Emotion Regulation: Top 10 Neuroscience-Backed Tools | Ethan Kross & Emma Seppälä

1. Understand Emotion’s Utility

Recognize that all emotions, including anxiety and anger, serve an adaptive purpose when proportional, helping you prepare or address injustices. This understanding can normalize difficult feelings and reduce self-judgment.

2. Cultivate Self-Compassion

Replace self-criticism with a self-compassionate stance, treating yourself as you would a friend during mistakes. This approach fosters resilience, improves mental and physical health, and strengthens relationships, unlike self-criticism which increases anxiety and depression.

3. Use Distance Self-Talk

When processing difficult experiences, use third-person self-talk (e.g., “Dan, you’re okay”) or the “generic you” (e.g., “you live, you learn”) to create a coaching perspective. This linguistic shift helps universalize your experience and fosters self-compassion.

4. Avoid Chronic Emotion Suppression

Stop chronically suppressing emotions, as this intensifies physiological responses, makes emotions stronger, and can lead to unhealthy outbursts or physical ailments. Suppression also negatively impacts relationships by signaling inauthenticity.

5. Allow Emotions to Process

Instead of suppressing, practice distress tolerance by allowing emotions to move through you fully, recognizing that most feelings have a natural time course and will eventually fade. Use mental time travel to gain perspective and hope that circumstances will improve.

6. Leverage Supportive Relationships

Lean on positive social relationships, conducting an “emotional advisor audit” to identify those who first empathize and validate your feelings, then help you reframe and gain perspective. Prioritize these connections and educate your network on effective support.

7. Tend Your Information Inputs

Be deliberate and sovereign about your daily inputs, consciously choosing what you watch, read, and listen to, especially at the start and end of your day. Regular meditation can enhance the awareness needed to make these choices and avoid unwanted emotional states.

8. Regulate with Breathing

When intense emotions overwhelm cognitive strategies, use breathing exercises to quickly down-regulate your nervous system. A simple technique is to inhale for a count of four and exhale for a longer count of six or eight to activate the parasympathetic system.

9. Shift State with Senses

Consciously leverage your senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste) as powerful levers to quickly shift your emotional state. For example, listen to music congruent with your desired mood or use specific scents to influence how you feel.

10. Employ Strategic Avoidance

Temporarily divert your attention from bothersome issues, then return to them later, as this can be a useful tactic when direct engagement is unproductive. This strategic avoidance allows you to approach the situation with a fresh, more effective perspective.

11. Help Others for Self-Benefit

Engage in altruism and help others, as this profoundly benefits your own psychological well-being, physical health, and even longevity. Showing up for others can energize and uplift you, even when you’re feeling stressed.

12. Reframe Challenging Situations

Reframe challenging situations to alter your perspective and calm intense emotions, as this cognitive strategy can reduce emotional intensity at both brain and physiological levels. This works well when emotions are not extremely strong.