Emotion regulation at work: avoid these 3 common mistakes
When it comes to regulating our emotions at work, we believe that it’s often about hiding our true emotions to avoid conflict, inappropriate discussions, or distress. The emotion regulation strategies we unconsciously use are, however, often destructive to our working environment and especially to our mental and physical health.
This article outlines three common mistakes we make when it comes to managing our emotions in the workplace and what techniques to use instead, to foster a healthy work environment.
1. Label rather than complain
Imagine you have a meeting with your boss to discuss your annual salary increase. Your boss tells you that she didn’t think that you deserved an increase for this year because your colleague’s performance has been better than yours. You swallow your anger and contempt for her and don’t say anything more during the meeting. Afterwards, you need to let your steam off in the lunchroom and tell your work friend all about the meeting. You don’t stop complaining about the misjudgment of your boss and poison the work atmosphere with your negativity for several weeks thereafter.
Emotions are contagious, which is for positive and negative ones. When complaining we only dwell on our negative thoughts and often increase our intensity for these destructive emotions. It is unfortunately an effective tool to infect other people with rumination and complaints in the workplace.
There is, however, another strategy that decreases the intensity of emotional thoughts and feelings. This strategy is called affect labeling, and it is very easy to apply in any situation. Affect labeling is a great tool to decrease destructive emotions in both the short term and especially the long term. In the above example, it would have been much more effective to label the emotion immediately. This technique significantly decreases the limbic response in the brain while increasing activation in the control system. When using affect labeling for negative events, this technique shows the best long-term reduction for these emotional responses.
2. Refraim rather than suppress
Imagine you and your boss are walking towards the meeting room where you need to convince a customer to buy your product. Right in front of the open meeting room door, your boss slips. From your perspective, this slip looked hilarious. Yet, to keep the professional image up, you suppress your need to laugh and help your boss up and enter the room.
Then the meeting starts. The client complains about your work in front of your boss, which humiliates and deeply irritates you. Also here, you decide to suppress any emotional responses and stay quiet while your boss is talking on your behalf and siding with the client.
In exceptional situations where showing your true emotions would be inappropriate, it might be a good solution to suppress them – such as in the first case when your boss slipped. Nevertheless, suppression is merely a quick fix, and it is not an emotion regulation strategy that you want to use when not necessary. Suppression is a response modulation strategy, that inhibits outward signs (facial expressions), but it does not effectively change your inward signs (physiological). Studies show that people who constantly suppress their feelings are at higher risk of developing cardiovascular diseases. In addition, memory performance is negatively impacted when suppressing your emotions.
Reframing, on the other hand, is a cognitive change strategy, which successfully reduces outward signs (facial expressions) and also reduces inward signs (physiological). In contrast to suppression, reframing subsequently decreases the risk of heart attacks and coronary heart disease. This technique essentially means changing your perspective of a situation or finding an alternative explanation with no ill intent for the behavior of others. Reframing is very effective when used appropriately. In the second scenario where the client humiliates you and your boss is siding with the client, you should better have reframed the situation instead of suppressing your emotions.
3. Distance rather than distract
Imagine you are sitting at your work desk and suddenly you hear your colleague complain about her discussion with her boss. She is shouting and insulting not only her boss but also other colleagues in the process. Then she comes up to you because you have a planned meeting with her. Going together to the meeting room, your colleague continues complaining and is still very upset when starting to discuss the meeting agenda with you. As a result, your meeting doesn’t go well, and you don’t get any results at the end of the meeting. Afterwards, you go back to your seat and put on headphones to distract yourself from this negativity while upsettingly diving back into work.
Distraction is a popular emotion regulation strategy that many people use for an immediate effect. It can indeed be useful for a short-term solution because you can, if effectively conducted, achieve a change of mood in the moment. Music, as in the above example, is very effective in influencing the mood. However, distraction, just like suppression, seems not to be effective in the long term. When distracting yourself from a negative event, it changes your emotional impact for the moment, nevertheless, sometime later such as the next day you still feel the same irritation when thinking back at the meeting and the attitude of your colleague. It does not regulate your emotional response in hindsight.
Instead of distracting yourself with music after the meeting, you’d better distance yourself from the situation. Distancing is a kind of reappraisal and creates emotional distance between you and the situation such as imagining that you are watching the whole scene from a third person’s perspective or being a fly on the wall who witnesses the situation. That way you see yourself having an emotional reaction to the external stimuli, however, you are not identifying with it directly. Distancing yourself from a negative event successfully reduces the emotional impact in the short-term but it also has a long-term effect on your emotional health.
Do you recognize yourself or people you know in one of these situations? If you want more advice on how to effectively regulate your emotions in the workplace, visit my website at www.emotional-inspiration.com and book a consultation session with me.
Have an inspiring day at work❣
About the author
Ama is a highly sensitive introve
rt. She has over seven years of experience in Human Resources, focused on recruitment and learning & development. Today, Ama is an Emotion Consultant & Trainer who specializes in emotion regulation and social awareness (empathy & nonverbal cues). She helps professionals and individuals to overcome their challenges with emotional intelligence. In early 2024, she published her first book "Becoming an Optimist in a Realists World", which encapsulates her journey, the insights she's gained, and scientific research behind emotional resilience.
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