Emotion regulation is about eliminating negative emotions

The core goal of emotion regulation has never been to eliminate negative emotions, but to establish a healthy relationship with negative emotions, and ultimately achieve flexible control of one's own emotions.

I have been an emotion group leader in college for six years, and I have encountered too many people who come to me with the idea of ​​"delete all bad emotions." Last month, there was a junior boy who couldn't help but emo because he was reviewing for the postgraduate entrance examination. He sat in the consultation room and said to me with fists clenched, "It would be great if I could install a switch in my brain. With one click, I can turn off all these messy emotions, and I can concentrate on endorsements."

Don't tell me, there are really not a few people who have this idea. Even many novices who are new to emotion regulation will regard "no negative emotions" as a sign of advancement. However, both mainstream psychological research and practical experience have proven that this path is simply unworkable.

Freud, the ancestor of psychoanalysis, has long mentioned that repressed emotions never really disappear, they are just buried in the subconscious, and sooner or later they will burst out in a more twisted way. I have seen too many people who usually seem to have a "very good temper" suddenly collapse because of the smallest thing. The essence is that they have suppressed too much dissatisfaction and grievances before, and when the last straw fell, they exploded. It's interesting to say that many people complained to me before that those methods of regulating emotions are useless and they should be sad or sad after trying them for a long time. When I asked, they all came with the mentality of "I should stop being angry immediately after using this method." Will that work?

There is a core concept in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) called "cognitive fusion", which means that many times what makes you miserable is not the negative emotion itself at all, but your obsession with "I shouldn't have this emotion." For example, if you are nervous when you go on stage to give a speech, your nervousness will only make your palms sweaty and your heart beat faster, and it will not have that big an impact on your performance. However, if you keep scolding yourself, "Why am I so useless? I can't even control my nervousness," you will become more and more panicked, and eventually you will really forget your words. On the contrary, if you say to yourself, "Oh, I'm nervous now, it's normal, after all, there are so many people watching," then the nervousness will pass quickly.

Research in positive psychology can also support this view. Research conducted by Seligman's team shows that people with moderate negative emotions can judge reality about 25% more accurately than people who are completely optimistic. Appropriate anxiety will help you predict risks in advance, appropriate anger will help you guard your boundaries, and even appropriate sadness are proof that you are connected to important people and things - if you are not sad when you lose important people, how can you feel precious when you have them? I once met a friend who was an entrepreneur. He talked about "always being positive" every day. His partner reminded him that the project had risk control loopholes. He felt that the other party was too negative and dismissed it directly. In the end, the project exploded and he lost more than 2 million yuan. In turn, he told me, "I wish I had listened to a few more complaints."

When I lead a group to do exercises, I never ask everyone to "don't be angry" or "don't be sad." Instead, I will first play the "emotion naming" game. For example, if you feel uncomfortable now, don't push it away in a hurry, and carefully identify it. Is it the grievance of being misunderstood? Or the guilt of not achieving the goal? Or the anger of having a boundary violated? There used to be a girl who always said that she was "in a very bad mood recently and didn't want to do anything." After recording her emotions for a week, she discovered that 80% of her "bad mood" was her reluctance to fail in the postgraduate entrance examination, and the remaining 20% ​​was the guilt of fear of disappointing her parents. After finding the root cause, she didn't even think about getting rid of these emotions. Instead, she took that reluctance and turned around to apply for overseas schools. Now she has received offers.

Of course, some people will ask, I am so sad that I can’t eat or sleep normally, why don’t I get rid of it? I didn't say that you should carry it hard. The bottom line of emotional regulation is to prevent your emotions from causing harm to your normal life and to others. For example, if you are depressed to the point that you have a tendency to self-harm, you must seek professional intervention. You should take medicine and receive counseling. However, this is not to "eliminate" depression, but to adjust it to a range that you can bear, so that it does not block your normal life.

In the past two years, I helped an organization develop courses on emotion regulation. During the month after I caught up, I changed the courseware until early in the morning. I was so stressed that I wanted to curse people every day when I got up. At first, I tried to force myself to "stop being upset and work hard." As a result, the more I pushed, the lower my efficiency became. Later, I simply broke the pot and set aside 15 minutes every afternoon to kick up the tree in the small garden downstairs of the company (of course it is a very thick sycamore tree, which cannot be damaged by kicking) to kick out all the fire. After kicking, I came back and continued to make changes. Instead, I finished the work three days in advance. You see, I didn't get rid of the irritability, I just found a suitable outlet for it.

To be honest, the mood is very similar to the weather in your home. You can't ask for sunny days every day, right? When it rains, you hold an umbrella, and when the temperature cools down, you put on more clothes. If the sun really shines every day, the ground will crack. The same goes for emotional regulation. You don't have to think about deleting all rainy and snowy days. You just need to learn to read the weather forecast in advance and don't get soaked in the rain.

To put it bluntly, as human beings, we should have seven emotions and six desires, and taste all the ups and downs, and that is what we call living. If you really get rid of all negative emotions and are happy every day, what is the difference between that and the inflatable dolls in the amusement park that are always smiling?