How to manage your anxiety using emotion regulation techniques

Everyone feels anxious from time to time. Anxiety is a feeling of worry, fear or dread. While it is a normal part of being human, anxiety can feel overwhelming, especially if you haven’t learned practical ways to manage it.

One of the most effective ways to manage anxiety is by building your emotional regulation skills. This means learning to replace unhelpful coping habits, like the avoidance of thinking about or doing anything to change what is making you feel anxious, especially when the cause of your anxiety lies within your control. Researchers and mental health professionals sometimes describe these habits as “avoidant coping habits.” It is possible, however, to learn to replace these habits with strategies that support your mental and emotional well-being.

Coping strategies are the thoughts or behaviours we turn to when something feels threatening, stressful or hard to face. Some ways of coping help reduce anxiety in the long run, while others might offer short-term relief but make things harder over time.

In this factsheet, you’ll find information on:

What emotion regulation is
How emotion regulation relates to anxiety
Unhelpful strategies that can make anxiety worse
Helpful techniques that support you in managing anxious feelings more effectively

What is emotion regulation?

Emotion regulation refers to the ways we manage and respond to our emotions, particularly those that are difficult to manage, such as anxiety, anger, or sadness. It includes:

• What emotions we experience
• When we experience them
• How we respond to them

Emotion regulation strategies are a specific type of coping strategy. They can help us respond to strong or distressing feelings in ways that support our mental health, rather than making things worse in the long run.

Like any skill, emotion regulation can be learned and strengthened over time. The more we practise, the better we get at managing our emotions in ways that feel effective, respectful to ourselves, and helpful in the moment.

What is the link between emotion regulation and anxiety?

Research shows that being able to manage your emotions in healthy ways can help protect against anxiety that starts to interfere with daily life. A key part of this is emotional awareness: the ability to notice, label, and understand your emotions, including where they come from and how they affect you.

Studies suggest that people with higher emotional awareness tend to experience lower levels of anxiety. This may be because understanding your emotions can make it easier to respond to everyday stress and worry in more manageable ways.

Some of the benefits of increasing emotional awareness include:

• Being able to recognise and name what you’re feeling
• Feeling more comfortable talking about your emotions, for example, with a counsellor or trusted adult
• Knowing how to use helpful emotion regulation strategies when you need them

Unhelpful emotion regulation strategies

Not all emotion regulation strategies are equally effective. Research shows that people who use more helpful strategies tend to experience fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression than those who use less helpful, or even harmful, ways of coping.

Below are some common emotion regulation strategies that may feel useful in the short term but often increase a person’s anxiety over time. If you recognise any of these in yourself, try to approach this new awareness with self-compassion. Everyone turns to less-than-ideal coping methods sometimes, especially when emotions feel intense or overwhelming.

What matters most is building awareness of when you’re using unhelpful strategies. That awareness is the first step toward making space for more helpful alternatives, some of which are outlined in the next section.

Avoidance

Avoidance can take many forms, but it often falls into two broad categories:

• Experiential avoidance: avoiding unwanted internal experiences, such as difficult thoughts, emotions, memories, or physical sensations, usually by distracting yourself. This might look like staying constantly busy, binge-watching TV, or scrolling on your phone to numb uncomfortable feelings
• Behavioural avoidance: withdrawing from situations or activities that bring up anxiety

In the short term, avoidance can feel helpful. It may give you a moment of relief or space to regulate overwhelming emotions, especially when the source of your anxiety is outside your control. But when avoidance becomes your default way of coping, it can make things harder in the long run.

Avoidance can hold you back from:

• Taking action in situations you can influence
• Shifting your perspective in situations you cannot control
• Working toward your goals
• Staying connected to the people and activities that matter to you

Avoidance is not always obvious. For example, frequently seeking reassurance from friends or adults might feel like a way of coping, but if it becomes a habit, it can actually keep anxiety going. While reassurance is a natural thing to want when you’re anxious, relying on it too often can get in the way of developing more effective, empowering ways to manage your anxiety, like problem-solving or reframing unhelpful thoughts.

Rumination

Rumination is when you get stuck in repetitive thoughts about a problem without taking steps to address it or shift your perspective in a helpful way.

It can be easy to confuse rumination with problem-solving. After all, both involve thinking about a problem in depth. You might even imagine different ways to respond or replay conversations in your head. But while problem-solving leads to action or a new, more helpful way of thinking about the situation, rumination tends to go in circles, keeping you focused on the source of your anxiety without actually resolving it.

Instead of helping, rumination often makes anxiety worse. It keeps your attention locked on the issue, feeding the anxious thoughts and feelings that come with it. Recognising when you may be ruminating is the first step toward shifting into a more active and helpful form of coping.

Suppression

Suppression is when a person deliberately tries to block out certain thoughts or emotions from their internal awareness or from being expressed outwardly. It is an intentional effort to bury or push away difficult feelings or unwanted thoughts.

You might find yourself suppressing emotions in particular situations, or it may become a default way of coping across many areas of life. For example, you might hold back tears in public or avoid talking about something that is upsetting you, even with people you trust.

Sometimes, suppression develops in response to cultural or family messages that discourage open emotional expression. These messages can be gendered, such as the stereotype that boys and men shouldn’t show sadness or vulnerability, or rooted in cultural expectations that value emotional reserve.

In some settings, suppression may feel necessary for self-protection, such as in environments where expressing emotions does not feel safe or accepted. It is also common in certain jobs or roles that require people to manage their emotions in order to meet professional or social expectations. This is sometimes called emotional labour: the effort it takes to regulate your emotional expression to suit a particular environment.

While suppression might help in the short term, especially in moments when emotional expression feels risky, regularly pushing down feelings without a safe outlet to process them may increase stress and anxiety over time.

Helpful emotion regulation strategies to manage anxiety

There are three core emotion regulation strategies that research shows can support better mental health and help reduce anxiety. Below, you will find information on what each one involves, and how you can start to use them in everyday life.

Bear in mind that learning to replace unhelpful coping strategies with more effective ones is a process, and one that takes time and patience. It’s completely normal to find it difficult or to face setbacks along the way. Try to be kind and patient with yourself as you build your awareness and begin to make changes.

You do not have to go through this relearning process alone. A fully qualified and accredited counsellor or psychotherapist can support you as you learn to navigate and regulate difficult emotions in a way that works for you.

Read more about how to access free and low-cost counselling and psychotherapy in Ireland.

Cognitive reappraisal

This technique involves expanding the way you interpret an anxiety-inducing situation, so that you are not locked into just one negative viewpoint. It can help you consider alternative explanations or perspectives, ones that may be more realistic, neutral, or even positive. This can be particularly useful if you tend to jump to the worst-case scenario or struggle to see things from a variety of different angles.

In Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), this process is often called cognitive restructuring. It involves identifying unhelpful thought patterns, sometimes known as cognitive distortions, and challenging them. When you’re feeling anxious, it’s easy to overestimate danger or assume the worst will happen. A CBT therapist can help you test how likely those imagined outcomes are and explore other ways of interpreting the situation.

If you want to practise cognitive reappraisal on your own, try asking yourself questions like:

• What other explanations might there be?
• If the worst did happen, how would I cope?
• Does this feeling have to lead to something bad?

These kinds of questions can help you step back from anxious thinking and approach the situation with a calmer, more flexible mindset.

Problem-solving

Problem-solving means exploring all the possible options or outcomes for dealing with a situation that is causing your anxiety. A good place to start is by asking yourself: What are all my possible options in this situation?

As you brainstorm, take time to weigh the pros and cons of each option. Consider what feels most realistic and manageable for you right now, given the resources and support you have available. Bear in mind that the best solution for you might look very different from someone else’s because your circumstances and strengths are unique.

During brainstorming, it is common to want to find a perfect solution to the problem, but aiming for perfection is likely to increase your level of anxiety and overwhelm. Instead, focus on taking small, manageable steps that move you towards a realistic goal.

One important part of problem-solving is turning your ideas into action. It is tempting to get stuck thinking about the problem without focusing on how you might address the problem through action. To avoid this, think about what support or information you might need to help put a plan into practice. This can help prevent you from getting caught in a loop of rumination, which has the potential to make your anxiety worse over time.

Acceptance

Sometimes, the situation or problem causing your anxiety might not have an easy or immediate solution, or it might be beyond your control. In these moments, one of the most helpful things you can do is to gently allow yourself to feel and process the difficult emotions, thoughts, memories, or bodily sensations that arise.

Acceptance means being open to these feelings rather than avoiding or suppressing them, which can deplete our energy and mental resources. This involves giving yourself permission to experience whatever you are feeling and, if needed, to seek support in working through those emotions.

It is important to remember that acceptance is not the same as giving up or resigning yourself to an anxiety-inducing situation. It takes real courage and strength to face challenging experiences with openness and acceptance, especially those outside of your control.

Learning how to recognise your emotions and practise positive emotion regulation techniques, like cognitive reappraisal, problem-solving, and acceptance, can take time. Try to be kind and patient with yourself throughout the learning process. For more information, check out our article on how to manage or regulate emotions.

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