Emotional Self-Regulation: Managing Without Repressing

Emotional self-regulation: feeling it without letting it decide for you

Emotional self-regulation is the ability to manage an intense emotion without letting it automatically take over your behavior.

It doesn’t mean you stop feeling anger, sadness, or anxiety: it means you can decide how to act despite feeling them.

It’s a component often mistaken for emotional repression, when in fact it’s nearly the opposite: it requires feeling the emotion clearly in order to manage it well.

How it shows up

• They create distance before reacting: they let a moment pass between feeling the emotion and acting, instead of responding automatically.
• They stay calm under pressure, without that meaning they pretend to feel nothing.
• They recover fairly quickly from a rough moment, without letting it define the rest of the day.

The double reaction: why we react to our own reaction

Physician and psychotherapist Norberto Levy describes emotions as very precise signals: fear, anger, and guilt each flag a different problem, and each serves a specific function.

Fear, in particular, signals a mismatch between the threat we perceive and the resources we feel we have to face it.

Levy points to a pattern that shows up constantly and turns out to be key to understanding self-regulation: the double reaction.

First we register a threat and react with fear (or whichever emotion fits). Then we have a second reaction, this time to having felt that first emotion, for example anger or a sense of helplessness at having been afraid.

An emotional reaction, then, is almost never a single, static thing, but a brief sequence. Self-regulating isn’t about cutting that sequence off at the root by repressing the first thing you feel, but about recognizing both layers: the original signal and the reaction to that signal.

Often the hardest discomfort to manage isn’t the initial emotion, but the judgment we pass afterward on having felt that way. The idea resembles Leslie Greenberg’s distinction between primary and secondary emotions, which we explain with an example in the article on emotional self-awareness.

How to train it, according to Levy and Greenberg

Levy suggests starting by identifying the double reaction described above: asking yourself whether what you’re feeling is the original signal or already a reaction to that signal, so the two layers don’t get confused.

On top of that comes a second piece, the deliberate pause (breathing, counting to ten, or putting off your response for a few minutes), which Levy links to a less impulsive reaction to something intense.

Greenberg (2002), working from emotion-focused therapy, focuses on tolerance for emotional discomfort: approaching difficult emotions and learning to tolerate them, instead of systematically avoiding them, as part of the same process of learning to regulate without repressing.

Reappraise or suppress: Gross’s process model

In 1998, psychologist James Gross proposed an influential model that distinguishes where, within the sequence of an emotion, you step in to regulate it, and why not every strategy works equally well.

Two of the most studied are almost opposite in their effects.

• Cognitive reappraisal steps in early: it means reinterpreting the situation before the emotional response fully unfolds (for example, seeing a criticism as useful information rather than as an attack).
• Expressive suppression, by contrast, steps in late: it means inhibiting the outward expression of an emotion that’s already under way, without changing the underlying interpretation.

Research by Gross and his colleagues found a meaningful difference between the two. Suppression, although it reduces visible expression, tends to leave internal physiological arousal intact (or even increase it), and it has a cognitive cost: in Jane Richards and James Gross’s experiments (2000), people who suppressed their expression while watching a film or a set of slides remembered the details less well, something that didn’t happen with reappraisal.

The differences also show up as habits. Gross and Oliver John (2003) created a questionnaire, the ERQ (Emotion Regulation Questionnaire), that measures how much each person relies on one strategy or the other in daily life. Those who reappraised more often felt and expressed more positive emotion and less negative emotion, got along better with others, and showed greater well-being; those who suppressed more often showed the opposite pattern, with less positive emotion and more negative emotion, even though they expressed it less. The data are correlational, but the pattern repeated across five studies.

It is, in a sense, the scientific basis for why simply “putting on a brave face” rarely works as a long-term self-regulation strategy: the unmanaged emotion is still there, just invisible from the outside.

If you want to see how this ability fits into your own profile, you can take our emotional intelligence test. And if you’re curious why venting by punching things doesn’t work either, we cover it in the article on catharsis.

Disclaimer: This article is based on Goleman’s model of emotional intelligence and is intended purely for informational purposes. It doesn’t replace the assessment, diagnosis, or intervention of a mental health professional; when facing significant difficulty in this area, a licensed professional can offer support that goes beyond self-knowledge.

Sources

• Levy, N. (2000). La sabiduría de las emociones.
• Greenberg, L. S. (2002). Emotion-Focused Therapy: Coaching Clients to Work Through Their Feelings. American Psychological Association.
• Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: an integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271-299.
• Richards, J. M. and Gross, J. J. (2000). Emotion regulation and memory: The cognitive costs of keeping one’s cool. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(3), 410-424. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.3.410
• Gross, J. J. and John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348-362. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348
• Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books.