Emotion Regulation vs. Suppression: What’s the Difference?

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Emotional intelligence includes knowing how to manage emotions so they don’t overwhelm you. How you reach that goal makes a big difference to your health and happiness.

What are Emotion Regulation and Emotion Suppression?

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.

Emotion suppression is inhibiting or hiding your emotions. It can be a coping mechanism for dealing with emotional pain, but it comes with negative side effects.

Suppression Has Its Costs

Suppressing your emotions is an example of a costly regulation strategy.

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 comes with negative side effects. So does 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.”

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

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.

Emtional 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.