What should I do if I can’t regulate my emotions?

When you can't regulate your emotions, the first thing to do is not to force yourself to calm down quickly, but to stop the self-attack of "Why can't I regulate my emotions?" and allow the emotions to exist for a while.

I met a girl who works as an e-commerce operator before. She stayed up for seven consecutive days last month during a sales promotion. On the way to get off work, she received a call from her home saying that her cat that she had owned for three years had escaped. She squatted at the door of the subway station and cried. Her colleagues all told her, "Don't worry, just go back after get off work." I searched and found it." Instead, she cried more and more fiercely. Later, she simply waved her hands to let her colleagues go first, and then squatted on the roadside and cried peacefully for 15 minutes. After crying, she went to a convenience store and bought a cup of hot taro paste and milk. She drank and took a taxi home, but she felt less panicked.

You may think this is laissez-faire? In fact, there have always been two different ideas for dealing with emotions in academic circles. One advocates quick intervention and correction, such as immediately using exercise and distraction to suppress negative emotions to avoid affecting normal life. The other advocates accepting first and then processing, believing that emotions themselves are signals of internal needs. Confrontation will amplify the reaction. There is no absolute right or wrong between these two ideas, but they are applicable to different scenarios. If you are going to have a meeting or receive clients right now, then it is okay to take a sip of ice water to calm down your emotions first. But if you are alone, there is really no need to force yourself to "get better soon."

The misunderstanding that many people have in regulating their emotions is like holding a spring in their hand and pressing it hard. The more you blame yourself for not being able to calm down, the higher the spring bounces. Originally, it was just one thing that made you angry. In the end, you will be extra angry with yourself for "Why is it so useless?", which is an extra layer of internal friction. When you are really stuck in an emotion, you don’t need to use complicated mindfulness or breathing adjustment techniques. Just do the simplest physiological grounding. Touch the real things around you, such as the cold cup wall, the suede of a sweater, or the keychain with a doll in your pocket. Take your attention away from your brain. The troublesome things that were going over and over were brought back to the present. Last time, a friend who worked on the back end got so angry that his hands shook after an argument with the product. He held the mechanical keyboard he had used for three years and felt the uneven texture of the keycap for three minutes. His anger gradually subsided. It was much more effective than the "don't care" he had forced himself to do before.

If your "unable to adjust" state lasts for a week or two, and you can't get excited about the things you usually like, and you are haunted by bad emotions when you sleep or wake up, don't force yourself to do it. Talk to a reliable psychological counselor, or go to the psychology department of a tertiary hospital for an evaluation. It is really not a shameful thing. It is just like taking a chest X-ray if you have a cough for a long time. It is just to check whether there is a deeper problem. In the five years I have been engaged in emotional intervention, I have seen too many people equate "being able to regulate emotions" with "never having negative emotions." In fact, this is not the case. Emotions are never your enemy. You don't have to yell at them every time they come up. If you are willing to stop and wait for it for two minutes, it will go away much faster than you think.