Can we be too good at regulating emotions?
Posted on May 06, 2011 by Karen Niven
Becki Kelly from the EROS Clinical Psychology group in Manchester asks whether we can be too good at regulation our emotions…
I thought I would use this blog to consider the question of whether we can be too good at regulating our own emotions. To me, it seems that most people have a sense of the way they want to feel. It’s probably fair to say that some people are better than others at getting themselves into these desired emotional states, but generally speaking we can get ourselves to feel the way we want to feel at least some of the time. Over time and with experience we learn how to get to that state, and also how to prolong it and maintain it. However, it’s recently occurred to me that we can sometimes be a bit too good at regulating our emotions to get into these preferred emotional states.
Take, for example ‘relaxation’. I for one am very good at getting into relaxed, contented, ‘chilled-out’ states. I don’t tend to get stressed or anxious, and I enjoy the feeling of being calm and relaxed. To me, feeling calm and relaxed is important because I see the alternatives as negative, and I don’t generally want to feel stressed, anxious, hyperactive or angry. So, because of this I have an array of strategies to get myself into these calm and relaxed mood states, with the reappraisal of stressful situations and the drinking of tea featuring high up on the list. However, these strategies have become so automatic that I actually find it very hard not to be relaxed. Many people on hearing this might wonder why this would be a problem, and in certain situations this can be hugely beneficial. For example, in high-pressure situations like interviews I am glad that I can effectively regulate my emotions to keep myself calm and relaxed, without anxiety taking over leaving me distracted and unable to answer tough questions.
However, when I find that feeling a different way might be helpful, I struggle to overcome the often automatic emotion-regulation strategies that serve to keep me calm relaxed. For many of us it can be useful to feel stressed or anxious as this might help us to work more quickly or help us to remain focused. Indeed, I certainly work much more quickly when I’m feeling stressed because stress has the consequence of making me feel more hyperactive and ‘sped up’, and also more able to ignore distractions such as hunger or tiredness. Nevertheless, when faced with a large workload, I can almost hear the reappraisals of the situation preventing my stress from escalating; “there’s plenty of time”, “it’s not good for you to get stressed”. Even when I don’t believe that these things are true, they are still fairly effective at keeping me calm!
So, given some imminent deadlines and the sense that perhaps a little bit of stress might be helpful, I decided it was a good time to try to work out why I had got ‘too good’ at keeping myself in these calm and relaxed states. I am part of a peer supervision group for a form of Cognitive Therapy called the Method of Levels (e.g., Carey, 2008), a form of therapy which seeks to help people think about the goals and reasons behind their problems, with a view to helping people consider these goals more closely, and try to resolve conflict between their goals. I was interested to see whether a brief MOL session might help me consider what might be behind my need to always feel relaxed, and so in this week’s supervision I was the therapy ’client’.
The questions I was asked about the way I described my problem with getting out of relaxed states into more ‘useful’ states helped me to consider two new perspectives which might shed some light on this issue. One is the issue of confidence in emotion-regulation abilities. The extent to which people believe they are effective at regulating their emotions and have confidence in their effectiveness can presumably vary, just as the extent to which people actually are effective might vary. Whilst I am confident in my ability to get into relaxed states, I realised I do worry that if I let myself experience a negative emotion like stress, it will persist beyond my control, and I will be unable to get back to the feeling of being calm and relaxed. The second issue is to do with our views of ourselves and our characteristics. The way we want to feel can be closely wrapped up in our sense of self. For example, we might want to feel contented because we believe that good people should appreciate the things they have in life, or we might want to feel happy so that others will want to be around us. Thus, discontentment or unhappiness might be negative not just because the mood state itself is unpleasant but also because it signals something negative to us about ourselves. For me, feeling calm and relaxed in response to stressful situations is part of being a confident and competent person, and I realised that feeling anxious or stressed might be aversive because it signals to me that I am not meeting that important goal.
So back to the question, can we be too good at regulating certain emotions, and if so what can we do about it? For me, the answer is probably yes, it seems that emotion-regulation strategies can become so practiced that they become automatic and hard to overcome. When this automaticity becomes a problem, it might be helpful to consider the reasons we have for wanting to experience certain emotions and not experience others, including our views of ourselves and our confidence in our abilities to regulate emotions.
Reference
Carey, T. A. (2008). Perceptual control theory and the method of levels: Further contributions to a transdiagnostic perspective. International Journal of Cognitive Therapy, 3, 237-255.
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