Emotional Regulation, Dysregulation & Suppression: What’s the Difference?

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Emotional intelligence includes knowing how to manage emotions so they don’t overwhelm you.

Three major concepts often talked about in discussions of emotional intelligence are emotional regulation, dysregulation, and suppression.

Which path a person is on can make a big difference in self-esteem, happiness, relationship and work success, and even physical health.

Let’s look at how these ways of dealing with emotions relate to each other. (I’ll also point you toward a step-by-step guide for improving your emotion regulation skills.)

What is Emotion Regulation?

Emotion regulation is the ability to control the intensity and duration of emotions and manage your behavioral response. It has been identified as a key emotional intelligence skill. It allows you to use your emotions as a source of information to make your life better.

What is Emotional Dysregulation?

With emotional dysregulation, emotions are all over the place. They can flash on and get stuck on. They can take control and create havoc in your life.

You can think of it as emotional mismanagement.

Dysregulation can look like:

Overreacting to minor stressors
Struggling to calm down once upset
Feeling emotionally flooded or easily triggered
Reacting impulsively when angry, hurt, or stressed
Swinging between emotional overwhelm and shutdown

Emotional dysregulation creates collateral damage. It can strain relationships, cloud judgment, increase stress, and leave a person caught in cycles of overwhelm and regret.

What is Emotion Suppression?

Emotion suppression is inhibiting or hiding your emotions. It can be a coping mechanism for dealing with emotional pain, but many people don’t realize it can come with negative side effects, especially if used as their main system for dealing with emotions.

People may be drawn to alcohol or drugs to suppress emotions, or seek distraction through compulsive attachment to just about any activity — gaming, gambling, exercise, plastic surgery, and other forms of escape.

Numbing Out Isn't Selective

One common form of suppression is going numb: emotionally checking out to avoid discomfort.

Engaging the coping technique of numbing out decreases the pain you feel but also decreases the potential for feeling normal levels of happiness.

You can’t numb out the pain without numbing out the joy.

You’re left feeling blah or drawn to activities that provide a spike of feel-good hormones that break through the numbing.

Why People Suppress Their Emotions

People may consciously choose to suppress their emotions for a variety of reasons.

Sometimes, emotion suppression is a subconscious default setting trained into them a long time ago that continues to exert control even though the reasons for engaging the mechanism are no longer present.

Reasons people suppress “negative” or “positive” emotions in unhealthy ways include:

Emotional suppression modeled by parents or authority figures
Cultural or gender role expectations
Overvaluing stoicism
Trauma, childhood abuse, bullying, combat, or emotionally demanding professions
Having paid a price for expressing pain or happiness in the past
Fear of vulnerability, rejection, conflict, or appearing weak
Lacking skills or confidence to manage emotional discomfort
Feeling undeserving of happiness

Emotional Suppression Has Its Costs

Whether suppression takes the form of emotional shutdown, numbing, or distraction, relying on it too heavily comes at a cost.

In the short term, suppression can be useful. It can help you win a hand of poker, get through a challenging meeting, or run into a burning building to save a child.

But long-term suppression takes a toll on your physical health, mental well-being, and relationships.

Suppression of painful emotions can have negative side effects. So can the suppression of feel-good emotions.

With emotion suppression, you are missing out on using emotions. You’re thwarting emotions’ ability to do their job — which is to provide you with information to make your life better.

Suppressed pain doesn’t go away. It gets stored, increasing your stress load, and can show up as:

Depression
Irritability or anger
Emotional overreactions
A general sense of emotional shutdown

Suppressing feel-good emotions results in missed happiness opportunities.

American professors West, Fitzsimmons, and Panter put it this way:

“Suppressing positive emotions was associated with decreased positive emotion, self-esteem, and psychological adjustment, and increased negative emotions.”

Better Ways to Regulate Emotions

Emotion regulation isn’t about “getting rid of” feelings.

It ideally uses a two-pronged approach:

Down-regulating uncomfortable or painful emotions
Up-regulating feel-good emotions

No matter where you are now, those are skills that can be learned.

Emotional Intelligence Step-by-Step Guide

My emotional intelligence workbook, Building Skills to Uplevel Life, includes proven strategies for down-regulating emotional pain and discomfort in healthy ways, along with research-based Positive Psychology strategies for up-regulating feel-good emotions.