Mood regulation practices -
Updated: Sep 27, These effective steps can help kids, teens, and adults alike learn and practice emotional regulation. It's hard to know what to do when you feel overwhelmed with an emotion.
Do you just accept it, ignore it, or try to stop the feeling? Looking for resources for yourself or your clients? Skip ahead to our mental health worksheets and activities. Article Highlights. Recognize your emotion.
Validate your feelings. Consider riding it out. Try self-soothing. Practice mindfulness. Learn CBT skills. Learn DBT skills.
Try cognitive defusion. Find a support network. Check out online resources. Be kind to yourself. What are emotions, exactly? If you think about it, most of your feelings come from your body.
You probably feel pressure in your chest or butterflies in your stomach. What about anger? You might clench your fists, or your face might flush. We think of emotions in our mind because our thoughts and feelings are related. Thoughts may bring on a certain emotion, and a thought can change how we feel.
Emotional regulation is the ability to soothe feelings or control your reactions to them. For example, if someone becomes angry and starts punching a wall, we might call that dysregulated. Emotional regulation in kids. People of all ages struggle with regulating emotions at times.
Younger kids , in particular, may have more challenges. Other issues, such as tiredness or stressed out parents, can also contribute. However, people of all ages and in many different circumstances may struggle with their emotions.
Talk to your doctor or find a therapist who can help. Here are some tips you can try, along with resources to support your efforts.
The techniques may work best for kids, teens, or adults. But mostly it will depend on the individual and their needs.
They may also be used to minimizing their emotions, even when others can see them. So a good starting point may be to put a language to feelings. Connecting your feelings to your physical sensations remember the butterflies can also help.
Some studies show UCLA, that simply naming an emotion can make you feel better. That may be because it connects the emotional and cognitive parts of your brain. That helps your brain know how to respond to a stressful situation.
This may not work for everyone, so notice your experience when you try it. If you need help with feelings words, visit here to check out our feelings activities and worksheets.
However, most people grow up being taught to shut down feelings. You might have heard or said things like:. This advice comes from well-meaning people who want to make you feel better. Or, they may feel uncomfortable and want to feel better themselves. Either way, they are usually just reacting automatically.
Most people also invalidate their own emotions. You might think:. When you push feelings away all the time, they could come back even stronger. When you continue to have emotions and thoughts crop back up, that means they still need to be resolved.
Invalidating them is making it worse. They were really mean to me. That was important. Once you recognize your feelings and accept them, what do you do next? It depends on your experience at the moment. If your feeling is uncomfortable, but you know you can take it, consider staying with it.
If your feelings are hurt, allowing yourself to cry may bring some relief. If a child is harming themself, they need more coping skills. Meanwhile, try some of these self-soothing skills. They can help calm your nervous system. After you experiment you may find one or two that work best for you.
Go for a walk. Play with clay or play-dough. Work on a hobby, like crafts. Practicing mindfulness helps us become more aware of our thought patterns, our emotions, and how our thoughts and feelings affect our reactions to events.
Perhaps the most important emotion regulation skill, learning to let go can be very difficult but is worth the effort you invest. Humans have a tendency to become stuck when attempting to process negative emotions. It sounds paradoxical, but the act of accepting that we are feeling emotions we would rather not feel can be the key to letting go of them.
This makes it bigger and increases our suffering. It is not good or bad. It is just there. There are no bad emotions, just emotions. Anger, fear, sadness are all painful emotions, but they are not bad. Everyone has them, and they are just as valid as the happy emotions. At the same time, do not hang on to your emotion.
Sometimes when we feel a very painful emotion, like anger or a deep grief, we hold on to it, or we intensify it, making it stronger and stronger, in our efforts to deal with it or to give it our full attention.
Try not to do this. Just let it be however it is. This can result in a lessening of the pain. We can learn to love our emotions just the way we can learn to love accept anything else about ourselves or our experience that we cannot change—our age, our height, freckles, the birds that sing early in the morning and wake us up, the weather, the size of our feet, allergies, etc.
Remember that acceptance love and approval are two different things. These get-togethers can be great opportunities to reconnect with loved ones, but they can also be stressful and emotionally charged.
Follow these DBT self-help tips to get through your holiday visits with dignity and grace Dietz, Take care of yourself by eating healthy meals, exercising regularly, getting enough sleep, avoiding toxic or mood-altering substances, and treating any illnesses or issues that require treatment.
Focus on increasing your positive emotions during the holiday season. This one is self-explanatory—give yourself permission and the opportunities to enjoy yourself during the holidays. Leave yourself open to the possibility of renewing old friendships, as well as to forging new friendships.
Perhaps most important of all, commit to maintaining and strengthening your current relationships with family, friends, and anyone else you are likely to see on your holiday travels.
Crowd out the negative in your head with all the positive that you can find. Remind yourself that you deserve to have fun, to enjoy your time with friends, and to bask in the warmth of a loving family. Make room in your mind for the positive, and the negative will have less space to fill Dietz, STOPP is a strategy that will help you in the heat of the moment when you are dealing with intense emotions.
It incorporates aspects of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy CBT , DBT, and mindfulness meditation to help you more effectively address and manage your emotional response to a challenging, difficult, or rage-inducing incident. If you learn only one skill that will help you to more effectively regulate your emotions, this should be the one you learn.
Learning how to pause in between an intense emotional reaction and your ensuing actions is one of the most valuable and life-changing skills that a person can have. Practice STOPPing, and you will be in a great position to manage your most difficult emotions.
There are many techniques to help you steer your emotions in the right direction, or to maintain your positive mood and emotional balance. There are also many techniques that on the surface seem like they will help you keep your emotional balance but upon further consideration reveal themselves to be unhealthy.
Different activities might work best for you, but these lists are a good start if you are unsure where to begin separating healthy from unhealthy activities.
These activities are healthy because they not only contribute to better management of your emotions, they do not cause you any harm.
When you are tempted to engage in an unhealthy activity, consider an activity that builds a sense of achievement instead. Try an activity that will result in you learning something new or developing a new skill, and allow yourself the space to build on it every day.
Aside from the strategies and techniques listed above, there are also several helpful handouts, worksheets, and even images that can aid you in developing your DBT skills and improving your emotion regulation. This worksheet helps you to identify and understand a situation or emotion you are struggling to accept.
After describing the reality, it asks you to think about the antecedents — or causes — that came before that reality hint: many of them you will find to be outside of your control. Next, you practice radical acceptance with your whole being mentally, physically, and spiritually , describing how you achieved this.
The worksheet encourages you to try the following:. Become aware of your thoughts and emotions that struggle with your reality — then release them. Use acceptance techniques such as visualization, awareness exercises, or affirmations.
Interpersonal Skills Acronyms lists the DBT skills related to interpersonal effectiveness, including objective effectiveness, relationship effectiveness, and self-respect effectiveness, and also provides useful tips to put these skills into practice.
The section on objective effectiveness skills DEAR MAN outlines each skill and includes the following tips for building and using them:. It may be helpful to refer to this handout when you are faced with a situation in which you struggle to stick to your standards. Use Part One, a guided meditation, to help your client identify how they respond to their emotions.
Briefly, you will:. Part Two takes your client through a similar guided meditation, but this time they will explore action tendencies that are related to a positive emotion instead. This allows you and your client to compare and contrast the two — how were they different?
What did they notice about each? This exercise can help your client connect the dots between a galvanizing event and the reaction they had to the event. Among other things, it can be particularly useful for clients who would like to target their impulsive tendencies or urges.
The full Exploring Action Tendencies worksheet can be accessed in the Positive Psychology Toolkit©. This is another great handout for reminding yourself of the tools at your disposal to aid you in regulating your emotions. The handout lists four skills that you can apply to improve your emotion regulation and provides suggestions on implementing these skills.
The first skill is Opposite Action, which can help you stop an intense or highly charged emotion in its tracks. Emotions often come with a specific behavior, like arguments following anger, or withdrawal resulting from sadness.
However, we often assume the relationship is from the emotion to behavior, rather than the other way around. Actually, it is possible to invoke an emotion by engaging in a behavior that is associated with that particular emotion.
Instead of doing what you would usually do when you are feeling a certain way, try doing the opposite action. If you are sad, try chatting with friends instead of withdrawing from them. The P. skill is another skill that acknowledges the link between body and brain.
You will likely find it much easier to manage your emotions if you also manage your health and your body. Follow these suggestions to keep your body healthy and happy, which makes it easier to keep your mind happy and healthy.
Humans are surprisingly good at filtering out the positive and focusing on the negative. If you notice you are paying too much attention to the negative, pause and refocus onto the positive. You can practice by doing one small, positive activity every day, focusing on the good parts of the activity as you do it.
Ignore minor issues and notice the enjoyment, pleasure, and fun! This handout can be found online here. The easy-to-identify symbols make understanding the zones simple for children, and intuitive for anyone who has paid attention to the world outside of their car!
is the happy medium and represents positive emotions and a balance between extremes. This image included below is an excellent addition to any classroom, daycare, or other location where young children are likely to be.
This image is another that would make a great poster for a classroom, especially with a laminate finish and an erasable marker for drawing expressions at the bottom. It poses a fairly simple question: How are you feeling?
If the reader is not sure how they are feeling, it can guide the reader in identifying his or her emotion. Finally, it leaves room for the reader to draw a new emotion that they would like to feel, and give the emotion a label.
This can be a fun activity for young children, and it encourages them to think about their emotions. Although this image was developed with children in mind, it can be adapted to be a great guide for people of any age who need help in determining how big their problem is. It lists the five levels a problem can potentially be on, starting with the most serious and moving towards the least serious.
Level 5: Emergency — Tornado, fire, danger, serious injury Potential emotions: Enraged, terrified, hysterical, angry. Level 4: Big Problem — Fighting, getting lost, someone gets hurt Potential emotions: Upset, scared, mad, anxious.
Level 3: Medium Problem — Minor accident, being disrespected, feeling sick Potential emotions: Worried, frustrating, exhausted, hurt. Level 1: Glitch — Losing a game, not getting the supply you want, being late Potential emotions: Okay, content, fine, calm.
Use this handy guide to help children or yourself! to identify where the problem is, and decide how to best respond to the situation. The final image would be perfect for very young children, as it is based on a concept that is very easy to understand: a traffic light.
However, it is best for them if they figure out how to keep their emotions within Green and sometimes Yellow while limiting the time they spend in Red. Tell them there are many ways to do this.
This can be an excellent lead-in for mindfulness practice or any other emotion regulation skill development! This piece first described emotion regulation, then emotion dysregulation, and then explored the ways in which you can move towards the former from the latter.
I hope you found this information enlightening and useful, and I hope you get some good use out of the resources collected here. Have you ever worked on your emotion regulation skills? What techniques did you use? Would you use any of these techniques? Let us know in the comments section below.
We hope you enjoyed reading this article. About the author Courtney Ackerman , MA, is a graduate of the positive organizational psychology and evaluation program at Claremont Graduate University.
She is a researcher and evaluator of mental health programs for the State of California and her professional interests include survey research, wellbeing in the workplace, and compassion.
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Almost one in five adults globally may have been neglected as a child, and it most likely happened unintentionally Stoltenborgh et al. Parents or [
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