We all experience emotions all the time, so it’s only natural that, from time to time, we will need to be able to control them. This is where an emotional regulation strategy comes into play.

We experience both negative emotions and positive emotions throughout life, and that is natural and healthy. However, there are times when our emotions get the best of us – losing a loved one, being fired from a job, feeling nervous for a speech. In times like this, an emotional regulation strategy is a valuable skill to possess.

Neurofeedback training is one of the most effective ways of learning how to self-regulate emotionally and find light even in the darkest times.

What Is Emotional Regulation?

The capacity to assert power over your own emotional state is known as emotional regulation While there are various strategies to improve your emotional state, down-regulation, or lessening the strength of emotions, is a common strategy used to regulate emotions.

Some individuals are more adept than others at controlling their emotions. They may appear to be "born relaxed," but these people also feel negative emotions – they just have good coping mechanisms in place that let them control challenging emotions.

Effective Emotion Regulation Tips

We all start learning somewhere, and with these 3 tips in mind, you will find that building an emotional regulation strategy will be so much easier:

1. Pay Attention to Possible Somatization

When you are experiencing an intense emotional response to an event in your life, or as an effect of a mental health problem, these emotional reactions may transform into physical symptoms.

As defined by professionals, somatization is the susceptibility to feel psychological distress as physical symptoms and to seek medical attention for these manifestations, which may be brought on by and/or maintained by emotional reactions like worry and sadness.

When you are in tune with your body, and you listen to what it is trying to tell you, it is easier to understand how you feel and initiate emotion regulation processes.

2. Be Aware of Your Triggers

It is impossible to avoid all stressful and unpleasant situations, but in order to employ adaptive emotion regulation strategies and help diminish negative feelings, it’s important to know what triggers these intense feelings in the first place.

Neurofeedback training is one of the best ways to be in touch with your brain and what triggers it. By using neurofeedback technology to monitor brain waves and get real time feedback about how your brain reacts to different triggers, you can identify your pain points and start training your brain with the best emotional regulation strategy for you.

3. Give Weight to Positive Emotions

We tend to give more importance to negative emotions than we do to positive ones, thus giving them more power over us. If we learn to acknowledge where positivity lies and start giving it more value, we can place our focus on it and let go of the burden of negativity.

Neurofeedback training also helps us find what brings us happiness, just as it helps us find our negativity triggers, therefore making it easier for us to embrace it little by little.

Putting Self-Regulation Into Practice With Neurofeedback

According to professionals in emotion regulation research, neurofeedback appears to be a useful technique for improving emotion control, with the potential to even reduce symptoms in patients with different mental diseases over the long run.

Careful interpretations of the neurofeedback results is recommended, which is why it’s a good option to start training your brain to embrace the best emotional regulation strategy in-office at Beaverton Neurofeedback.

However, if that is not a viable option for you, getting your own equipment and training at home is possible with the NeurOptimal® System (NO3) – a fully automated equipment, just like the one used in the office, designed to easily be learned by everyone in under an hour.

Whether you choose to rent out your own equipment, or entrust Beaverton Neurofeedback to run your sessions, you are sure to significantly improve your emotional regulation skills and master emotional self-regulation in no time through professional brain training.