Somebody once told me, with real conviction, that their emotional regulation strategy was “just not thinking about it.” I asked how that was going. There was a pause. Then, rather sheepishly: “Badly, actually. But I’m getting better at not thinking about that too.”
I share this not to be unkind, I’ve deployed a version of this strategy myself, on more than one occasion, usually somewhere around 11pm with a biscuit in hand, but because it captures something important about how emotional regulation tends to get misunderstood. Most people, when they hear the phrase, picture something close to willpower. Grit your teeth. Hold it together. Don’t let it show. As though regulating an emotion were mostly a matter of sufficient effort, applied at the right moment, by someone with enough moral fibre to pull it off.
It isn’t, really. And I think the gap between what emotional regulation actually is and what we’ve been led to believe it is might be worth sitting with for a moment.
Regulation Isn’t Suppression Wearing a Nicer Outfit
Here’s where I think the confusion usually starts. Suppression and regulation get treated as roughly the same activity, differing only in how socially acceptable they sound. Suppression is “bottling it up,” which has a bad reputation. Regulation is “managing your emotions,” which sounds considerably more mature. But if the underlying mechanism is identical, push the feeling down, present a calm face, carry on, then we’ve just given the same coping strategy a promotion, not actually changed what it’s doing.
True regulation isn’t about making a feeling disappear or pretending it isn’t there. It’s closer to being able to have the feeling without the feeling having you entirely. The anger is still present. The anxiety hasn’t vanished. But there’s enough space around it that you can still think, still choose, still remain more or less yourself while it moves through you.
Suppression, by contrast, tends to just delay the bill. The feeling doesn’t go anywhere. It usually resurfaces later, often in a form that’s harder to trace back to its original cause, irritability with someone who had nothing to do with it, a stomach that’s inexplicably in knots, a night’s sleep that refuses to cooperate.
Why Willpower Was Never the Right Tool for This Job
I suspect the willpower model persists partly because it’s tidy. It suggests emotional struggles are a discipline problem, solvable with enough determination, in the same category as giving up sugar or finally sorting the loft. Tidy, but not quite accurate.
Willpower is a conscious, effortful, frontal-lobe activity. It’s what you use to resist a second biscuit, or to make yourself go to the gym on a Tuesday you’d rather not. Emotional dysregulation, though, tends to originate somewhere considerably older and faster than that, deep in the nervous system, often before conscious thought has had a chance to get involved at all. By the time you’ve noticed you’re flooded with panic, or rage, or that particular hollow shame that arrives from nowhere, your body has usually already made several decisions on your behalf.
Asking willpower to intervene at that point is a bit like asking someone to calmly negotiate with a smoke alarm mid-blare. Possible, in theory. Not remarkably effective in practice. The nervous system isn’t interested in your reasoning at that moment. It’s interested in survival, and it got there first.
What’s Actually Happening When You “Lose It”
I find it genuinely helps clients to understand what’s going on physiologically in these moments, because it tends to remove a layer of shame that otherwise gets piled on top of whatever the original feeling was.
When something registers as a threat, and the nervous system is not a particularly discerning judge of what counts, treating a difficult email much like it might treat an actual predator, the more primitive parts of the brain can effectively take the wheel from the more reflective ones. Blood moves toward the muscles rather than the areas responsible for considered thought. Heart rate climbs. The capacity for nuance, patience, and long-term thinking briefly goes offline, because none of those were especially useful to a nervous system focused entirely on getting through the next thirty seconds.
This is why “just calm down” is such a spectacularly unhelpful thing to say to someone mid-flood, and also why it rarely works when we say it to ourselves. You’re not choosing to feel enormous. Something in you has already decided the situation warrants an enormous response, usually based on older information than the present moment actually contains.
Where the Old Information Comes From
This is the part that tends to interest me most, and where the psychodynamic angle earns its keep. Because for a lot of people, what looks like disproportionate emotional reactivity in the present is really an old alarm going off, triggered by something that merely resembles a past threat rather than constituting a new one.
A raised voice that sounds uncomfortably like a parent’s temper. A moment of being ignored that echoes, faintly but unmistakably, an old and much larger experience of being overlooked. Criticism that lands with far more force than the actual words would seem to warrant, because it’s not really being received in the present tense at all.
You might already have a guess at which of these, if any, tends to show up for you. It’s rarely obvious in the moment, mostly it just feels like “this is a lot,” without much further explanation attached.
Regulation as a Relationship, Not a Skill You Perform Alone
Here’s something that gets left out of most emotional regulation advice, and I think it’s rather important: regulation was never designed to be a solo activity, at least not to begin with.
Infants don’t regulate themselves. They’re regulated, gradually and repeatedly, by someone bigger and calmer holding them through distress until their own nervous system learns, slowly, what “this will pass” actually feels like from the inside. This is sometimes called co-regulation, and it’s the scaffolding most adult self-regulation is quietly built on. If that scaffolding was patchy, inconsistent, or simply absent in childhood, if distress was met with dismissal, impatience, or a parent who was flooded themselves, the capacity to self-soothe later in life doesn’t arrive by default. It tends to need building, often later than anyone would choose, sometimes for the first time in a therapy room.
This might be worth pausing on if regulation has always felt like something other people seem to manage effortlessly, while you’re still white-knuckling your way through it. It may not be a deficiency in your character. It may simply be a skill nobody ever got the chance to model for you.
What Regulation Actually Looks Like, Practically
Real regulation tends to be less dramatic than the mental image of gritted teeth and stoic composure. It often looks like noticing a feeling starting to build before it’s fully taken over, and having somewhere to put that noticing, a breath, a pause, a sentence like “I’m getting flooded, give me a minute” rather than either exploding or performing calm you don’t feel.
It also, frequently, involves widening what’s sometimes called the window of tolerance, the range of emotional intensity you can experience without either shutting down or spiralling. That window tends to expand gradually, through repeated experience of feeling something big and discovering, again and again, that it eventually passed and you remained intact. Not through gritting it out once and hoping that settles the matter permanently.
Reaching Out for Support
If you’ve spent years assuming your emotional reactions were simply a personal failing, something willpower should have fixed by now, it might be worth exploring what’s actually underneath them, and where the pattern first took shape.
At Serenity of Mind Therapy, I offer psychodynamic therapy both online and in-person at my therapy rooms in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, and Crowborough, East Sussex. Together we can get curious, at your own pace, about what your nervous system might be responding to, and what it might feel like to build the kind of steadiness nobody got the chance to teach you earlier.
If any of this feels familiar, you’re very welcome to contact me here.