When life’s stresses seem insurmountable, how do you respond? As your emotional distress spins out of control, how long does it take for you to regain your composure? Perhaps you’ve been told some very bad news about a close friend. You’d like very much to help, but you’re also needed to help resolve family problems at home. Meanwhile, work demands are piling up, and a faucet in your bathroom decided to break. As much as you try to sort things out, feelings of stress come over you in an unending wave.
Psychologists who attempt to partial out the best way to understand stress have, according to Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières psychologist Claudia Trudel-Fitzgerald and colleagues (2023), created a set of artificial distinctions between theoretical approaches. The purpose of their study was to find the areas of common ground, helping to provide a new way to look at emotions.
From what’s known as the cognitive approach to stress, the details of what situations can create a sense of panic can vary from person to person. In fact, what you regard as stressful could be viewed by someone else as a challenge. Within this perspective, it’s not the situation but the perception that you lack the resources to confront it that leads your emotions to spiral. To overcome stress, you only need to analyze the situation from a more positive perspective by coming up with a suitable coping strategy.
Emotions, therefore, factor heavily into an understanding of coping, but researchers trying to understand stress from a purely emotion-focused approach believe that the feeling of losing control reflects “loosely coupled changes in subjective experience, cognition, behaviour, and peripheral physiology that unfold over a relatively short period of time.” In other words, once an emotion starts to spiral out of control, it takes massive inner strength to contain it.
You might think that all of this theoretical bickering is well and good, but how does it help you? The simple answer is that from the cognitive/coping perspective, you can manage stress by re-evaluating a situation. From the emotion control perspective, you’ve got to dig down deep within yourself to find the off-switch. This may not seem all that helpful if you’re caught in the middle of a bad set of circumstances as you watch your emotions spiral around you. However, if you could ask yourself certain questions while these emotions are building up, perhaps you could quiet them down.
As it turns out, some of the most well-known measurement instruments used to quantify both coping and emotion regulation do seem to have overlap. Using what’s called a “scoping review,” one that is conducted according to rigorous experimental controls, the authors brought the two traditions together with a common set of items. However, differences also emerged in terms of their relative effectiveness in promoting resilience.
Their findings showed that there is, in fact, an advantage to framing the management of stress in terms of coping rather than emotion regulation. As Trudel-Fitzgerald et al. note, coping offers a more practical set of options for people dealing with life’s exigencies. These “modifiable regulatory processes” can be effective because they are so very hands-on. Emotion regulation, in contrast, doesn't give you a set of tools other than telling yourself to calm down.
Consider the example of reframing a bad situation in more positive terms. In "proactive coping" you would agree with the item: "I turn obstacles into positive experiences," but in emotion regulation, you would indicate agreement with the item "I think that the situation also has its positive sides." The idea that you would “turn obstacles” suggests taking some form of action rather than passively allowing them to intrude on your well-being. Coping also includes such strategies as seeking "instrumental" social support; the counterpart in emotion regulation is to seek support alone to feel better, not help per se. Venting is all well and good, but getting someone to give you advice is that much better.
The bottom line in all of this is to ask yourself which approach will work better in getting you through tough times. As the authors point out, when studied in the moment, emotion regulation and coping could produce similar outcomes of allaying distress. However, over the course of the years, research that contrasts the two perspectives shows that it is coping that will produce the greatest resilience. The authors define this favorable quality as “Ability to adapt positively and to fare better than expected.” Resilience is more than managing emotions; it’s also about handling problematic situations and making them better.
Thinking back on the earlier example, you could certainly use emotion regulation as a way to keep from screaming out loud when bad situations start to multiply exponentially. But relying only on emotions instead of trying to fix problems could lead you to a state of acceptance that keeps you from improving your objective lot in life. It’s one thing to try to feel better when you’re upset about a situation you can’t change, but if you could change it, how much better would that be to building your resilience? Take that bad day you're having apart, and separate what you can fix (like the faucet) from what you can't (your friend's bad news). Then, with those you can't fix, rather than become unglued, bring the emotional strategies to bear on the situation such as positive reappraisal or acceptance.
To sum up, there’s more than an academic reason to look at emotion regulation from the perspective of coping. Building greater resilience isn’t just a matter of controlling your emotions but also of understanding and managing what situations cause them in the first place.
References
Trudel-Fitzgerald, C., Boucher, G., Morin, C., Mondragon, P., Guimond, A.-J., Nishimi, K., Choi, K. W., & Denckla, C. (2023). Coping and emotion regulation: A conceptual and measurement scoping review. Canadian Psychology / Psychologie canadienne. https://doi.org/10.1037/cap0000377
A New Way to See Problems as Fixable, not Insurmountable
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06.02.2024
When life’s stresses seem insurmountable, how do you respond? As your emotional distress spins out of control, how long does it take for you to regain your composure? Perhaps you’ve been told some very bad news about a close friend. You’d like very much to help, but you’re also needed to help resolve family problems at home. Meanwhile, work demands are piling up, and a faucet in your bathroom decided to break. As much as you try to sort things out, feelings of stress come over you in an unending wave.
Psychologists who attempt to partial out the best way to understand stress have, according to Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières psychologist Claudia Trudel-Fitzgerald and colleagues (2023), created a set of artificial distinctions between theoretical approaches. The purpose of their study was to find the areas of common ground, helping to provide a new way to look at emotions.
From what’s known as the cognitive approach to stress, the details of what situations can create a sense of panic can vary from person to person. In fact, what you regard as stressful could be viewed by someone else as a challenge. Within this perspective, it’s not the situation but the perception that you lack the resources to confront it that leads your emotions to spiral. To overcome stress, you only need to analyze the situation from a more positive perspective by coming up with a suitable coping strategy.
Emotions, therefore, factor heavily into an understanding of coping, but researchers trying to understand stress........
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