How Do You Manage Your Emotions?

What it means to manage your emotions

You're at a family dinner and someone makes a comment that rubs you the wrong way. Your stomach tightens, your heart starts racing and you feel the urge to snap back. Sound familiar?

At that moment you have a few options: bite your tongue and smile, blurt out the first thing that comes to mind or ask yourself a question before answering (what exactly did I just feel, and what do I want to do with it?).

That third option is managing your emotions: noticing what is going on inside you, looking at what set it off and deciding how to respond. In psychology, this skill is called emotion regulation; outside of it, people usually talk about managing emotions.

Managing your emotions isn't controlling them, in the sense of deciding what you feel and what you don't. It isn't suppressing them either, meaning looking calm on the outside while you're just as angry inside. And it isn't simply venting.

You don't choose an emotion; it shows up on its own. What you can choose is what you do before it arrives, what you do while you feel it and what you do afterward. Learning how to manage emotions means learning to act in those three moments.

Why suppressing what you feel doesn't work

Suppressing what you feel hides it on the outside, but on the inside the emotion stays the same, and it comes at a cost: your memory suffers and your body stays tense.

In a review, psychologist James Gross compared two strategies: suppression (hiding what shows) and reappraisal (changing how you understand a situation so it affects you differently). Suppression worsens your memory of what happens in that moment and raises your body's stress response (heart rate, tension), both in the person suppressing and in the person they are with. Reappraisal, on the other hand, reduces both what you feel and what you show, and it doesn't affect memory.

At that dinner, reappraising looks more like "they've had a terrible week at work" than "they said it to make me look bad."

People who tend to reappraise feel and express more positive emotions and fewer negative ones, get along better with others and have greater well-being. People who tend to suppress, on the other hand, feel more negative emotions even though they express fewer, have worse relationships and lower well-being. That is the pattern that shows up again and again in five studies on how people habitually handle their emotions.

The five emotion regulation strategies

Research on how to regulate emotions groups the strategies by when they act on the emotion: you can act before the situation happens, while it is happening or afterward. It is the most widely used model of emotion regulation in psychology, developed by Gross himself at Stanford. It identifies five families of strategies: choosing the situation, changing it, shifting your attention, changing how you interpret it and regulating your response.

Picture a single scene: on Thursday you have to present the quarterly results to your whole team, and presentations make you really nervous. Each strategy acts at a different point in that same situation.

Choosing the situation

This is deciding which situations you put yourself in and which ones you stay away from, before the emotion arrives. A word of caution: avoiding things across the board is linked to more symptoms of anxiety and depression, so the idea is to choose wisely, not to avoid everything.

You can't skip the presentation, since it's your job to give it, but you do get to choose how you prepare for it. A few days before, instead of rehearsing alone at home, you get together with a co-worker you trust and run through it in front of them.

Changing the situation

This is changing whatever is up to you in the situation, so it affects you less. You can't get out of it, but you can change what it will be like.

You can ask to go first (so you don't spend the whole meeting waiting for your turn), prepare a few notes with the key points in case your mind goes blank and check the room or the video call setup the day before. None of these gets rid of the nerves completely, but they all cut down on surprises.

Shifting your attention

This is deciding what you focus on. In a meta-analysis of 306 experimental comparisons between strategies, distraction worked, and focusing on what you feel did not.

The night before, instead of going over everything that could go wrong, you keep your mind on something else: wrapping up a loose end or going for a walk.

And during the presentation, instead of scanning the room for skeptical faces, you focus on the people who are nodding.

Changing how you interpret the situation

This is reappraisal: changing what you tell yourself about what is happening. It is the most studied strategy in the model, and looking at the situation from the outside, or the way someone else would see it, is one of the approaches that work best. According to that meta-analysis, reappraising the situation works better than reappraising only your reaction: changing how you see the whole presentation helps more than changing only how you see your nerves.

"They're here to see the numbers, not to judge me," you might tell yourself. Or think about what you would tell a co-worker in your shoes: that they have spent months preparing that data, that they know more about it than anyone in the room and that a small stumble doesn't erase any of that.

And when your mind exaggerates ("they'll see my hands shaking and think I'm not up to the job"), that's a cognitive distortion: a thought that shows up on its own and that you believe without checking.

Regulating your response

This is acting on what your body is already doing: shallow breathing, a racing pulse and tension. The situation stays the same; what you bring down is the heart rate you walk in with.

Before the meeting starts, you find a quiet spot and do cyclic sighing: two inhales through the nose (the second one shorter, to top off your lungs) and a slow, complete exhale through the mouth.

A randomized trial with just over 100 adults compared five minutes a day of different breathing exercises with the same amount of meditation over one month. Every option improved mood, but breathing improved it more, especially cyclic sighing, and it also brought breathing rate down more.

The earlier you act, the less you have to fix later: choosing the situation saves you from having to change it, and changing it saves you from having to calm your response. But all five work, and you can combine them.

How to manage an emotion in the moment, step by step

These emotional regulation skills are for the moment an emotion hits. For example: your partner texts you something critical that stings, and you're angry before you've had a chance to think.

• Stop before you reply. Don't type anything yet. A few seconds won't change what you feel, but they keep you from answering in the heat of the moment, the kind of reply you end up regretting.
• Name what you feel. "I'm annoyed" doesn't cover it: anger, disappointment and a sense of unfairness are not the same thing. If you can't find the exact word, the emotion wheel helps you narrow it down.
• Find it in your body. Pressure in your chest, stiff shoulders and fingers cramped from gripping your phone.
• Breathe slowly. Cyclic sighing: two inhales through the nose and a long exhale through the mouth, a few times.
• Ask yourself what you're telling yourself. "He always does this" or "he's doing it to annoy me." Check whether the thought claims more than you know.
• Choose what you're going to do. You might reply calmly, ask to talk about it in person or leave it until tomorrow. With your heart rate down and the thought checked, the choice is yours.

What to do after the emotion has passed

The worst of a strong emotion passes after a while, but what happened is still there. From that point you can do one of two things: ruminate on it or process it.

Ruminating means going over the same thing again and again without getting anywhere new. In a meta-analysis of 114 studies on emotion regulation strategies, rumination was the strategy most strongly linked to symptoms of anxiety and depression. Processing is different: you go back over what happened once, with questions, and you take something useful away from it.

Writing it down helps you process it, because it forces you to sort out what keeps spinning in your head. An emotional journal gives you a place to note what happened, what you felt and what you told yourself.

If you would rather have the questions ready for you, MindLogs, a therapy journal app, walks you through seven steps to write about what happened. When you finish, the app points out the thinking trap that may be behind what you wrote and suggests another way to see it. Over time, its reports show you which situations keep coming up.

Your entries are encrypted on your own phone.

What research says about managing emotions

The meta-analysis of 114 studies looked at how six strategies were related to symptoms of four problems: anxiety, depression, eating disorders and substance use.

Among those least linked to symptoms were reappraisal and accepting what you feel as it is. Accepting isn't giving up or agreeing with everything: it is letting the emotion be there without fighting it.

If you shut your laptop on Friday and feel overwhelmed about the week ahead, accepting means noticing that feeling and telling yourself "it makes sense to feel this way, I have a packed week," instead of telling yourself over and over that you shouldn't feel it. Accepting an emotion doesn't mean accepting the situation that caused it either: you can be sad about an argument and still decide tomorrow how to sort it out.

Besides rumination, one of the patterns most linked to symptoms was leaving problems unsolved. When you can change something, change it.

Common mistakes when managing your emotions

Forcing yourself to think positive. Covering an emotion with a nice phrase ("this is actually an opportunity") isn't reappraisal; it is sugarcoating. Reappraisal would look more like "this hurt, and the part that's up to me is this."

Trying not to feel. Working hard not to feel the emotion, or not to think about what caused it, didn't work in the experiments that put it to the test. The emotion doesn't switch off because you decide it should: what you can do is name it and decide what to do with it.

Venting without restraint. Yelling, slamming a door or unloading in an eight-paragraph text releases the pressure in the moment. But it doesn't help you understand what happened, it doesn't change the situation and it often adds a second problem to the first.

Avoiding everything that unsettles you. If you cancel a presentation, dodge a difficult conversation or never bring up something that matters to you, today's discomfort goes away, but the problem is still there. And you miss the chance to find out you could handle it.

Conclusion

Managing your emotions means choosing what you do with what you feel, knowing that the emotion shows up on its own. You have five ways to act: the situation you choose, what you change about it, where you put your attention, how you interpret it and what you do with your body.

Suppression doesn't work: it hides the reaction and leaves the emotion inside, with costs for you and for the person you're with. Reappraisal does: looking at the situation from another angle is what has worked best in research.

These strategies, like writing down what you feel, are tools for getting to know yourself, not a treatment. If what you feel keeps overwhelming you or gets in the way of your daily life, talk to a mental health professional.

Frequently asked questions

What are the 5 strategies for managing emotions?

The five strategies for managing an emotion are choosing the situation (where you go and where you don't), changing what you can about it, shifting your attention to something else, changing how you interpret it and regulating your body's response (breathing, moving and taking a pause). They are ordered by when they act on the emotion, and you can combine them.

Can you control your emotions?

You don't choose to feel an emotion: it shows up on its own, before you can decide anything. What you can choose is what you do before, during and after: which situations you put yourself in, where you put your attention, how you interpret what happens and what you do with your body once the emotion is already there. That is why, rather than asking how to control your emotions, it makes more sense to ask how to manage them.

How do you manage negative emotions?

So-called negative emotions are not bad: they signal that something matters to you. Managing negative emotions works the same way as managing any other: start by naming them precisely and understanding what triggered them. Then you can pick a strategy: change the situation, look at it from another angle or regulate what your body is doing.

What is the hardest emotion to manage?

It isn't the same for everyone. Everyone has one that's harder for them: some people handle anger better than shame, and for others sadness weighs heavier than fear. Keeping a written record of what you feel helps you find yours, because when you reread your entries you see which situations keep coming up and which emotion shows up each time.

When should I get professional help?

It is time to get help when what you feel keeps overwhelming you or gets in the way of your daily life: when you can't work, sleep or keep up your relationships the way you used to. Managing your emotions on your own helps you get to know yourself; a problem of that size calls for a mental health professional, who can assess your situation and suggest a treatment.