”Regulate your emotions” can sound suspiciously like a more psychologically sophisticated way of saying “calm down”.
A child is angry: regulate.
Someone is overwhelmed: regulate.
A person cries, raises their voice, shuts down or struggles to continue with what is being asked of them: they need to regulate.
The language has become increasingly familiar in schools, parenting, therapy and online discussions about mental health, but somewhere along the way, emotional regulation can begin to sound as though the goal is simply to make difficult emotions disappear – or at least make them less visible to everyone else. That is not what psychologists mean by emotional regulation.
James Gross (1998), whose process model became one of the most influential frameworks in the field, described emotion regulation as the processes through which people influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how those emotions are experiences and expressed. Regulation can happen at several points: we might choose or change a situation, redirect our attention, change how we interpret what is happening, or influence how we respond once an emotion has already developed.
Crucially, none of that requires the emotion itself to be wrong.
Anger does not become dysregulation simply because it is uncomfortable to witness. Sadness does not need to be converted into happiness. Fear can be entirely appropriate when something feels threatening and somebody who remains visibly upset while choosing not to act in a harmful way may actually be regulating remarkably well.
Gratz and Roemer (2004) proposed an even broader understanding of healthy emotion regulation. Their model includes being aware of and understanding emotions, accepting them, remaining able to pursue valued or desired behaviour while distressed, and having access to strategies for managing emotional intensity when necessary. This changes the question considerably.
Instead of asking: “How quickly can this person become calm?”, we might ask: “Can this person experience what they are dealing without the emotion completely removing their ability to choose what happens next?”
Calmness can sometimes be the result of effective regulation, but lameness and regulation are not the same thing.
Regulation is not suppression
One of the easiest mistakes to make is to confuse emotional regulation with emotional suppression.
Suppression involves trying to inhibit the outward expression of an emotion once it is already happening: keeping the tears in, hiding the anger, controlling the expression on our face or making sure nobody else can see how distressed we feel. It can certainly change what an emotion looks like from the outside; but looking calmer does not necessarily mean feeling calmer.
Gross and John’s (2003) research distinguished expressive suppression from strategies such as cognitive reappraisal, where a person changes how they interpret a situation in ways that can alter its emotional impact. Habitual suppression has been associated with poorer social connection and wellbeing, while reappraisal tends to show a different and generally more adaptive pattern. This does not mean suppressing an emotional expression is always harmful – there are situations in which choosing not to express everything we feel is useful – but it does mean that emotional invisibility should not be mistaken for successful regulation. This distinction becomes particularly important when adults are supporting children.
A child who moves from shouting to silence may appear more regulated to the people around them. They may indeed have regulated, but they might also have shut down, stopped communicating, decided that expressing the emotion is unsafe, or simply learned what emotional presentation the adults around them prefer.
The Zones of Regulation, widely used in schools, provides an interesting example. The framework groups internal states into four colour coded Zones to help children develop language for recognising and responding to their emotions. Importantly, its own guidance states that all Zones are acceptable, that the Green Zone is not the goal, and that the framework should not be used as a behaviour-management or compliance system (Kuypers, 2011).
Yet there is an obvious risk when a framework designed to increase emotional awareness enters environments in which calm, compliant behaviour is highly valued. “Which Zone are you in?” Can become less of an invitation to notice an internal states into and more of an instruction to change it.
Red can quietly become bad.
Green can quickly become good.
Regulation can become another word for “present yourself in a way that is easier for the environment to manage.
That is not really a criticism of the principles of which Zones is based. In many ways, it is a criticism of what can happen when those principles are reduced to four colours without the psychological understanding underneath them.
There is also a reason to be cautious about how confidently any programme is described as evidence-based. A 2024 review by Mason, Leaf and Gerhardt concluded that, despite the widespread use of Zones of Regulation, the programme did not at that point meet established standards for an evidence-based practice. More recent implementation research has found that teachers can find it acceptable and useful, including for developing emotional language, but also that it is not suitable for every learner and often requires adaptation (Love et al. 2024). None of that means that colour-coded emotional language has no value. It means that the tool should remain a tool.
The goal of emotional regulation is not turn every Red, Yellow or Blue into a Green. It is to help somebody recognise what they are experiencing, understand what they may need, and retain or regain enough choice over what they do with the emotion.
Regulation is not always something we do alone
The word self-regulation can make emotional regulation sound like a completely individual task.
You feel something, you recognise it, you manage it, you return yourself to a state in which you can carry on; butt emotional regulation develops within relationships long before it becomes something we can reliably do by ourselves.
Developmental research has consistently emphasised the role of caregivers and other important adults in helping children learn how emotions work. Morris and colleagues (2007), reviewing research on the family context of emotional regulation, proposed that children develop regulation partly through observing other people, through the way adults respond to their emotions, and through the wider emotional climate in which they grow up. This process is often described as co-regulation.
A child becomes overwhelmed and an adult helps make sense of what is happening. They provide reassurance, reduce demands, name an emotion, model a strategy, offer physical or emotional safety, or simply remain present while the intensity passes. Over time, some of those externally supported processes can become increasingly available to the child themselves.
Research on social buffering provides another perspective on why this matters. Hostinar, Sullivan and Gunnar (2014) reviewed evidence showing that supportive social relationships can reduce psychological stress responses. Regulation is therefore not merely a matter of somebody deciding internally to become calmer; our nervous systems are responsive to the people and environments around us.
Thinking, then, about regulation language being used with children; telling an already overwhelmed child to “use your regulation strategies” may assume access to skills that become harder to retrieve precisely when distress is highest. Sometimes the most useful question is not: “Why aren’t they regulating themselves?”, but, “What can I change or provide that might make regulation more possible?”
Co-regulation does not mean that another person permanently regulated somebody’s emotions for them. Nor does it mean removing every source of frustration or preventing children from experiencing dfficult feelings. It means recognising that independence is usually built through supported experience. We do not teach emotional regulation simply by expecting somebody to demonstrate it. Sometimes we teach it by lending them enough of our own steadiness that, eventually, they can begin to find theirs.
Regulation is not compliance
Perhaps one of the most important distinctions is also one of the easiest to miss: A regulated person is not necessarily a compliant person.
Emotional regulation concerns how somebody experiences, responds to and works with an emotional state. Compliance concerns whether somebody does what is being asked of them. Sometimes the two happen together, sometimes they do not.
A child might say calmly, “No, I’m not doing that.”
They may understand the request, recognise that they are becoming frustrated, communicate their position without shouting or becoming aggressive, and remain able to think about what happens next. That may represent considerably more regulation than a child who immediately says yes while becoming increasingly distressed internally.
The difference matters because regulation is always taking place within a context. Ross Thompson (1994) argued that emotion regulation cannot be understood simply as controlling emotional arousal; it involves monitoring and modifying emotional reactions in ways that relate to a person’s goals and the demands of the situation. More recent work by Gross (2015) similarly emphasises that regulation strategies cannot easily be divided into universally “good” or “bad” approaches without considering what somebody is trying to achieve and the circumstances in which the strategy is being used. That makes regulation much harder to judge from the outside than it first appears.
A person leaving a room might be avoiding something they eventually need to face. Or leaving may be he most effective strategy available to them for preventing an escalating argument.
Someone asking for a demand to be postponed might be struggling to engage with something important. Or they may have recognised that they are reaching the limit of what they can manage and are making a deliberate choice to return to it later.
Even anger can be regulated without disappearing. Somebody can remain angry while deciding not to insult another person, taking time before responding, explaining what boundary has been crossed or choosing an appropriate way to challenge something they believe is unfair.
The goal is not therefore less emotion. Sometimes the goal is more choice while the emotion is present.
This has particular importance in settings where adults naturally have expectations that children need to meet. If “regulated” quietly becomes another word for quiet, agreeable and doing what has been asked, then emotional regulation has been confused with behavioural compliance.
A child can be calm and still disagree. They can be upset and still regulated. They can need a break without having failed and they can regulate successfully without producing the emotional state that is most convenient for everybody else.
Th environment can make regulation easier, or harder
It is tempting to talk about regulation as though it exists entirely inside the individual.
Someone is either regulated or dysregulated. They have good regulation skills or poor ones. they used their strategy or they did not. But emotions do not happen in a vacuum.
The same person may cope relatively well in one environment and struggle enormously in another. Noise, unpredictability, social pressure, competing demands, fatigue, perceived threat and the behaviour of other people can all change what somebody is being asked to regulate in the first place.
Research on regulatory flexibility is useful here. Bonanno and Burton (2013) challenged the assumption that particular regulation strategies are always helpful or always unhelpful. Instead, they argued that effective regulation involves sensitivity to context, having access to different strategies, and being able to adjust our response depending on feedback from the situation. This makes regulation partly a question of fit.
Taking five minutes alone might help somebody regulate after an argument but be less useful when what they actually need is reassurance from another person. Distracting ourselves might be helpful while waiting for something we cannot control, but less useful when a problem requires action. Expressing anger may damage one situation and be essential to asserting a boundary in another.
The strategy cannot be separated completely from the circumstances in which it is being used.
For children, the surrounding emotional environment matters too. Morris and colleagues (2007) argued that emotion regulation develops partly through the wider emotional climate around a child, including how emotions are modelled, responded to and expressed within relationships.
This raises an uncomfortable question when somebody is repeatedly described as struggling to regulate: Are we looking at what is happening inside the person, or are we also looking at what the environment keeps asking them to manage?
Sometimes developing regulation skills is absolutely necessary.Sometimes the room is too loud, the demand is unclear, the interaction had already become confrontational. Sometimes somebody is being expected to remain regulated in circumstances that would challenge most people’s ability to do so.
Changing an environment is not always possible, and emotional regulation cannot depend on everything around us being comfortable. Part of developing regulation is learning to navigate experiences we cannot completely control. But neither should every difficulty be located inside the individual. Supporting regulation can mean teaching skills, it can also mean asking whether we have made those skills unnecessarily diffficult to use.
Regulation can still look messy
One of the difficulties with emotional regulation is that successful regulation ones not always look particularly calm, polished or impressive from the outside. Someone may still cry, they may still need to leave the room, they may still be visibly angry, shake, speak less fluently than usual or need another person nearby while the intensity passes. The emotion does not have to disappear before regulation has taken place.
Gratz and Roemer’s (2004) model is useful here because it treats emotion regulation as involving several different capacities: awareness and understanding of emotion, acceptance of emotional experience, the ability to continue with goal-directed behaviour while distressed, control over impulsive behaviour and access to strategies that feel effective.
By that definition, somebody might be highly distressed and still demonstrate meaningful regulation.
A person who notices that they are becoming overwhelmed and asks for a break has identified an internal state and chosen a response. Someone who remains angry but decides not to send the message they know they will regret has regulated. A child who cannot yet explain exactly what they are feeling but seeks out a trusted adult rather than escalating further may also be using an emerging regulation strategy. None of these examples necessarily end with somebody looking completely calm and perhaps that is where our expectations sometimes become unrealistic.
We can begin to judge regulation by the appearance of the person afterwards rather than by the choices they were able to make during the emotion itself. The psychological goal is not emotional perfection. It is greater awareness, greater flexibility and, over time, greater access to responses that allow a person to experience difficult emotions without those emotions entirely determining what happens next.
Regulation is about choice, not emotional obedience
Emotional regulation is often treated as though success means retaining to calm as quickly as possible, but emotions are not behavioural problems to be eliminated.
They provide information. They signal threat, loss, injustice, uncertainty, connection and need. Regulation does not require us to stop feeling them. It asks us to become better able to notice them, understand them and decide what to do while they are present.
Sometimes that means changing the situation. Sometimes it means changing how we interpret it. Sometimes it means asking for help, leaving the room, setting a boundary, waiting before responding or simply allowing the emotion to exist without immediately acting on it and sometimes the most regulating thing an environment can do is stop demanding that somebody look calm before they are considered to be coping.
If emotional regulation is reduced to quiet behaviour, Green Zones and visible compliance, we risk teaching people to perform calmness rather than understand themselves. The goal should not be emotional obedience, It should be greater awareness, greater flexibility, and greater choice.
A person can be angry and regulated. They can be frightened and regulated. They can disagree, cry, need space, or ask for support and still be regulating successfully. Calmness can be useful but regulation is bigger than calm.
References & Further Reading
Bonanno, G. A., & Burton, C. L. (2013). Regulatory flexibility: An individual differences perspective on coping and emotion regulation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(6), 591–612.
Gratz, K. L., & Roemer, L. (2004). Multidimensional assessment of emotion regulation and dysregulation: Development, factor structure, and initial validation of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 26(1), 41–54.
Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271–299.
Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1–26.
Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362.
Hostinar, C. E., Sullivan, R. M., & Gunnar, M. R. (2014). Psychobiological mechanisms underlying the social buffering of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenocortical axis: A review of animal models and human studies across development. Psychological Bulletin, 140(1), 256–282.
Kuypers, L. M. (2011). The Zones of Regulation: A Curriculum Designed to Foster Self-Regulation and Emotional Control. Think Social Publishing.
Love, A. M. A., Gibbs, V., Roxburgh, D. G., Dorn, E. A., & Cai, R. Y. (2024). Implementing ‘The Zones of Regulation’ for autistic students: Teacher perceptions and practices. Australasian Journal of Special and Inclusive Education, 48(2), 79–89.
Mason, B. K., Leaf, J. B., & Gerhardt, P. F. (2024). A research review of the Zones of Regulation program. The Journal of Special Education, 57(4), 219–229.
Morris, A. S., Silk, J. S., Steinberg, L., Myers, S. S., & Robinson, L. R. (2007). The role of the family context in the development of emotion regulation. Social Development, 16(2), 361–388.
The Zones of Regulation. (2026). Unlearn to Relearn The Zones of Regulation. The Zones of Regulation.
Thompson, R. A. (1994). Emotion regulation: A theme in search of definition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 59(2–3), 25–52.
Leave a Reply