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Emotional regulation · also called affect regulation

how to stop overreacting

Emotional regulation is influencing which emotions you have, when you have them, and how you express them. It does not mean suppression: suppressing an emotion reliably increases its physiological cost while reducing none of its intensity.

What to do about it

Name the emotion in one word. Naming reduces its intensity measurably.

Books that work on this

Each is a 90-day programme. Start with the first — later books assume the work in the earlier ones.

Part of the Nervous System series.

How people say it

Nobody looks this up by its clinical name. These are the ways it actually gets said.

  • I cannot control my emotions
  • how to stop overreacting
  • I explode then feel awful
  • bottling everything up
  • managing anger in the moment
  • I go from zero to a hundred
  • how do I calm down fast
  • why do small things set me off

Written by Brian Spiker, who has run Spiker Carpet and Tile Care since 2013 — the receipts. More terms in the encyclopedia.

About the author

Brian Spiker has run Spiker Carpet and Tile Care since 2013 — a real service business with real customers, real Google reviews, and 13 years of work most self-help authors will never do.

He writes the way operators talk: brutal, funny, and built from work that actually has to get done. Verify everything at spikercarpetandtilecare.com.