I'm A Brain Researcher & This Mental Skill Can *Majorly* Improve Your Life
The best news? It's trainable.
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Image by LensCrafters / Contributor March 31, 2026 We carefully vet all products and services featured on mindbodygreen using our Our selections are never influenced by the commissions earned from our links. Researchers and clinicians define emotional self-regulation as the ability to monitor, assess, and modify your own emotions. Your ability to modify your own emotions1—how intensely you feel something, the variety of feelings you experience, how long you feel particular emotions—is partly conscious, partly subconscious. Self-control and willpower are related concepts, too. When you meet a person with strong emotional self-regulation, they may be full of contradictions. They may experience a broad range of emotions but also demonstrate incredible mastery and flexibility2 in how and when they express them. Emotional self-regulation doesn't mean being stone-cold.
The emotionally self-regulated person possesses two defining characteristics:
The benefits of emotional self-regulation
For instance, if you were in the final push preparing for a meeting with a client but you noticed that you were feeling stressed and couldn't concentrate, you might realize that, paradoxically, slogging on might waste more time than taking a break. You might get up, take a quick walk around the block, and then come back with renewed focus.
In the relationship category, emotional self-regulation reaps huge rewards. Being able to manage your own emotions provides a major benefit because you don't, for example, accidentally start fights by snapping at your partner when they ask an innocent question unrelated to the source of your stress.
How to develop it
Emotional self-regulation seems to take practice and time4. In study after study, older adults outperform younger adults and children at emotional self-regulation. Relatedly, they also report higher amounts of positive moods5 and lower amounts of negative moods. So what skills have they developed?
There are four main steps involved in effectively managing an emotionally charged situation. Successful emotional regulation involves recognizing each step as it happens and making mindful choices at each point:
People with high emotional self-regulation are able to navigate situations more successfully than those who don't recognize or handle each step as carefully.
In the "Response" step, people high in emotional regulation seem to operate in a handful of ways. Here are a few examples:
Adapted from an excerpt from SMARTER TOMORROW. Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth R. Ricker. Used with permission of Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.
