Emotion regulation is a skill that everyone has the power to harness. The essential goal or aim of this skill is to gain control over our negative emotions that are silently pulling us into the shadows of our unconscious minds. By refusing to acknowledge or confront our negative emotions, we will continue to be ruled by them. Our negative emotions can creep into our relationships, sabotage our social lives, and deny us the ability to experience genuine happiness. While we can’t entirely eliminate these emotions, we can dull their energies. Once we have successfully regulated our harmful emotions, we can make room for the positive ones.

Step one — Identify the emotion(s)

Some common negative emotions that we all experience include guilt, fear, and anger. Identifying them can be done by recalling an emotional experience from the past. The emotions can be connected to worries and anxiety about the future. They can also stem from the problems we are experiencing in the present. Our negative emotions can be connected to a thought or image in the mind, or a sensation in the body. Once we identify our negative emotions, we have already done much of the work.

Step two — Accept the emotion(s)

We are all human, so we all experience and harbor negative emotions. These emotions are like negative programming that we allow to run our lives. They are narratives we’ve created about ourselves and the world around us. We unconsciously give our negative emotions great power by feeding them with thoughts, stories, and destructive behaviors. We are not wrong or bad for having negative emotions.  Once we accept these emotions without judgement, we can work to regulate them.

Step three — Regulate the emotion(s)

 This step is all about letting go of the negative emotions so they don’t continue to control our lives. Emotional regulation can be done in many different ways. The combination of breathing and visualization techniques can be effective in this process. With deep breathing, you can visualize yourself inhaling the negative emotions through the nose and exhaling them out of the body through the mouth. You can visualize a part of the body where the emotion is felt. As you exhale, imagine the emotion leaving the identified part of the body. Breath work and visualization are a couple of ways we can regulate our negative emotions and make way for the positive.

Step four — Cultivate positive emotions

The harboring of negative emotions and the power we have given them, sometimes over the course of a lifetime, have blocked our receptivity to positive emotions like courage, joy, and love. Just as we all have the ability to experience negative emotions, we also have the capacity to experience positive ones. Once the negative emotions have been regulated and they have lost their vitality, room can be made for the emotions that allow us to live fulfilling lives.