Posts Tagged ‘emotion regulation’
Check the Facts Before Acting on Emotions
“If there’s a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so.” – Lev Grossman Have you ever sprung into action after experiencing an emotion without pausing to reflect with mindfulness? You’re certainly not alone if you can relate to this tendency to react, rather than respond to your present moment experience.…
Read More
Mood-Dependent Behavior vs. Strategic Behavior
“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson One of the trickiest behaviors to overcome or change…
Read More
Improve the Moment with Emotion Regulation Strategies
“‘Well,’ said Pooh, ‘what I like best,’ and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.” – A.A. Milne…
Read More
How to Use Emotion Regulation Coping Skills
“The appearance of things change according to the emotions and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.” – Kahlil Gibran Emotion regulation is all about identifying, managing, and responding to emotions in a way that allows them to be useful and productive aspects of your…
Read More
Apply Opposite Action to Painful Emotions
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” – Kahlil Gibran Emotions can often be experienced so suddenly or deeply that little time or energy is given to question the facts or happenings that prompted the emotional experience. When emotions feel visceral and real in this way, we may…
Read More
12 Steps to Becoming Less Fearful of Emotions
“Feelings are much like waves, we can’t stop them from coming but we can choose which one to surf.” – Jonatan Mårtensson When emotions seem overwhelming or painful, it is a natural response to want to avoid these emotions as much as possible. After all, who would “want” to feel angry, sad, or anxious? The paradox…
Read More
How to Calm Down from Extreme Emotions in 30 Seconds
“Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.” – Publilius Syrus This week I attended a 2-day workshop on emotion regulation in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), conducted by DBT’s creator, Dr. Marsha Linehan. The past two days (along with a thick binder) have been filled with copious amounts of information on specific skills…
Read More
Top 10 Ways to Regulate Emotions – Part Two
Ready to learn about five more strategies of emotion regulation? As mentioned in Top 10 Ways to Regulate Emotions – Part One, strategies six and seven are specifically endorsed by Dr. Marsha Linehan, creator of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. The following emotion regulation strategies are adapted from The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook (McKay, Wood, &…
Read More
Top 10 Ways to Regulate Emotions – Part One
Emotion regulation skills allow us to effectively cope with our emotional reactions. While we cannot always maintain control over what we feel, we have total control over how we choose to respond to those feelings. The first step to gaining greater control over your emotions begins with learning how to recognize emotions and their effects…
Read More
How to Identify Emotional Triggers
Emotional triggers consist of thoughts, feelings, and events that seem to “trigger” an automatic response from us. The word “trigger” is important here, because the idea is that our reaction occurs automatically. It might seem as if the emotional reaction is completely involuntary. The truth is that this reaction, like everything else that we do,…
Read More