Emotional regulation involves using breathwork and meditation to balance your nervous system. By engaging the parasympathetic response, you can process emotions without suppression, building resilience and long-term mental clarity.
Key takeaways
- Emotional regulation skills engage the parasympathetic nervous system.
- True regulation requires feeling and processing emotions rather than bottling them up.
- Developing emotional awareness requires daily habits, such as breathwork and body awareness, to build resilient neural pathways over time.
When you’re easily stressed or overwhelmed, it’s easy to feel like the only way you can get through the day is to push down everything you’re feeling. But bottling up your emotions isn’t the same as emotional control. Suppressing your emotions creates emotional debt that allows suppressed feelings to get trapped in your body, eventually leading to a hypersensitive nervous system.
Ignoring your emotions doesn’t make them go away. But meditation and breathwork techniques can help you build emotional regulation skills so you can process your emotions without draining your nervous system. See how Open’s science-backed self-regulation practices can expand your capacity to tolerate and recover from stress.
What Does Emotional Regulation Mean for Your Nervous System?
Emotional dysregulation shows up in many ways, like relentless productivity, numbing your feelings with endless scrolling, and experiencing oversized emotional reactions to relatively minor triggers. Anything you can do to avoid sitting with your emotions and truly feeling them, inadvertently keeping your nervous system on edge, is a sign that the stress cycle is incomplete.
For your nervous system, emotional regulation provides the space to process emotions and adapt to strong feelings without becoming trapped in a fight-or-flight response. A regulated nervous system response means there is a balance between your rational brain and your emotional brain, allowing you to choose responses rather than react to pure emotions. Emotional regulation skills engage the parasympathetic nervous system, signaling safety to your body and allowing your brain’s command center to lead again.
How Does Your Prefrontal Cortex Manage Your Emotions?
The prefrontal cortex is the command center for your brain, responsible for executive control, planning, and reasoning. But when your amygdala triggers a stress response in your nervous system, the prefrontal cortex takes a back seat, making clear, rational thought almost impossible. This is precisely why it’s not possible to think your way out of panic or anxiety.
When your nervous system is balanced, the prefrontal cortex manages emotions through top-down processing. A well-regulated system takes the trigger from the amygdala, then lets the prefrontal cortex evaluate the emotional context and send signals to control the nervous system's response, without suppressing the underlying emotion.
Can Breathwork and Meditation Truly Build Emotional Awareness?
Meditation and breathwork are scientifically-proven practices that build emotional awareness and support emotional self-regulation. Where breathwork actively stimulates the vagus nerve to alter physiological responses and calm the amygdala, meditation is a passive practice that builds the capacity to sit with discomfort and observe your emotions.
Combining these techniques allows you to quickly resolve physiological responses to strong emotions and process them without trying to suppress them, increasing your emotional intelligence and awareness with consistent practice.
What Daily Habits Support Learning How to Control Your Emotions?
Emotional control requires consistent practice to maintain mental and physiological resilience. Practicing body awareness helps you recognize your body’s response to intense emotions so you can label your feelings, observe them, and move on. Daily habits that support emotional regulation skills developed during meditation and breathwork practice include:
- Sleeping 8 hours a night
- Eating and drinking enough water to fuel your body
- Avoiding excessive sugar or caffeine, especially late in the day
- Moving your body for 20 minutes to release endorphins
- Acknowledging your feelings when they happen
- Five-minute breathwork practice
- Journaling your feelings and experiences
Combining daily habits with meditation and breathwork practice provides a strong foundation for long-term emotional regulation.
Co-Regulation vs Self-Regulation: Which Is Better?
Mastering mindful emotional intelligence is easier for some than others. While self-regulation, a closed loop where you can recognize a stress response and practice techniques to calm your nervous system, is the goal, some people struggle with the practice. For beginners and people who have highly reactive nervous systems, co-regulation may be a more accessible starting point. Co-regulation and self-regulation each serve a purpose in your journey as you develop the skills for emotional control, so neither is better than the other.
Emotional Regulation FAQs
What are the best digital classes for building long-term emotional regulation and resilience?
Open’s digital catalog has dozens of meditation and breathwork practices to build mindfulness, stress resiliency, and long-term emotional regulation, such as:
Open’s movement classes also provide a great way to expand your nervous system's capacity. Popular flows, such as Tension Release and Slow Stretch to Ground, encourage parasympathetic activation, supporting emotional regulation along with physical stress release.
Is emotional regulation the same thing as controlling my emotions?
No. Emotional regulation doesn’t mean you are pushing your feelings away or “getting over” what you’re feeling. Emotional regulation is a skill you gradually build to help you identify your emotions, stay present with them, understand how emotions translate into physical energy, and choose to respond to stress rather than react impulsively.
What is “co-regulation,” and can I do it alone?
Co-regulation is the process of using another person’s nervous system to stabilize your own. Think of it as a way to deliberately mirror another person’s energy to anchor your own emotional state. While this can often happen subconsciously with people you are close to, you can also co-regulate through guided practice, either in person or on a digital mindfulness platform like Open.
How to practice emotional regulation while working in a high-stress environment?
A five-minute emotional regulation practice at your desk, such as Emotional Regulation, gives you the space to anchor your emotions and control your stress response so you can get through the rest of the day without being overwhelmed by your nervous system.
Hold Space for What You’re Feeling
Emotional regulation isn’t a one-and-done fix for all of the emotions you’ve been suppressing. Effective emotional regulation skills need practice for long-term emotional control. Similarly to training your body to increase mobility or endurance, developing emotional awareness and forming resilient neural pathways requires consistency.
Create emotional regulation skills and stress resilience through science-backed meditation and breathwork practices at Open in LA. Join a class today.
Author Bio
Through mindfulness & meditation, our co-founder Manoj, has helped thousands of people around the world trade mania for pause, so that they may live fearlessly in honour of a happier and more meaningful life. He is a proud father, writer, lululemon global ambassador and founder of Australia’s first drop-in meditation studio. Whether he’s teaching through words or the silence in between them, Manoj’s great love for Buddhist wisdom and contemporary science is present in every encounter.