What is Self-Regulation?

I would first describe self-regulation as personal power: the capacity to remain connected to oneself while responding consciously to internal states, external stimuli, and the demands of the world, in ways that are congruent with our identity, values, and sense of self.

In a Harvard Health Publishing article published on August 8, 2024, health writer Lisa Catanese, ELS, defines self-regulation as “the act of controlling your behaviors, thoughts, emotions, choices, and impulses.” She explains that self-regulation skills can help us keep difficult emotions in check and create space between an emotional response and our subsequent reaction. Catanese also notes that difficult emotions can interfere with happiness, productivity, and relationships, suggesting that although we cannot always avoid difficult feelings, we can change how we respond to them.

This framing, however, raises an important question: Should the goal of self-regulation be to control or avoid difficult emotions, thoughts and impulses?

I would argue that it should not.

Self-regulation does not necessarily mean being calm, quiet, and compliant, although it may sometimes present in these ways. Equating regulation with calmness risks conflating self-regulation with emotional and cognitive suppression. To teach and develop self-regulation skills, individuals must be able to experience and recognize states of dysregulation and, through that experience, learn how to identify and use strategies to return to a regulated state.

From a more holistic perspective, psychological health is not achieved by avoiding difficult feelings and thoughts, or even by attempting to avoid them. Emotional and intellectual avoidance may provide short-term relief while contributing, over time, to difficulties in relationships, physical well-being, and our ability to remain fully present in our lives.

Rather than categorizing emotions as positive or negative, I propose understanding them as transient states that carry sensory, relational, and existential information. An emotion is neither inherently good nor bad. It is an embodied response to something we have encountered, perceived, remembered, anticipated, or experienced. It provides information about what is happening within us and about how our nervous system is responding to a particular stimulus or context.

The task of self-regulation, therefore, is not necessarily to eliminate a response, but to develop the capacity to receive, understand, tolerate, and integrate the information it contains before going into action.

For some people, sensory and emotional stimuli arrive with considerable intensity. Their internal responses may be large, immediate, and difficult to ignore. For these individuals, self-regulation can initially feel daunting. Yet the very sensitivity that makes regulation challenging can also become a profound capacity. When a person learns to receive, tolerate, organize, and make meaning from this intensity, sensitivity can become a source of depth rather than a liability.

Strong interoceptive awareness, the capacity to perceive and interpret signals arising from within the body, can, when developed alongside emotional literacy and regulation skills, support a particularly nuanced awareness of oneself and others. This heightened sensitivity may contribute to empathy and compassion. What initially feels like an overwhelming volume of internal information can, with practice, become a sophisticated instrument for connection.

The challenge exists at the other end of the spectrum as well. A person who is more withdrawn or less attuned to internal sensory signals may experience stimuli less intensely or have greater difficulty recognizing what is happening within. For that person, self-regulation may not mean learning to quiet an overactive system; it may mean learning to activate, connect, and listen. Difficulty mobilizing oneself, initiating action, or accessing one's internal experience can also reflect a state of dysregulation that requires attention and support.

In other words, regulation is not synonymous with down-regulation. Sometimes the nervous system needs to settle; at other times, it needs to become more activated, engaged, or responsive. The goal is not a particular emotional or physiological state. The goal is an appropriate and flexible response to the demands of the moment.

This is why I believe self-regulation is ultimately less about control and more about alignment. Alignment means developing congruence between our sensory and emotional states, our internal experience, our values, and the lives we choose to create. It requires the capacity to notice what is happening within us without immediately judging, suppressing, or acting upon it; the courage to allow that information to inform how we live; and the skills to translate our internal experience into action and communication with humanity.

Self-regulation, then, is not the art of becoming less emotional, less sensitive, or less reactive. It is the development of sufficient capacity to remain connected to ourselves while experiencing what is actually happening within us. It is not about controlling the self. It is about becoming capable of inhabiting the self fully and choosing how to respond from there. Sometimes, the only intervention needed to develop this, is the capacity to pause so that the nervous system can hear, listen or read what it needs.

The more we develop the capacity to tune into ourselves and hold what is present, rather than immediately trying to change, suppress, or escape it, the more capable we become of tolerating contradiction and complexity. We can hold grief alongside gratitude, anger alongside love, fear alongside courage, or uncertainty alongside conviction. Regulation allows these seemingly opposing experiences to coexist without requiring one to cancel out the other.

Through this lens, self-regulation becomes more than a strategy for managing emotions or modifying behavior. It becomes a capacity for living with greater integrity: the ability to remain in relationship with our internal experience while making choices that are consistent with who we are, what we value, and how we want to engage with the world.

Cécile Rêve