Imbalance in emotion regulation mechanism

The core essence of the imbalance of the emotional regulation mechanism is the coordinated failure of the three systems of physiological regulation, cognitive evaluation, and environmental support within the individual. It is neither a "poor personality" or a bad temper as the public thinks, nor an irreversible personality defect, but a reversible sub-health state between mental health and clinical mental illness. The domestic 2023 National Mental Health Blue Book data shows that more than 72% of people aged 18-45 have experienced emotional regulation imbalances during high-pressure stages that lasted for more than one month.

Xiao Su, the visitor I just received in my studio last week, is a typical example. She is a 32-year-old Internet operator who has worked in the company for six years. She is recognized as the "emotional stability ceiling" by the entire department. Even Party A, who is the most difficult to deal with, has never blushed. Last month, her colleague at the next table mistakenly took the spicy snail noodles she ordered. She dropped the folder in her hand, and everyone in the large room looked up at her. She froze for two seconds, turned around, and rushed into the stairwell. She cried for almost two hours. Later, she told me, "My mind went blank at the time, and I felt all the anger rushing up at once, and I couldn't hold it back at all. It was like the brakes of a car suddenly hit the brakes."

Regarding the causes of this "brake failure", researchers in different fields have considerable differences. The conclusion in the field of neuroscience is very straightforward. A 2022 follow-up study by Stanford Medical School showed that subjects who slept less than 6 hours a day on average for 14 consecutive days had 62% higher activity in the amygdala, which is responsible for generating emotional responses, than those who slept 7.5 hours, and the connection strength between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala, which is responsible for regulating emotional impulses, dropped by 49%. To put it bluntly, the physiological braking system failed first, and you have nowhere to control it no matter how hard you try.

However, Sister Li, who has been doing community family consultation for 14 years, does not agree with this. She has dealt with at least 30 cases in her hands. She has a regular work and rest schedule and gets enough sleep, but she still explodes when her children make noises for snacks at meal time. In essence, it is a long-term backlog of emotional labor that uses up the adjustment margin - she usually has to take care of the elderly. When it comes to emotions, you have to take your husband's work pressure into consideration. Even if you want to drink a glass of iced Americano, you have to first think about "will breastfeeding affect the child?" The "running memory" for emotional regulation has long been fully occupied. Just pop up a small pop-up window and it will crash immediately. It has little to do with whether the physiological condition is good or not.

The most popular cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) on the market today mostly attributes the core of emotional imbalance to "cognitive biases." For example, the reason why Xiao Su broke down over a bowl of snail noodles was that she interpreted "a colleague brought the wrong takeout" as "even such a small thing has to go against me, and everyone does not pay attention to my needs." As long as this distorted cognition is reversed, the mood will naturally be stable. However, most consultants from the humanistic school feel that this logic is a bit "standing and talking without back pain" - Xiao Su had not taken a full day off for 37 days in a row, and she was carrying the online nodes of three projects at the same time. The landlord had just informed her that the rent would be increased by 20%. At this time, if you ask her to "think about the problem from another angle", what is the difference between asking someone who has been hungry for three days to "stop thinking about eating"?

When I worked on my own cases, I also discovered that there is no universal "magic prescription" for adjustment. There was a visitor who was a product manager. He used to practice mindful breathing online. The more he practiced, the more irritated he became. Instead, he had an extra layer of anxiety because "I can't even sit still for 5 minutes." Later, I asked him to try playing two games of Xiaoxiao on his phone every time he got angry. The effect was amazing. He said, "It's like finding an insignificant outlet to vent all the emotions, which is much more useful than forcing yourself to calm down." There is also a back-end programmer who is even more interesting. He wrote a small script with a few lines of code, and filled in a few parameters for each emotion: anger value 1-10 points, what is the triggering event, sleep duration and diet in the past three days. After filling in the anger, most of the anger disappeared. In his words, "The emotions floating in the mind were turned into cold numbers, and the sense of substitution was lost instantly."

Many people only have the impression of emotional imbalance as "exploding at the first touch". In fact, there is another completely opposite extreme - emotional blunting. This is the case for Aze, a sophomore who came for consultation last month. He said that he has not felt "happy" or "sad" in almost a year. He didn't feel it when he received a first-class scholarship in his major. He didn't feel it when he failed a class at the end of the semester. He couldn't even let go of the cat he had owned for three years when he got sick and left. After a teardrop, I went to a psychiatrist for a check-up and found out that he had forced himself not to have mood swings for six months in order to prepare for the IELTS exam. Over time, his adjustment mechanism "frozen". In order to avoid the impact of negative emotions, he simply soldered all the emotional switches.

To be honest, the academic community has not fully understood the operating logic of the emotion regulation mechanism. After all, everyone’s emotional system is like electronic equipment shipped from different batches. Some have aging batteries that cannot carry the load, some have too many self-starting programs running in the background that no one pays attention to, and have consumed resources. Some simply have the voltage of the external environment being unstable. Any problem may arise. Instead of following the "three-step emotion regulation method" on the Internet, it is better to spend three to five days first and write down two changes in your mood when you are free: what made you irritable today, how many hours did you sleep the day before, and whether there is anything that has been pressing on your heart recently. This is more effective than any ready-made prescription. After all, only if you can accurately find where your "brake" is, can you talk about how to fix it, right?