Before we had our daughter, my husband and I would sometimes gripe and snap at each other when interrupted, or sigh heavily and roll our eyes when frustrated. It wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t really a threat. We were adults, secure enough in our relationship to see these moments for what they were: fleeting symptoms of being tired or stressed that had nothing to do with the other. A quick kiss and a passing “Sorry for being so grouchy” was more than enough to let these things slide. 

These habits came to a crashing halt when our baby became a verbal toddler.

Toddlers, if you didn’t know, are shockingly keen observers and nearly perfect mimics. There’s something about hearing your tiny, sweet little angel baby demand “Can I just get five minutes to myself please?” that makes you reevaluate your life. 

“There’s something about hearing your tiny, sweet little angel baby demand ‘Can I just get five minutes to myself please?’ that makes you reevaluate your life.” 

We were in lockdown at the time and I was deep in online gentle parenting videos, looking for the right script we could adopt so that we didn’t accidentally teach our child to become a stressed out grump every time she felt a negative emotion. 

Here’s where things got tricky. 

My family is a House of Feelers. We also all have ADHD. This means that our feelings come on fast and strong, often prompting some sort of outward expression: We make noises or cartoonish faces, we wave our hands around and gesture emphatically. We stand up or collapse on the floor; we pace, we clap, we touch. Our voices get so loud sometimes the dogs start barking to join in. Whether what we’re feeling is good or bad, it’s often strong and extremely apparent to everyone around us, even when we think we’re being subtle. 

So when my toddler had big feelings, they would come out in howling cries or pitchy whines, bursts of displeasure that my body processed instantly as “EMERGENCY.” My heart rate would spike, my body temperature rising, and the calm, gentle parenting script I’d been carefully practicing would go out the window. 

In case you were wondering, shouting “Just calm down! Please just be calm!” does not, in fact, calm anybody down.

Not just for kids

There is a lot about the work of parenting that is less than fun. I’m not just talking about the chores — the meal prep, the endless tidying, the laundry — but the part where we are teaching our children how to be people. Which is happening (spoiler alert!) at all times. 

From the moment they wake up to when they (finally) fall asleep, our children are learning how to be: How to communicate and tie their shoes and share their toys; how to read and draw and use a fork. They are learning facts about sharks and how to put on a jacket without bunching their sleeves up inside it and deciding whether they like gymnastics or soccer more. They are learning how to be a good friend, how to deal with disappointment, and how to express their anger or frustration in ways that are safe for themselves and for others. 

“If I wanted to teach my baby how to manage her emotions, I was going to have to learn how to manage mine.”

Sometimes they are learning from the careful, deliberate lessons their caregivers, teachers, and parents (repeatedly) teach them, but they learn a whole lot more when we aren’t teaching them at all. Simply by being around us and witnessing the way we live our lives, they are learning powerful ways of being. 

This can be uncomfortable. Most of us don’t spend every waking moment on our best behavior, and in the comfort and privacy of our own homes, we might not always act in ways we’d feel distinctly proud of.

It is important to me not to rely on the school of “Do as I say, not as I do” style of parenting, because I remember there being a direct line between the cognitive dissonance it generated and the disillusioned, angry attitude I developed as a teen about the adults I was meant to trust. 

All this to say, one thing became abundantly clear: If I wanted to teach my baby how to manage her emotions, I was going to have to learn how to manage mine.  

What does it mean to regulate your emotions?

Emotions are felt mental states triggered by our conscious interpretation of various stimuli. They occur automatically and provide information that is crucial for our survival. 

While emotions are innate, emotional regulation is learned. 

In other words, we are not born with the ability to control our natural responses to the world around us — we are taught how to do this, explicitly and implicitly. Through our lived experience and the influencing factors in our home and environment, we learn what behaviors are considered desirable, and which aren’t. Depending on the details of our particular circumstances, the stakes for these lessons can be extremely high or almost nonexistent — a bad grade could mean almost nothing to one child, while it might decimate another child’s sense of self-worth. We all generally crave the same sense of security and love, so it’s natural to adapt our behavior to obtain them. 

“We are not born with the ability to control our natural responses to the world around us — we are taught how to do this, explicitly and implicitly.”

Regulating our emotions is a complex and multifaceted skillset. Regulation usually targets the emotions that we have designated as more “negative” — like anger, anxiety, and disappointment — by either attempting to prevent the emotion from happening, or preventing ourselves from expressing it. 

I am going to attempt to thread some tough needles here. 

I don’t personally believe that emotions themselves have any moral value. Envy, guilt, or sadness might all feel bad, but I don’t think they are bad — or that feeling them makes us bad. They are automatic and temporary pieces of information. While we can’t control whether or not they exist, we can control how much weight and importance we allow them to carry.  

“Envy, guilt, or sadness might all feel bad, but I don’t think they are bad — or that feeling them makes us bad. They are automatic and temporary pieces of information.”

Though regulation can sometimes mean choosing not to express an emotion, I also want to be clear that I am not advocating for emotional repression or denial as a rule. Personally, I think healthy regulation allows us the space to feel tough emotions for long enough to be able to clearly track and name them. Sometimes, getting that space requires keeping our emotions to ourselves, even if only for the time being.

But there is a distinction between giving ourselves time to process our feelings and going full Elsa from “Frozen,” whose mantra was “Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let it show.” (And we all know how that turned out!)

TL;DR: There is not always a hard and fast rule for emotional regulation we can apply across all scenarios, or a method that is appropriate, accessible, and healthy for everyone. But if we can agree that our emotions are generally temporary responses, and that sometimes these feelings will change with time, then our common goal for regulation is this: to prevent a fleeting emotion from governing the more permanent aspects of our lives. 

The basics of emotion regulation

Emotion regulation is in service of social relationships, so it’s important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all rule book out there. There are a few theories and a number of factors that affect regulation outcomes across genetic, physiological, mental health, developmental, and environmental differences. In other words, it is important to recognize that emotion regulation is an organic and flexible practice that can be adapted.

Consider the following steps a foundational starter pack for emotion regulation, all in service of our one clear goal: We want to prevent temporary emotional responses from dictating our behaviors in more permanent areas of our lives.

1. Self-awareness: identify what you’re feeling, and why. 

When we feel a surge of emotion, it’s easy to ride its wave: It comes out in our facial expressions and body language, and then we might let our words and actions follow. This is not always a problem — expressing our joy or gratitude for a gift or when we see a loved one is rarely going to create an issue. And there are even scenarios where expressing our immediate emotions are safe and appropriate, like in a brainstorming session or a post-event assessment.

“When we feel a surge of emotion, it’s easy to ride its wave: It comes out in our facial expressions and body language, and then we might let our words and actions follow.”

But we’ve all had experiences where we feel something unexpected, uncomfortable, or a little bit complicated at a time when acting on it might have undesirable consequences. 

For the purposes of following through each step, let’s look at this example from my life:

My babysitter calls an hour before school gets out to say she’s sick and won’t be able to make it. I feel a flare of panic because I work from home and I’m on a deadline. At pick up, my daughter has a meltdown when I tell her that the babysitter canceled. I feel instantly guilty, so I agree to let her watch some TV while she has snack. I try to work with noise cancelling headphones on. She interrupts me every few minutes, pointing out moments on the show, trying to get me to watch with her. I get increasingly irritated as my deadline approaches. 

When the show is over, we move to her room so she can play while I keep working. I tell her I have to finish what I’m doing so though I’m going to be in the room with her, I’m unavailable until I meet my deadline. When she inevitably interrupts me, she says “I’m so sorry to bother you Mommy, but I think I need a snack?” My daughter has type 1 diabetes, and sure enough, her blood sugar is dropping. I feel terrible, both that she is so apologetic and also that I missed the alarm to begin with. I have to set my work aside as we work on stabilizing her blood sugar, which always makes me go into high alert even though I work hard to seem calm for my daughter. 

The loss of childcare, my daughter’s disappointment, even the low blood sugar are all manageable challenges on their own, but because I was starting at a base stress level that was fairly high due to a work deadline, I took each of these moments as a personal attack. I was seeing everything in relation to whether it would help or hinder me in my goal to make the deadline. I saw everything as an interruption, a roadblock, or a distraction. And as the minutes passed, my emotional responses got bigger and bigger. 

2. Emotional acceptance: reducing vulnerability in order to increase your distress tolerance 

If self-awareness is being able to look honestly at ourselves and name what we’re seeing with clear eyes, then emotional acceptance is simply not casting judgments on what we find. 

Whenever I felt irritated or frustrated as my ability to work without interruption continued to be delayed, the emotions were almost always followed by guilt. I knew that the issues were just bad luck, just the circumstances being what they were, and not actually a series of targeted attacks designed to prevent me from meeting my deadlines. So I would feel the flare of annoyance or panic and then, almost simultaneously, scold myself for feeling them. 

This self-criticism for the natural emotional responses that I cannot control didn’t, shockingly, regulate my emotions. Instead, it only compounded the negative feelings, until instead of just a simple frustration, I was a tornado of feeling. 

“Self-criticism for the natural emotional responses that I cannot control didn’t, shockingly, regulate my emotions. Instead, it only compounded the negative feelings.”

So instead of casting judgment on the emotion, I could let the feeling come. We don’t need to roll out the red carpet for every feeling that we have, because we know they aren’t all going to stick around. So we can treat their arrival like a vaguely familiar acquaintance we might nod at in passing, then direct our attention elsewhere. 

One of the skills in Dialectical Behavior Therapy is to increase our tolerance for distress. It’s a crucial skill, because sometimes we aren’t able to control the external stressors in our life, and we have no choice but to endure them. If we can build our ability to tolerate them, however, we can reduce the emotional responses that we were previously judging ourselves for. 

So how do we increase our tolerance of distress? If we think of our distressed selves as being in a vulnerable state, then our next step would be to reduce the factors that are making us vulnerable to begin with. 

In my example, the primary points that made me vulnerable to distress were my work deadline and the loss of childcare. Addressing these might look like:

  • Reaching out to work to extend my deadline.
  • Calling my husband, parents, or another babysitter to get last-minute childcare.

There is a sneakier vulnerability at play here, however, which is slightly harder to reduce: I am a high achiever, and I struggle with feelings of failure when I don’t meet my own standards. Needing to push a deadline or having to rebuff my kid because I’m working are both scenarios where I am bound to feel like a failure. 

But sometimes we have to accept circumstances for what they are, and readjust. My daughter’s medical needs are always going to take priority, so I know whatever I have to drop in those moments is simply the cost of keeping her alive. I can accept “failing” at a deadline in those cases. 

“Sometimes we have to accept circumstances for what they are, and readjust.”

When her blood sugar is stable and the issue is simply that she’s looking for me to entertain her while I am unavailable, then the work here is in reducing my vulnerability to unrealistic standards of being a working mother. In other words: I have to increase my tolerance of being “good enough” sometimes. I have to expand my capacity for sometimes disappointing my daughter, without internalizing it as a sign that I am failing as a mother. 

Accepting the reality of the situation is the starting point: I have a deadline and I also have to care for my child. It is unlikely that I’m going to be able to work without interruption, so I will have to accept that the afternoon is going to be a bit dicey. I am probably going to be late with my work, and my kid might be frustrated that I can’t give her my full attention. 

It’s not ideal. But it’s okay. And sometimes that’s as much improvement as we can hope for.

3. Cognitive reappraisal: increasing positive emotions

This is the part that I love, because it feels like an actual superpower once you get good at it: Cognitive reappraisal is a regulation technique where you consciously reframe a situation in order to change your emotional response to it. 

There is a version of my example where I am a victim: My babysitter canceled, my daughter was difficult all afternoon, and I am a bad mother and employee because I can’t do anything right. 

“Cognitive reappraisal is a regulation technique where you consciously reframe a situation in order to change your emotional response to it.”

My emotions in response to this story would be as expected: frustrated, angry, and hurt. If I frame the entire afternoon around my inability to meet my deadline, I’m guaranteed to have a miserable outcome. 

What if I take a different approach? 

If I decide to accept that losing my babysitter means I’m going to miss my deadline, I won’t eliminate the stress of having to ask to extend it, but I will reduce the stress of trying to meet it under less than ideal circumstances. 

If I decide to accept that meeting my deadline will mean disappointing my daughter by not being fully available to play, then I have to reframe the afternoon to reduce the stress for us both. Maybe I set up a timer for mini dance breaks, or a reward system to incentivize her to play independently while I work. Then the focus isn’t on the interruptions and the frustration, but on both of our incremental steps toward our goals.

By the end of the day, I don’t want to feel like I’m being targeted by the universe. Instead, I can see that a bunch of dominoes fell, and by accepting the situation and reducing the pressures within my control, I prevented the rest of them from going down. In other words, I did the best that I could with the situation I was in. 

While it might not eliminate the anxiety or stress of the situation altogether, I can feel infinitely more positive about handling the challenges that came my way without succumbing to panic and despair. Which will only make me feel more capable and confident for the next time I find myself in this situation.

4. Distancing: gaining perspective to change feelings

In many ways, living in the present moment is a wonderful grounding tool for when the vastly overwhelming world we live in feels like too much. But sometimes we need to zoom out a bit to remember that some moments, while maybe stressful, are not actually emergencies. 

When my babysitter canceled, I could feel my cortisol levels spike. This is my brain at work, coding an event as “danger,” which then kicks my nervous system into an acute stress response. 

But here’s the thing: My body is mistaken. It is reacting to the news that I have to juggle work and childcare as if I had instead found myself standing in front of a wild bear. Facing a wild bear would likely be actual danger; a last minute babysitter cancellation on a random Tuesday is not. 

“Facing a wild bear would likely be actual danger; a last minute babysitter cancellation on a random Tuesday is not.”

I have to teach my brain how to downgrade this stressor from “danger” to “inconvenience.” I do this the same way I contextualize various experiences for my daughter: By naming the situation as what it is. 

Distancing self-talk is the practice of talking to yourself in the third person. I don’t always do this, but I will address myself directly, and I think it has similar results. So after the cancellation phone call, when my heart starts racing and I can feel my body heat begin to rise, I tell myself to breathe. “This is not an emergency,” I say. “You are safe.” 

Removing the first person from our self-talk can reduce the self-criticism that tends to sneak in when we’re in distress. Distancing self-talk can assist in breaking the patterns we might have baked in during tough experiences. Talking to ourselves the way we might a friend or a loved one can give us access to a more compassionate and measured perspective on the situation. 

“Well, it’s not ideal,” I might tell myself. “But it’s also not an emergency. You have done it before, and you will do it again.” After a few corrections, our brains eventually rewire, so that the automatic response to a babysitting cancellation is no longer “BEAR! BEAR! THERE’S A BEAR!”

If we can reduce the intensity of our emotions, we can make choices that align with our beliefs and goals — and not the fleeting alarm bells our brain accidentally sounds when it treats a scheduling conflict as a mortal threat.

Practice, not perfection

When I was growing up, I had a Mary Engelbreit print on my wall that said “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.”

(It should go without saying that this notion applies to non-threatening situations only!)

I’ve thought about this quote a lot over the years — sometimes only after realizing that I had, unconsciously, applied it to the distress or discomfort in my life. For the entirety of my twenties, for example, I had an extremely limited budget but a deep desire to flex my interior design skills. Couple that with a nonprofit office job with yellowing walls and bleak fluorescent lighting, and it felt like I was doomed to spend my waking hours trapped on the set of “Severence.” This would not do.

I had some extra lamps at home I liked, and a rug that didn’t fit my apartment. I thrifted some cool frames and hung photos. When there was money for flowers, I set them in a huge ceramic pitcher in the center of my desk. Before long, the grim, windowless office was warm and inviting, and I actually liked being there.

Somehow, I had absorbed the Mary Engelbreit quote into my subconscious, and now a windowless, cheap office hates to see my coming. It comforts me to know that even if there are some habits around emotion regulation we might have to unlearn from our own pasts, we are also able to pick up the good ones too.

“I believe that learning how to be a person is a process, and we are always learning.”

No matter how many times we may have shouted “Calm down!” at each other, we can always, always try again. I believe that learning how to be a person is a process, and we are always learning. We can expect good days and bad. The practice of learning is ongoing, ever-changing, and rarely ever perfect. But we get to keep trying.

Even if emotions come on fast and strong, the work is in remembering that the emotions are not in control of our choices. We are. And we are always able to take a step back, take a deep breath, and choose what we want to do next.

Stephanie H. Fallon is a Contributing Editor at The Good Trade. She is a writer originally from Houston, Texas and holds an MFA from the Jackson Center of Creative Writing at Hollins University. She lives with her family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and she is the author of Finishing Lines, where she writes about her fear of finishing, living a creative life, and (medical) motherhood. Since 2022, she has been reviewing sustainable home and lifestyle brands, fact-checking sustainability claims, and bringing her sharp editorial skills to every product review. Say hi on Instagram or on her website.