The science and strategy of regulating emotion

Engaging with emotions – whether our own or other people’s – can be a challenging and anxiety-producing task. My clients often ask me,

What can I do when my emotions get the best of me?

What should I do when someone gets emotional and stops acting rationally?

How do I de-escalate someone when their emotions run high?  

My answer: try labeling the emotion.

What is labeling?

Emotional labeling is the act of accurately identifying and naming an emotion. We can do this for ourselves and for others and help others to do it for themselves.

Here are questions I typically ask myself and others when I use labeling:

What am I feeling right now?

How can I describe what I’m feeling?

In a word or two, what are you feeling?

How would you label what you’re feeling?

 Here’s how it sounds when I label emotion for myself or others:

I feel like I have a knot in my stomach.

I’m disappointed and demotivated.

I sense you feel disregarded.

It sounds like you feel you’re carrying a burden.

Why labeling works

It’s really hard for us to process new information, make deliberate decisions, and problem solve when we’re overloaded with emotion. The reason for this rests in the anatomy of our brains.

Consider this: The limbic system is the part of our brain that assesses threat and reward, produces emotions that correspond to threat and reward, and triggers behaviors that help us avoid danger and increase reward. In contrast, the prefrontal cortex is where high level thinking processes like analysis, decision making, problem solving, and collaboration happen. These two key areas of the brain – often referred to as the unconscious brain and the conscious brain – compete for energy and attention; when one part is very active the other part automatically becomes less active.

What does this mean? It means the prefrontal cortex needs to be active and the limbic system needs to be quiet for people to think and act rationally. The act of labeling emotions is one way to achieve this.

Labeling emotions requires us to think critically about how we feel and find accurate language to describe it. This critical thinking and analysis happen in the prefrontal cortex. So, when people have the chance to label their emotions, their attention and energy in the brain naturally shifts from their limbic system to their prefrontal cortex, creating a more calm and rational state of mind. Pretty cool, right?

When to use labeling

Here are five common behaviors I see in the workplace, which signal that someone is probably in an aroused limbic state and may benefit from labeling:

1. An outburst of yelling directed at another person or group of people.
2. Acting highly defensive or aggressive toward someone.
3. Abruptly leaving a conversation by walking out, hanging up, or turning off their video or microphone.
4. Staying silent and maintaining an extremely controlled, unchanging facial expression.
5. Breaking down in tears.

These are self-protecting behaviors. I said earlier that the limbic system assesses threats in our environment and triggers behaviors that help us survive those threats. Most of us know those behaviors as fight, flight, and freeze responses. These are deeply hardwired, unconscious habits that have helped humans survive for thousands of years.

Although the threats we face have evolved over time, our hardwired reactions haven’t. This means that when we experience a threat to things like our reputation, relationships, autonomy, advancement, and sense of self, we’re hardwired to react in self-protecting ways – even when we know a more rational response would yield better results.

To be clear, I’m not excusing these types of self-protecting behaviors. And I’m definitely not suggesting that because the instinct to self-protect is hardwired, we can’t react differently. On the contrary, I believe understanding why we have these instinctual reactions gives us insight into how best to regulate them and build new – more productive – habits.

Top tips

Confession: When I first learned about labeling emotion, I was skeptical. I wondered: If I focus on emotions, won’t I continue to feed the part of the brain that generates emotion and starve the part that does the rational thinking? Wouldn’t it be better to just leave emotions alone?

What I learned is that how we label emotions matters. Research shows that speaking at length about an emotional experience and exploring the feelings associated with it does in fact drive energy and attention toward the limbic system and make people focus more on their emotions. We can avoid that effect by applying these four tips:

1. Label the emotion using one or two words. Don’t describe it in great detail.
2. Don’t evaluate or judge the emotion.
3. Don’t spend time exploring why the emotion exists.
4. Create emotional distance by using metaphor and metrics: “I feel like I’m running in circles.” “On a scale from 1 to 10, my anxiety is about a 6.”

I’ve been using emotional labeling as a coach, mediator, and trainer for more than ten years. It’s proven to be an invaluable tool for helping me regulate my own emotions and for helping others regulate theirs. I invite you to give it a try.