Our emotions result from our interactions with the environment and each other, guiding us through the many and varied situations we encounter in life and motivating us to do what is needed to reach our goals (Greenberg, 2016).
What do we do when we cannot express our emotions? And how do we find ways to regulate them, maintaining control without becoming cold and distant?
The answer appears to lie within our ability to manage our awareness and regulation of emotions, boosting our emotional intelligence.
This article explores emotional regulation and the closely related issue of emotional expression, and introduces tools to manage and express feelings more successfully.
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Emotions are crucial to our survival, communication, and problem-solving (Greenberg, 2016).
Emotions help us:
Our emotions and how we use them are fallible; they do not always guide us well. Emotional intelligence is the ability to be aware and make sense of what our emotions tell us regarding how we conduct our behavior and our lives (Goleman, 1995).
So, if emotions help us adapt to situations and the environment, how do we manage them?
To act with emotional intelligence, we need to regulate both our emotional experiences and our emotional expression. Regulation “means being able to have emotions when you want them and not have them when you don’t” (Greenberg, 2016, p. 20).
Emotional regulation is a powerful and necessary skill. Children learn to manage their fears and soothe themselves at a young age. In adulthood, we may control our anger by counting to 10 or curb our anxiety through meditation, exercise, or talking to a dear friend.
Emotional regulation and finding the ideal balance of emotional activation are tricky. Too little, and we are walked over and taken advantage of; too much, and we fail to consider others, harming relationships. A degree of anger, for example, may promote the assertion required to motivate us to step up, challenge a situation, and perform at the level required (Greenberg, 2016).
Being emotionally intelligent involves experiencing emotions and handling or regulating them to avoid too much or the wrong type of emotion (Greenberg, 2016).
These detailed, science-based exercises will equip you or your clients with tools to improve communication skills and enjoy more positive social interactions with others.
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“We send emotional messages in every encounter, and those signals affect those we are with” (Goleman, 1995, p. 115).
Emotional intelligence involves managing this encounter – this expression of our feelings.
Emotional expression is both subtle and highly complex. Making it appropriate to the context, the people, and the environment is an advanced cognitive skill, integrating signals from both our biology and culture (Greenberg, 2016).
What happens when we find it difficult to express our emotions?
Emotional repression is an aspect of emotional regulation. Indeed, while regulating emotions helps us cope with the broad range of events we face, too much can have negative consequences, even damaging mental and physical wellbeing (Patel & Patel, 2019).
Individuals with difficulty managing their emotions are more likely to engage in substance abuse, fail to exercise, adopt poor eating habits, and have sleeping problems (Patel & Patel, 2019).
As well as an essential part of coping, managing emotions is cultural and learned. Increased emotional expression at a funeral in one part of the world may be considered inappropriate in another. The Makonde tribe of Tanzania engages in explosive outbursts of high-pitched crying, which may seem out of place at a funeral in Europe or the United States (Greenberg, 2016).
Aside from cultural and environmental cues, several other factors can impact how well we express our emotions (Greenberg, 2016):
How we feel is impacted by our body, environment, people around us, and other cognitive processes, all of which can affect how we express our emotions (Greenberg, 2016).
Put simply, we may find it difficult to express how we truly feel when we may not be fully aware, and even the act of attempting to share can change our emotions.
