How to Regulate Your Emotions?
122. How to Regulate Your Emotions?
What does it actually mean to regulate your emotions?
Is it managing your emotions? Does it mean no longer feeling unpleasant emotions?
This episode was inspired by episode 307 of the podcast Change ma vie by Clotilde Dusoulier and I wanted to share my own way of doing things.
4 pillars for regulating your nervous system and your emotions
Going back to the emotional bathtub example I explained in episode 121 deprogramming vs. regulating your nervous system. There are 4 major pillars for acting on the regulation of your nervous system and therefore your emotions, the level of your bathtub:
- You have the faucet of your bathtub, these are your past experiences that dysregulated your nervous system. That’s not today’s topic.
- The first time you turn off the faucet of your bathtub, you still have an initial water level in your bathtub, and depending on the accumulation of life experiences that dysregulated your nervous system, your storage can be more or less significant. That’s not today’s topic.
- Working on your basic physiology is like working on the quality of the bathtub’s enamel. That’s not today’s topic.
- You can then manage the water level in your bathtub via the drain of your bathtub, or prevent life or others from adding more water to your bathtub. That’s today’s topic.
What Does It Mean to Regulate Your Emotions?
For me there are 3 steps :
- Spotting what dysregulates and regulates you every time you’re activated to avoid refilling your bathtub.
- Feeling and welcoming your emotions in the body. Depending on your level of disconnection this can be a difficult exercise and you’ll first need to reconnect with your body and your sensations. A simple first way to reconnect is to get into the habit of asking yourself what your body needs with the body check-in. In Je m’aime you have several exercises to reconnect with your sensations so that it then becomes easier to feel your emotions, especially the uncomfortable ones. Feeling/Welcoming makes you attentive to what your body is expressing without trying to change anything. When you do this your emotion passes after 90 seconds.
- Spotting what dysregulates and regulates you: understanding the external and internal circumstances that make you feel these emotions, their messages, what helps you react in the moment if the emotion is too intense or persists. Your emotions are like friends, even the unpleasant ones, they’re just there to give you a message. I explain this in episode 61 the roadmaps of polyvagal theory which let you spot your 3 states. This is where you have the whole range of tools that help you regulate. You’ll find plenty of them on my youtube channel.
- Depending on your current window of tolerance and what you’re experiencing in your current life/what’s coming up, you can put prevention measures in place that will fill you with resources. That’s your routine.
- If you’ve had events that overwhelmed your nervous system (you feel like you took a hit) you can also have other actions that help you come back to your state of safety, the ventral vagal state.
- You can also do work to gain capacity to increase your window of tolerance for what dysregulates you by starting to practice when things are calm, then increasing the degree of difficulty. (“So it takes more to fill up your bathtub”): breathwork is one way, cold exposure is another (I talk about it in episode 59) and you can simply do it by facing your personal challenges, learning to welcome and be at ease with your uncomfortable emotions.
- Reclaiming your power in relation to your environment/in interactions with others. (Acting in alignment, setting your boundaries while still managing to connect with others.) It’s the feeling of powerlessness that often creates trauma, and it’s especially important to reclaim this power in connection.
For you
FREE Webinar "HOW TO FREE OURSELVES FROM THE PATTERNS THAT PREVENT US FROM BEING HAPPY IN LOVE?"
Subscribe now to my newsletter and receive the replay of the webinar how a wound from the past is created ?
* Mandatory fields
If you register for this webinar, you will be subscribed to my newsletter and you will be able to receive offers from me. You can unsubscribe at any time. Please read my
privacy policy (german only), to see how I process the data.
How Do I Personally Regulate My Emotions?
You may have started wondering, but how do I manage to do all of this?
I’ll reassure you, you don’t need to do a lot or spend a lot of time to have good emotional regulation, here’s my example
- I do the check-in exercise to feel my states only when I’m going through a more stressful period because I know I tend to disconnect at those times. Other clues that tell me I need to reconnect with my body are if I compensate by eating or if I struggle to find time for my body routines. Otherwise I have a large enough connection to my body and I connect with it several times a day, often doing 2-in-1s: for example when I run or do yoga I observe my body’s sensations, this is doable because I don’t exercise in noise or extreme conditions or anything like that, when I walk I orient myself in space with my senses, when I self-massage I feel my skin and feel my organs.
- When an emotion comes up and persists, I use either a mini-breathing exercise of 1 to 3 min or an essential oil to regulate myself.
- I know that given my current window of tolerance and my current life, I need to do at least 1 yoga session and 1 running session per week to be able to manage my challenges more easily. I’ve had phases like during covid where there was more uncertainty, or when I had just gone self-employed, where I did a yoga session every day. I’ve also had phases where I had too much and doing 90 min of yoga stressed me out more, so I had to find the balance between giving my nervous system enough resources to handle the extra stress and not stressing myself out more to do it. For example I did shorter yoga sessions of 45 min or 20 minutes, which was easier to fit into a busy schedule.
- If I feel like I’m struggling to return to the ventral vagal state, I’ll do longer breathing exercises (5 to 10 min) or I hug my cats or my husband, which brings me back to ventral in 1 min, then what helps me is understanding what happened and understanding the message of my emotions (with 2 tools that you learn in Cultivating Love and Opening up to love). If I feel like I really took a hit, for example at my father’s death, I’ll do a breathwork session.
- With entrepreneurship I necessarily step out of my comfort zone regularly and this forces me to work on my window of tolerance. I used to do regular 2 min cold showers and lake immersion but right now that would be too much because I have other projects that challenge me enough, it would be too much for me.
In terms of time I spend less than 20 minutes a day plus 1 running session and 1 yoga session per week, that’s enough for me.
I actually made a video about it
To learn to regulate your emotions, I’d say there’s initially an effort to make to understand how your nervous system works and identify how you function and what resources you, and after that it’s easily integrated into your days, even busy ones.
Going further
If you’d like to dive deeper into the topic and identify your own love patterns, there’s my book Opening up to love, available in all bookstores.
And if you need help learning all this, you can join my program Opening up to love, the fruit of my 8 years of practice. You can choose the Day of the Past option, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: psycho-corporal approach to deprogram your nervous system’s automatic patterns and reprogram new relational reflexes.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast “S’ouvrir à l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
Table des matières
