Emotional regulation refers to the capacity to influence which emotions you have, when you have them, and how you experience and express them. It does not mean eliminating or suppressing emotions, it means having agency in how emotions move through you rather than being controlled by them.
Emotional regulation develops through early co-regulation with caregivers, the process by which a calm, regulated adult nervous system helps a child's nervous system learn to return to baseline after activation. People who did not have consistent access to co-regulation often developed less robust self-regulation capacities.
Common emotional regulation strategies include cognitive reappraisal (changing how you think about a situation), attention deployment (directing attention toward or away from emotional stimuli), and response modulation (changing physiological, behavioral, or experiential aspects of emotional response).
Suppression, the attempt to prevent emotional expression, is associated with worse outcomes than other regulation strategies. Suppression maintains the physiological state while preventing expression, producing internal costs without the relief of expression.
Building emotional regulation capacity typically involves increasing the window of tolerance, the range of emotional intensity within which a person can remain present and functional. Practices that support this include mindfulness, somatic therapies, and consistent therapeutic relationships.