Outward calm doesn’t always reflect inward peace. A healthy sense of emotional calm is tied to a nervous system flexible enough to tolerate stress and return to equanimity, and with that comes mood regulation that accurately reflects your mental state. If a sense of calm is manufactured by bottling up emotions instead of processing them, it will be reflected in your nervous system.

What is the difference between keeping your cool and suppressing your emotions? Learn about the key differences between true calm and artificial calm, how to control your emotions through breathwork, and how Open’s mindfulness app can support your emotional regulation skills. 

What Is the Difference Between Emotional Regulation and Emotional Suppression?

Emotional suppression and emotional regulation are opposite sides of the same coin. Emotional regulation uses cognitive skills to identify and process emotions, understand their causes, and manage your response to stress by changing your perception of a situation. 

Emotional suppression is a defense mechanism that involves consciously or subconsciously pushing emotions down by avoiding or ignoring them, which keeps your body’s stress response high even when outward emotional expression is muted. 

Regulation: 

• Noticing anger, fear, or sadness in the moment, then pausing to label your feelings and process them.
• Recognizing your emotions and calmly expressing your needs or thoughts, without acting on impulse. 

Suppression:

• Saying “I’m fine” when you are feeling frustrated or sad
• Avoiding your emotions by overworking or scrolling on social media
• Building silent resentment toward a situation, which may result in impulsive emotional reactions later on. 

When you suppress your emotions instead of regulating them, your nervous system becomes tapped into a continuous state of low-grade fight-or-flight. As the stress cycle remains incomplete, stress and tension in your nervous system can manifest as physical symptoms such as chronic fatigue, shallow breathing, low heart rate variability, or high blood pressure. Over time, this makes it more difficult to recover from daily stressors. 

What Are the Benefits of Emotional Control?

Emotional regulation benefits mental and physical health, interpersonal relationships, and cognition. Increasing your emotional resilience allows your nervous system to recover from negative experiences or stress more quickly, which can improve quality of life and life satisfaction. The key benefits include:

• Improved mental health: Emotional self-regulation prevents low moods and anxiety associated with suppressed emotions. 
• Better physical health: Mood regulation reduces physical symptoms of chronic stress, decreasing the risk of high blood pressure and improving immune system response. 
• Stronger interpersonal relationships: Controlling emotional outbursts encourages peaceful interactions and constructive communication. 
• Enhanced decision-making: Pausing before reacting allows the prefrontal cortex to process situations and prevents impulsive decisions. 

How Does Your Nervous System’s Window of Tolerance Determine Your Emotional State?

Your window of tolerance is an optimal zone that allows you to function through daily stressors and adapt to challenging situations without reacting on pure emotions. Your exact window of tolerance is not fixed. Factors like sleep, physical health, trauma history, and daily stress levels can influence how much or little the window is open. When your nervous system is within this optimal zone, your prefrontal cortex is balanced with the emotional centers of your brain, allowing you to process emotions and respond to situations.

If your nervous system falls below the lower limit of this optimal window, the parasympathetic nervous system overcompensates with hyperarousal, freezing or shutting down emotional processing. This can lead to feelings of emotional numbness or feeling detached from your surroundings. 

Exceeding the upper limit of the window of tolerance leads to a state of hyperarousal, or fight-or-flight. In this state, your sympathetic nervous system may overcompensate by perceiving threats everywhere, making rational decision-making very difficult. It’s common to feel anxiety, panic, or anger in this hypervigilant state. 

Why Does Naming What You Feel Shift Your Emotional State?

Naming your emotional state is a mindfulness technique that taps directly into your cognition. By naming the emotions you feel, your brain activity moves away from the fear center and toward the prefrontal cortex, creating space for you to process your emotions. Mindfully recognizing your emotions turns nebulous, overwhelming feelings in the nervous system into something manageable. 

Can Intentional Breathwork Be the Physiological Key to Calm?

Breathwork can improve mood regulation on a biological level by directly impacting your autonomic nervous system. Slow, deep, rhythmic breathing from the diaphragm synchronizes your heart and breathing rate, gradually increasing your heart rate variability and building long-term emotional resilience. 

Breathwork is a physiological key to unlocking the benefits of the brain-body connection. Deep breathing stimulates the vagus nerve, directly signaling safety to your brain; the extended exhales stabilize blood gases by reducing carbon dioxide; then slow breathing patterns promote alpha brain wave activity. Practices to get you started include:

• Box Breath
• Pause
• Sigh High

When Is It Time to Move Beyond Self-Guided Practice?

Self-guided breathing practices for mood regulation are an excellent way to reduce stress and learn how to control your emotions. However, feelings of persistent overwhelm, stress, or other emotions that negatively affect your relationships, work, and daily life are signs that professional support may be needed. Balancing self-guided practice with talk therapy can encourage healthy coping mechanisms, deeper emotional release, and trauma processing so you can expand your window of tolerance and your capacity to return to a calm state after stress. 

Emotional Regulation Skills: FAQs

Why do I feel so emotionally overwhelmed during a busy workday?

Feeling emotionally overwhelmed in the middle of the day means your nervous system has shifted into a fight-flight-freeze state, stalling your ability to regulate emotions, make rational choices, or process information. Cognitive overload, such as switching between multiple cognitive tasks, and decision fatigue are common causes of workday emotional overwhelm. Feeling pressure to be productive, carrying invisible pressures like a fear of disappointing others or a desire for perfectionism, and performing emotional labor to stay professional can also trigger hyperarousal in the nervous system. 

How can I start regulating my emotions in the middle of the workday?

Whether you’re in the grip of workday panic or you need to settle after a stressful meeting, you can begin self-regulation practice by engaging in three to five minutes of breathwork. Practices like extended exhales and box breathing activate the parasympathetic nervous system, lower cortisol levels, and expand your nervous system’s window of tolerance, so you can respond to stress with clarity rather than reactivity. 

Why are in-person and digital breathwork classes for stress relief in LA helpful?

Both in-person and digital breathwork classes are effective for stress regulation because breathing practices support a deliberate shift toward a parasympathetic state. In-person breathwork sessions at Open put you in a community environment where you can draw on collective energy and feel more motivated. Open’s digital classes offer high accessibility and flexibility, so you can practice on your own time. 

How do I choose between digital classes and in-person sessions for stress relief?

Choosing your class format depends on your schedule, comfort level, and sometimes experience level. In-person classes for guided breathwork practice are beneficial for beginners or for people seeking significant stress reduction through trauma-informed breathwork. People with intermediate experience or who feel more comfortable in a solitary environment may benefit from digital classes that they can take at their own pace. 

Your breathwork format may also depend on what your nervous system needs. Digital classes can be taken on demand at any time of day, allowing you to reset your nervous system at home or between meetings. In-person classes provide a shared space with community connection that deepens somatic practice through collective focus. 

Deep Breathing Opens the Door for Mood Regulation

Building skills in emotional control benefits your mental and physical health, your interpersonal relationships, and your overall life satisfaction. Open’s in-person and digital courses show how to calm intense emotions without suppressing them using breathwork and other mindfulness techniques. 

Practice emotional regulation skills through intentional daily mindfulness and movement practices at Open in LA or by downloading the Open app.