What is emotional regulation and why is it hard to learn?

What is emotional regulation?

Emotional regulation is the ability to influence which emotions you have, when you have them, and how you experience and express them. It involves both intrinsic processes (what you do inside your own head) and extrinsic processes (how your environment and other people shape your emotional responses), all in service of managing your emotions toward a goal¹.

The key word is influence. Regulation doesn't mean eliminating emotions or staying calm at all times. It means having some say over the intensity, duration and expression of what you feel, rather than being pulled along by every emotional current.

Why is it a learned skill, not a trait?

The clearest evidence that emotional regulation is learned comes from watching how it develops. A two-year study of 1,128 children and adolescents aged 9 to 15 found that use of expressive suppression — holding emotions in — decreased as participants got older¹. In other words, the strategies people use to manage emotions shift with age and experience.

This developmental pattern continues into adulthood. A review of lifespan research found a normative shift toward an increasingly healthy emotion regulation profile as people age, with increased use of reappraisal and decreased use of suppression². A purely innate trait wouldn't change so consistently over time.

Where does the skill come from?

Family context

Children learn emotional regulation through three main pathways in the family: observational learning (watching how parents handle their own emotions), direct parenting practices around emotion, and the broader emotional climate of the home — including attachment relationships and how openly feelings are expressed³.

This matters because it means regulation is shaped by family context rather than solely inherited³. If you grew up in a home with particular patterns of emotional expression, you may have learned those same patterns.

Brain development

Adolescence is a critical window. Brain regions involved in generating and regulating emotions, including the limbic system and prefrontal cortex, undergo protracted development during the teenage years⁴. This helps explain why adolescence is a time of increasing vulnerability to internalising and externalising psychopathologies associated with poor emotion regulation, including depression, anxiety and antisocial behaviour⁴.

An fMRI study comparing children (10–13), adolescents (14–17) and young adults (18–22) found linear age-related increases in activation in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex during reappraisal⁵. Adolescents showed relatively lower reactivity-related activation but higher reappraisal-related activation in regions associated with mental state attribution⁵.

The two strategies that matter most

Researchers studying emotional regulation often focus on two strategies from James Gross's process model¹:

• Cognitive reappraisal: changing how you think about a situation to change how it makes you feel. Reframing a stressful deadline as a challenge rather than a threat is reappraisal.
• Expressive suppression: changing how you respond behaviourally to an emotion — holding it in, keeping a neutral face, pushing the feeling down.

The evidence consistently favours reappraisal. Experimental findings show reappraisal has a healthier profile of short-term emotional, cognitive and social consequences than suppression². People who habitually use reappraisal also tend to report healthier patterns of mood, social functioning and wellbeing than those who rely on suppression².

Why is it hard to learn as an adult?

If you didn't learn flexible regulation strategies growing up, you're not starting from zero — but you are working against established patterns. The family context shapes emotion regulation³, and the brain systems that support reappraisal develop with age⁵.

There's also a measurement problem. Researchers themselves acknowledge conceptual and methodological challenges in studying emotion regulation, including the difficulty of separating the emotion itself from the attempt to regulate it⁶. This conceptual fuzziness means regulation can seem simpler than it is — a gap that self-help advice often fills with promises of quick willpower fixes, when the research points to a skill built over years.

What this means in practice

You can learn emotional regulation as an adult. The research on development shows a normative shift toward healthier regulation during adulthood, with increased use of reappraisal and decreased use of suppression².

A sensible starting point is to notice which strategy you default to. Do you tend to reframe situations, or do you tend to hold feelings in? Awareness of the pattern is the first step toward changing it. From the Unleashed Awareness Bank, one useful prompt is noticing when you reach for food, shopping or spending as a way to manage emotion rather than hunger or genuine need — a habit loop that reinforces itself over time.

If you want to build the awareness that underpins regulation, journaling is one practical route. Our piece on how to start a journaling habit that sticks covers the mechanics, and does tracking your mood actually help you understand it? looks at whether self-monitoring works.

A note on when to seek support

Difficulty regulating emotions is linked with a range of mental health conditions, including depression, borderline personality disorder, substance-use disorders and eating disorders⁷. If you find that intense emotions are consistently disrupting your work, relationships or sleep, speak to a GP or a qualified mental health professional. Regulation skills can be learned, but persistent difficulty is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a personal failing.