What Does an Emotionally Regulated Adult Look Like?

What is your relationship with your emotions on a daily basis?

According to Marc Brackett, founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and author of the new book Dealing with Feeling, emotions are around whether we like them to be or not — and our skill in dealing with them will influence how much success and well-being we can attain.

His book explains how we can work with our emotions so they don’t get in the way of us achieving our goals or living the life we want. Emotion regulation is a skill that we should start learning in childhood, he argues — but many of us must revisit it as adults because no one really showed or taught us how.

Kira M. Newman: What is emotion regulation?

Marc Brackett: Emotion regulation in its simplest form are the strategies that we use to manage our feelings to achieve good relationships, well-being, and goals. It includes thoughts and actions; we can shift our emotions by changing the way we think and by doing things.

I have an acronym PRIME: We can Prevent unwanted emotions, Reduce difficult ones, Initiate ones that we want to feel, Maintain the ones that we want to keep, and Enhance other ones. Essentially, emotion regulation is a set of goals and strategies that are a function of whatever feeling we’re having, who we are as a person, and the situation that we’re in.

KMN: What does an emotionally regulated person look like? How do we know when we’re sufficiently regulating our emotions?

MB: They look like any person except that they’re in a place where they are not thrown by their emotions.

Let’s start with what they’re not. They’re not yelling, screaming, saying unkind things, being mean and hurtful.

What they’re doing is they’re using healthy strategies to manage their emotions. They’re noticing what their feelings are. They’re asking themselves questions about the helpfulness or not of those feelings. And then they are choosing helpful strategies.

KMN: What does emotion regulation feel like as a habit integrated into our daily lives? Do we stop and respond to every feeling that we have?

MB: A lot of our emotion regulation is automatic; it’s unconscious. We’re working on a project and we get a little overwhelmed, and we take a deep breath. We didn’t even think about that.

Do all emotions need regulation? The answer is no. Otherwise, we’d go crazy. We don’t want to be attending to our emotions all day long; I think that would be unhelpful. What we want to do is notice if we’re having a strong emotion that is interfering with a goal.

Let’s say you’re at home and you get into a fight with your dog or your partner or your kid, and then you’re going into an important meeting at work. That’s a good opportunity to say, “OK, I’m really angry at my son and I don’t want to sit with that anger in that meeting, so I’m going to take my breath, and I’m going to attribute my anger to what happened this morning and not allow it to have power over my conversation that’s coming up.”

Those are the opportune moments for both emotion check-ins and emotion regulation — when you notice a shift or when you are going to be doing something important.

KMN: Certain feelings seem to be about what they’re about, and certain feelings seem to be echoes of past wounds or triggers. Is there a difference in how you deal with those types of feelings?

MB: I think what you’re getting at are feelings versus emotions. Our experience of any instance of emotion is always connected to our history.

That’s important because it means that it’s a learned experience, and then you can evaluate if your responses are helpful or unhelpful or adaptive or maladaptive to your well-being and then make a choice to say, “OK, I need to step back and reappraise or learn a more helpful way of dealing with this emotion or feeling.”

KMN: If we don’t like how our emotions are affecting our lives, how do we simultaneously accept our emotions while also wanting to change ourselves?

MB: Emotions come, as we say, unbidden. The experience of a feeling, it just happens. That’s life. You watch a movie, you’re in a conversation, someone says something hurtful, mean — the feeling is the feeling. I think accepting that that’s reality is a good thing to do. My feelings are my feelings, and they happen and it’s OK.

Then you have to make a decision. And this is the big one, which is: “Is how I’m feeling very strong and getting in the way? Am I feeling it for too long of a period of time and it’s interfering with my success or my well-being or my decisions?” The opportunities for shifting are generally around intensity and duration.

It doesn’t mean you don’t accept it. Everybody gets permission to feel, as I say. There’s no option there.

We have been taught and almost made to believe that all unpleasant emotions or “negative” emotions are bad for us or derail us from a goal, and I just think that’s misguided. We just haven’t been taught healthy strategies to deal with those emotions, and so we allow them to escalate — so peeved becomes irritated, irritated becomes angry, angry becomes enraged; down becomes disappointment, disappointment becomes hopelessness, hopelessness becomes despair, despair becomes depression.

If we were more emotionally self-aware when we’re having little feelings, I think we would prevent a lot of the stronger, intense, unwanted emotions.

KMN: How much are people in control of what they feel?

MB: I think we are in much more control than we ever thought because our emotions are our responses to situations that happen in the world around us. Not everybody has the same reaction to the same stimulus.

Just be aware that somehow across your development, you learned how to respond to emotions, you were taught somehow or another, whether implicitly or explicitly, that you should not talk about it or deny it or suppress it or it’s OK to talk about it.

It’s important because it gives us a little bit more ownership over what we feel or how we feel and what we do with those feelings.

KMN: So we can be creative with our emotion regulation strategies.

MB: I think it’s a creative process. I play a game with myself.

And it’s fun. I’ll say something completely outside of the box, like “That was a really fascinating comment. I’m curious where that came from.” And the person’s like, “What do you mean?” I’m like, “Well, I wasn’t expecting that from you. Say more about that.” I love that process. And I think that it is an exercise in creativity.

This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Click here to read the original article.