Stress Management Emotion Regulation Summary

The essence of stress management and emotional regulation has never been to "eliminate negative emotions" or "maintain emotional stability throughout the process", but to find an emotional interaction model that suits your personal physique, personality, and life scenarios, so that stress becomes a controllable driving force rather than a flood that engulfs you.

To be honest, the biggest pitfall I have encountered before is treating emotional regulation as a "standard answer question". In 2022, I was responsible for the iterative launch of an internal tool. I only slept 4 hours a day for 27 consecutive days. During that time, I followed the popular online method of mindfulness meditation. During those 10 minutes, my mind was filled with to-do lists. The more I sat, the more irritated I became. In the end, I dropped the pen in my hand and was happy for half a minute. Later, after talking with a friend who was a clinical psychologist, I found out that at that time, I was in a state of high neurological arousal and was not suitable for static adjustment methods at all. I had to move first to use up the excess adrenaline. Later, I took 10 minutes every afternoon to run downstairs twice, sweat all over and then come back to sit down. On the contrary, I was able to calm down and change my plan.

There is very interesting data in the "China National Mental Health Development Report (2023-2024)": the stress perception rate of the 18-35 year old group exceeds 72%, of which nearly 60% of the respondents said that the emotion regulation methods they have tried are "completely useless." The essential reason is that everyone is copying other people's homework without considering the match between the method and their own. Interestingly, there is no unified standard answer to this matter in the psychology community. The logic of different schools is completely different. There is no superiority or inferiority, it just depends on whether it is suitable for you.

Researchers from the cognitive behavioral school will say that you must first adjust irrational beliefs. Many people's stress is not caused by the event itself at all, but is the shackles of obsessions such as "I must do everything perfectly" and "Others are better than me." This was the case for an intern I worked with before. Every time she submitted a plan, she had to revise it seven or eight times. Even if she had already reached the standard, she was still afraid of being scolded. Later, I accompanied her to change the idea of ​​"must be perfect" to "submit the passing version first, and then iteratively optimize it." Her insomnia was cured in half a month. This method is especially suitable for people who usually like to think and are more rational.

People in the emotion-focused school don't accept this. They believe that when emotions come, don't suppress them, let them flow out first. I have a friend who works in K12 teaching and training. Every year, the admissions season runs for three months. She is complained by parents every day and her boss presses her for performance. It is useless to ask her to sit there and adjust her beliefs. Her solution is to spend two hours a week to go to a deserted KTV, order a whole book of sad love songs and cry while singing. After crying, she goes out to eat a bowl of ice powder, and she can immediately go back to deal with customers with full blood. This method is especially effective for people who are accustomed to being "sensible" and "suppressing emotions". It is better than suppressing emotions and turning them into physical problems, and ending up with stomachaches and headaches every day without being able to find out the cause.

There are also researchers in the field of neuroscience who are more direct, saying that emotions are essentially fluctuations of hormones and neurotransmitters. How can there be so many twists and turns? Spend 10 minutes in the sun to replenish some vitamin D, eat something sweet to increase serotonin, run for 20 minutes to secrete some endorphins, and your mood will naturally calm down. This is a universal method that can be used by people of all personalities.

Oh, by the way, the saying that "emotional stability is the best match for adults" that is very popular on the Internet is actually very controversial. Workplace bloggers will tell you that "people with unstable emotions cannot achieve great things", and clinical psychologists will jump out and say that "forcing oneself to be emotionally stable for a long time is the most dangerous self-harm behavior". In fact, both statements are correct, and neither is correct. Of course you can't lose your temper casually when you're dealing with a client, but if you go home and close the door and hold it in for a long time, something will definitely go wrong. The core is "adjustment based on the situation," rather than requiring you to have zero mood swings throughout the process. When I was working on a project a while ago, I put a stress reliever in the office. If I got annoyed by a demand change, I would hold it for two minutes. My colleagues were not surprised, and no one said I was emotionally unstable.

To take the most common example, if you have sudden acute anxiety, such as about to go on stage to give a speech or have an interview, and your hands are shaking and your heart is beating so fast, don't engage in slow meditation to adjust your beliefs, just use the "5-4-3-2-1 grounding method": Say 5 There are 3 things you can see in front of you, 4 things you can touch now, 3 sounds you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 taste you can taste. The whole process takes less than 1 minute and can immediately bring you back to reality from an anxious fugue state. The last time I went to an industry summit to share, I was so nervous while waiting that I relied on this method to stabilize myself. In my own test, it was more effective than drinking three cans of Red Bull.

If it is long-term chronic stress, such as being busy with projects for several months or being under pressure to prepare for exams, you don’t have to sign up for mindfulness classes or psychological counseling. Just leave yourself a 10-minute “emotional safety exit” without being too high-spirited. The Internet operation girl downstairs buys two skewers of sausages from a roadside stall every day after get off work. She eats them while standing and then goes upstairs. During those 10 minutes, she doesn’t read work news and doesn’t want to do anything, so she just concentrates on eating the sausages. She says this is more effective than any kind of psychological therapy. I keep a lemon candy in my bag all year round. When I'm stressed, I bite it and it's so sour that I immediately regain my senses.

Of course, not all stress needs to be dealt with. Every time I write an important plan, I will be a little anxious. This anxiety will force me to go through all possible loopholes. Last time, it was this kind of nervousness that allowed me to detect budget errors in the plan in advance and avoid subsequent losses of hundreds of thousands. You see, negative emotions are not always the enemy. Sometimes they come to report to you. You don’t have to feel like you are facing a formidable enemy as soon as you feel stressed.

After all, emotions are your own, and your comfort with them is more important than any standardized scientific method. Now I don’t force myself to follow any method. Sometimes when I feel stressed, I squat downstairs and feed stray cats for 10 minutes. Sometimes I go to the supermarket to squeeze the instant noodles I bought, and I just enjoy it as much as I want. After all, the purpose of our emotional regulation is to make ourselves live more comfortably, not to put another layer of shackles on ourselves that "must be scientifically regulated", right?