Key Takeaways
- Self-regulation means controlling your behavior, emotions, and thoughts.
- You can practice self-regulation by staying calm and thinking before you react.
- Parents can help teach self-regulation by setting routines and modeling good behavior.
Self-regulation is the ability to control one’s behavior, emotions, and thoughts in the pursuit of long-term goals. This ability emerges during childhood, but you can develop your self-regulation skills as an adult by practicing mindfulness, becoming more aware of your emotions, and reframing how you see situations.
How Self-Regulation Develops
Emotional self-regulation refers to the ability to manage disruptive emotions and impulses—in other words, to think before acting. It allows you to rebound from disappointment and act consistently with your values. It is also one of the five key components of emotional intelligence: the ability to recognize, interpret, and regulate emotions.
Your ability to self-regulate as an adult has roots in your childhood. Learning how to self-regulate is an important skill that children learn both for emotional maturity and, later, for social connections.
In an ideal situation, a toddler who throws tantrums grows into a child who learns how to tolerate uncomfortable feelings without throwing a fit, and later into an adult who can control impulses to act based on uncomfortable feelings.
In essence, maturity reflects the ability to face emotional, social, and cognitive threats in the environment with patience and thoughtfulness. If this description reminds you of mindfulness, that’s no accident—mindfulness does indeed relate to the ability to self-regulate.
How to Practice Self-Regulation
You can practice self-regulation by staying calm and thinking carefully before you react. Engaging in relaxation tactics like deep breathing or mindfulness can help you keep your cool, while deliberately considering the consequences of your actions can help you focus on the potential outcomes.
The first step to practicing self-regulation is to recognize that everyone has a choice in how to react to situations. While you may feel like life has dealt you a bad hand, what matters most is how you react to it.
- Recognize that you have three options in every situation, known as approach, avoidance, and attack. While it may feel as though your choice of behavior is out of your control, it’s not. Your feelings may sway you more toward one path, but you are more than those feelings.
- Become aware of your emotions. Do you feel like running away from a difficult situation? Do you feel like lashing out in anger at someone who has hurt you?
- Monitor your body to get clues about how you are feeling if it is not immediately obvious. For example, a rapidly increasing heart rate may be a sign that you are entering a state of rage or even experiencing a panic attack.
Start to restore balance by focusing on your deeply held values, rather than those transient emotions. Look beyond momentary discomfort to the larger picture.
Recognizing your options can help you put your self-regulation skills into practice. Focus on identifying what you are feeling, but remember that feelings are not facts. Giving yourself time to stay calm and deliberate on your options can help you make better choices.
If you find you are unable to teach yourself to self-regulate, consider consulting a mental health professional. A trained therapist can help you learn and implement strategies and skills specific to your situation. Therapy can also be a great place to practice those skills for use in your everyday life.
How to Help Kids Learn Self-Regulation
Parents can help children develop self-regulation through:
- Setting routines (e.g., regular mealtimes and consistent bedtime routines): Routines help children learn what to expect, which makes it easier for them to feel comfortable.
- Delayed attention: When children act in ways that don’t demonstrate self-regulation, ignore their requests. For example, if they interrupt a conversation, don’t stop your discussion to attend to their needs. Tell them that they will need to wait.
- Modeling self-regulation: You can also strengthen this ability by helping children recognize their emotions, teaching problem-solving skills, setting limits, and enforcing rules with natural consequences.
Skills That Help You Regulate Your Emotions
If self-regulation is so important, why were most of us never taught strategies for using this skill? Most often, parents, teachers, and other adults expect that children will “grow out of” the tantrum phase. While this is true for the most part, all children and adults can benefit from learning concrete strategies for self-regulation.
Mindfulness
According to Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), mindfulness is an awareness that grows from purposefully and non-judgmentally paying attention to the present moment.
By engaging in skills such as focused breathing and gratitude, mindfulness enables us to put some space between ourselves and our reactions, leading to better focus and feelings of calmness and relaxation.
In a 2019 review of 27 research studies, mindfulness was shown to improve attention, which in turn helped regulate negative emotions and improve executive function.
Cognitive Reappraisal
Cognitive reappraisal, or cognitive reframing, involves changing thought patterns and reinterpreting a situation to change the emotional response.
For example, imagine a friend who has not returned your calls or texts for several days. Rather than thinking that this reflects something about yourself, such as “my friend hates me,” you might instead think, “My friend must be really busy.” Research has shown that using cognitive reappraisal in everyday life is related to experiencing more positive and fewer negative emotions.
In a 2016 study examining the link between self-regulation strategies (e.g., mindfulness, cognitive reappraisal, and emotion suppression) and emotional well-being, researchers found cognitive reappraisal to be associated with daily positive emotions, including enthusiasm, happiness, satisfaction, and excitement.
Acceptance and problem-solving are other useful strategies for self-regulation. In contrast, unhelpful approaches include avoidance, distraction, suppression, and worrying.
Why Self-Regulation Is Important
Self-regulation involves pausing between a feeling and an action—taking the time to think things through, make a plan, and wait patiently. Children often struggle with these behaviors, and adults may as well.
It’s easy to see how a lack of self-regulation will cause problems in life. A child who yells or hits other children out of frustration will not be popular among peers and may face discipline at school.
An adult with poor self-regulation skills may lack self-confidence and self-esteem and have trouble handling stress and frustration. Often, this might result in anger or anxiety. In more severe cases, it can even lead to being diagnosed with a mental health condition.
Qualities of Self-Regulators
In general, people who are adept at self-regulating tend to be able to:
- Act in accordance with their values
- Calm themselves when upset
- Cheer themselves when feeling down
- Maintain open communication
- Persist through difficult times
- Put forth their best effort
- Remain flexible and adapting to situations
- See the good in others
- Stay clear about their intentions
- Take control of situations when necessary
- View challenges as opportunities
Self-regulation allows you to act according to your deeply held values or social conscience and express yourself appropriately. If you value academic achievement, it will enable you to study instead of slacking off before a test. If you value helping others, it allows you to help a coworker with a project, even if you are on a tight deadline yourself.
In its most basic form, self-regulation allows us to be more resilient and bounce back from failure while also staying calm under pressure. Researchers have found that self-regulation skills are tied to a range of positive health outcomes, including better resilience to stress, increased happiness, and better overall well-being.
Why You Might Struggle to Stay in Control
Staying in control isn’t always easy, and there are a few reasons why you might struggle. Common challenges you might face include:
- You want to avoid discomfort or uncomfortable feelings.
- You tend to get easily overwhelmed.
- You often engage in negative self-talk.
- You tend to procrastinate or struggle to follow through on pursuing your goals.
- You tend to act on impulse, particularly when strong emotions are involved.
How do these problems start? It could start early, such as when an infant is neglected. A child who does not feel safe and secure, or who is unsure whether their needs will be met, may have trouble self-soothing and self-regulating.
Later, a child, teen, or adult may struggle with self-regulation, either because this ability was not developed during childhood or because of a lack of strategies for managing difficult feelings. When left unchecked, over time, this could lead to more serious issues such as mental health disorders and risky behaviors such as substance use.
