Emotional Self-Regulation
Emotional Self-Regulation or regulation of emotion is the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of life experiences with the range of emotions in a balanced manner that is spiritually healthy and supportive for the individual, the purpose is to reduce or eliminate self harming behaviors as a result of a lack of Impulse Control. Emotional Self-Regulation is directly related to increasing ones Emotional Competence and Coherence.
It can also be defined as extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions. Emotion self-regulation belongs to the broader set of emotion-regulation processes, which includes the regulation of one's own feelings and the regulation of perception over other people's feelings.
Emotional regulation is a complex process that involves initiating, inhibiting, or modulating one's state or behavior in a given situation – for example the subjective experience (feelings), cognitive responses (thoughts), emotion-related physiological responses (for example heart rate or hormonal activity), and emotion-related behavior (bodily actions or expressions). Functionally, emotional regulation can also refer to processes such as the tendency to focus one's attention to a task and the ability to suppress harmful or destructive behavior under the instruction of ones personal choice to do so. Emotional regulation is a highly significant function in human life.
Every day, people are continually exposed to a wide variety of potentially arousing stimuli. Harmful, extreme or unchecked emotional reactions to such stimuli could impede levels of function within society; therefore, people must engage in some form of emotion regulation almost all of the time. Generally speaking, emotional dysregulation has been defined as difficulties in controlling the influence of emotional arousal on the negative qualities of thoughts, actions, and interactions. Individuals who are emotionally dysregulated exhibit patterns of responding in which there is a mismatch between their goals, responses, and/or modes of expression, and the demands of the social environment. Generally, this can be explained through the conditioning of Cognitive Dissonance which interferes and mismatches emotional and mental signaling. For example, there is a significant association between emotion dysregulation and symptoms of depression, anxiety, eating pathology, and substance abuse. Higher levels of emotion regulation are likely to be related to both high levels of coherence, competence and the expression of more harmonized and authentic emotions. [1]
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