort, safety, desire) or direct you away from it (unpleasant, discomfort, danger, repulsion).  In and of itself an emotion is not negative or positive.  It would be more accurate to think of our emotional state as either pleasant, so we want more of it, or unpleasant so we want to avoid it.

These emotional states vary in intensity depending upon the immediacy and type of action you perceive the situation calls for.  Mild irritation when you are running late and there are road works delaying you so you bring the car to a slow and frustrating stop feels quite different to the mix of surprise and anger when someone dangerously cuts in causing you to slam on the breaks and narrowly avoid an accident whilst they speed away oblivious to their impact on you.  Both required the action to brake but in a different time frame, with different intensity and different implications.

Our emotional states also vary in duration depending on how much attention we give them and how we act on them.  In the example above you might focus on the fact your quick responses kept you safe which would create a feeling of pleasure and confirm your story that you are a good driver or you might focus on the lack of consideration and poor skills of the other driver and confirm your story that other drivers are dangerous and how you nearly had a terrible accident again.  In this case you may hold onto the anger and ruminate on this for quite some time, even playing out different scenarios in your mind. 

An intense emotion rarely takes as much as 2 minutes to pass through your body before it dissipates – if it stays longer than that it is because you are actively thinking about it in a way that is perpetuating it.  This includes ignoring, suppressing or denying an emotion and taking no action to effectively address it, in which case it can stick around for years and may result in you finding ways to numb it with unhealthy behaviors, such as overeating.

Emotions are also very personal.  What sadness feels like to me in my body and how it affects my thoughts and actions may be quite different to yours, just as what triggers a state of sadness could be different for both of us.

We don’t want to suppress our emotions; they are a genuine reflection of our internal state – our hopes fears, expectations and needs. The inputs that create them however may not be an accurate or complete reflection of our current reality.  We want to acknowledge the emotions and the shifts in state and then we can consider our inputs, particularly if the energy they are creating is not moving us in the direction we wish to go.

If our emotions are a call to action, once we become aware we can ask “What action is this emotion calling for and how appropriate/desirable/safe is this in the current situation?”.  “Will that action take me in the direction I truly wish to go or away from that?”

How we communicate our emotions

The reason we have so many different words for our emotions is because we have a shared language that allows us to create concepts as a shorthand to describe the range and intensity of the energetic states created by the combination of all of those inputs. If I say I feel sad to you, you have a sense of what that might feel like and what I might need from you (depending on how well you know me). This is much easier than trying to explain all your inputs to someone and hope they have any sense of how you feel and what you might need.  So our emotional words are a way to communicate and connect socially – to get the support we need or to maintain a safe distance.

Before we evolved such a rich language and as pre-verbal humans, we relied on our bodies to communicate our feelings and we often notice signals in others that reflect their emotional state – smiling, laughing, crying, making themselves smaller or larger, making or avoiding eye contact. 

Even as adults we can find our bodies communicate these changes in our emotional states even when we can’t find the words to describe what we are feeling.

Now we have so many words to describe different emotional states that we can find it helpful to have clear definitions, Brene Browns Atlas of the Heart is a beautiful book that does just that and helps to draw clear distinctions between often confused concepts such as jealousy and envy or guilt and shame.  Keep in mind these are shared concepts – agreed meanings that are social constructs - and can be subject to cultural differences.  We learn them as we learn our language and the norms and rules of the communities we live in. 

When we first learn to talk our emotional vocabulary is limited to simple ideas, eg mad, sad, bad.  As our language grows in parallel to our making sense of the world (as we compile our mental Book of Expectations), we have a broader experience and build a wider emotional vocabulary to express this. The extent of our emotional vocabulary is influenced by how comfortable we are reflecting on our emotional state and how comfortable others are to discuss this.  I have some clients who at the start of our work use the word “weird” to describe almost every emotion they have.  This is in some cases because they aren’t used to naming their emotions and in others because they can’t yet put a word to the feeling they are experiencing.

Conditioning affects our emotional experience

From an early age we have been communicating our needs through our emotions and actions.  How those close to us responded to this shapes our relationship with our emotions.  We may learn to fear them, deny or suppress them, hide them from others and sometimes even ourselves.  We can layer them by feeling shame about the emotions we think we shouldn’t have. We may use one emotion as a substitute for another, such as feeling rage at some slight or unfairness when underneath we are actually sad or terrified.

We may also confuse actions typically associated with particular emotions with the emotions themselves which leads to the misperception of them being negative or positive.  Learning to separate the emotion from the typical pattern of behavior opens up the ability to choose different actions. We can reduce the fear of some emotions once we know it is possible to acknowledge an emotion and understand the inputs that created it before choosing to take action.  We can also see where our typical emotional responses are learned behavior.  How you saw anger acted out in your household will have a big influence on how you let others know you are angry now.  It also sets your expectations as to what will happen if others are angry with you.

Putting insight into intentional actions

One of the most important parts of coaching is helping clients take new insight and learning and put it into action in a way that moves them forward towards their goals. Once clients understand they are creating their own emotions, they are faced with a couple of hard truths:

• No one can create an emotion within you – only you can do that. 
  

• Your thoughts, beliefs and stories about yourself and the world you live in play a crucial part in the emotions you feel and the actions you take. 

It is incredibly empowering to know that nobody can make you feel bad except you.  At the same time, it can be devastating if you have lived your life blaming everyone outside of you for how you feel inside.  Yes, many of us didn’t get the love, support and understanding that we wish we had in our early years and that can have a devastating impact on us and often means we have to work harder than others at some things.  However, if we make it mean we can’t make changes to improve our lives now then that is on us.

Maya Angelou: "I can be changed by what happens to me.  But I refuse to be reduced  by it."

If we are willing to accept responsibility for our emotional state, we can appreciate our emotions as a valuable window into our inner world as well as an essential part of our humanity and survival.  We can develop our capacity to choose our emotional experience and responses more of the time, whilst also knowing that rather than trying to stop our emotions we can lean in and learn from them.  This is what I wanted for Daisy.

Getting past emotional defenses

This type of personal development requires accessing systems designed to operate outside of your awareness so you can assess and update these and then tuck them away tidily (at least for now) and go about your business.  These systems have their own defenses that can make this type of inquiry more difficult.  For example, when you are in an anxious or stressed state the communication between different parts of your brain is reduced, making it easier to react quickly without thinking (a helpful survival instinct) but makes it harder to notice your thoughts in the moment. 

You may have experienced a version of this when your mind goes blank during an important test even when you know the material.

If you have got this far and like Daisy are feeling a little overwhelmed at the work it will take to change I wouldn’t blame you for thinking: “Maybe I’m so broken I can’t change”.  It is your brain’s attempt to protect you from the effort and imagined discomfort of surfacing all those subconscious routines it has created over your lifetime.  It might also tell you that you don’t want to make those changes because you will lose the things you do like about yourself / that have kept you safe / that created the success you have.  But I can assure you there is nothing in the process of personal development that can take away the skills and knowledge you have.  You simply get to choose to let go of old ideas that don’t serve you now whilst strengthening the skills and qualities you do want.

Believing you can’t change is common, it allows you to give up ahead of trying and conserves energy (another survival instinct). That belief ensures nothing changes, but just because it is a common belief it doesn’t make it true. Just like any other thought you have – merely thinking it doesn’t make it true but believing it to be true influences every decision and every action you take.

Your ability to change

You created your sense of self (who and how you are).  You wired your own brain as you grew and developed responding to your environment and the feedback/conditioning you received (what was rewarded / what was punished within your family and community).  You created your values, your sense of right and wrong and all the beliefs you hold.  You created your story about who and how you are in the world and what is possible.  You continue to update your wiring every day; through every interaction, real and imagined.  The term for this is neuroplasticity – your ability to take in new information and build new skills, both physical and mental.

What you created you can most definitely recreate.  But it isn’t for the faint of heart, for the people that truly feel broken beyond repair.  It is the work of courageous people, determined to outgrow their past, to be more than their conditioning and the expectations of others, to step out of their uncomfortable numbness and lean into a little discomfort knowing that is where the breakthroughs are; the gifts waiting to be discovered to free themselves from limiting beliefs and self-sabotage.

How Therapists and Coaches help

Coaches and therapists do similar work but have different approaches.  We both aim to help you observe the feedback cycle and its different systems. To help you slow down the loop sufficiently so you can notice the different parts, and the conflicts and collaborations  between them: the thoughts, beliefs, felt sensations, and emotions and desires arising from these.  We do this so you can identify for yourself which ones are not achieving what you want and to learn where you have the capacity and capability to make changes that are more likely to get the outcome you desire.

The key difference is which system within the feedback loop we focus on.  Coaches typically work with thoughts, and beliefs and Therapists work with feelings and memories (physical and emotional).  Coaches help you to clarify your thoughts and beliefs about your future imagined self and to identify what you can do now in the present to move towards that effectively by identifying and overcoming barriers. Therapists help you make sense of your present experience by understanding how you have constructed your sense of who and how you are through your past experiences.  This enables you to consider the meaning and significance of these and how this influences you now, so you can decide what to hold onto and what to let go. 

Therapy is great for helping you understand what you are feeling and why; coaching helps you put insight into effective action to achieve your goals. 

Therapeutic coaching offers the best of both approaches – facilitating the growth that comes when you learn how to turn deep insights from therapeutic reflection into achievable strategies and intentional action supported by a coaching process.

As you now know, there is a complex interplay between our emotional input systems so there is considerable overlap between the work of coaches and therapists. There are also many different philosophical approaches in both camps.  Put this together with the fact that every practitioner is also a human with their own experiences, perspectives and understanding and you will see that we are just as unique as our clients.  So, if you have tried to work with a therapist, coach or other practitioner in the past and didn’t find it helpful, I encourage you to keep your mind and options open, they may just not have been the right one for you.

If you are interested in approaching this work by focusing on your physical body system there are other practitioners who work with these as a starting point for improving the overall wellbeing of their clients, such as Alexander Technique teachers, Pilates Instructors and Body Psychotherapists.  Which approach is right for you will reflect your personal preference and where you want to start, but bear in mind you are likely to touch all the emotional input systems to varying degrees. 

My training and experience enables me to work with all the systems.  As a Therapist, Coach and Pilates Instructor I bring the knowledge and insights from each of these fields together in a way that enables me to meet you wherever you are, and whatever your preference and tailor my approach to provide the understanding and support you are looking for to help you make the changes you want.

What now?

If you are ready to tell a different story, to untether yourself from your current sense of who you are what you are capable of.  If you are ready to commit to do the heavy lifting for yourself and stop waiting for someone else to do it for you then let me know.  I would love to take you through a process of self-inquiry that frees you from the past, from old stories and limiting beliefs so that you can move forward with confidence and ease and enjoy your life more.

Thank you

I would like to thank Daisy for her permission to use her words in this blog, for sharing her thoughts and ideas with me and helping me to be a better human.

As always, if you are interested in understanding how therapeutic coaching can help you create the life you want please connect with me at https://www.unburdennow.com/contact

Recommended Resources

I have drawn on the work, research and ideas of so many amazing teachers, authors and podcasters over my career as a therapist, coach and Pilates instructor.  One who has had significant impact on my ability to understand and work with emotions is Lisa Feldman Barrett.  If you are interested in learning more about how we create our emotions and why, I recommend her book “How Emotions Are Made”.

Brene' Brown beautifully describes over 80 emotions and experiences of human connection in her book: Atlas of the Heart

A great foundational book for those wishing to understand how your thoughts affect your physical movement I recommend Missy Vineyard's book How You Stand, How You Move, How You Live: Learning the Alexander Technique to Explore Your Mind-Body Connection and Achieve Self-Mastery.

You can use this link to subscribe to my site to be notified of future posts. I don't write often but when I do it is from my personal experience and with the hope that what I share will lead to your own insights and encourage you to take the action you need to enjoy your life more.