Pushing down difficult emotions is not the same as managing them. The research on emotional regulation draws a clear line between the two, and understanding that line can change how you relate to your own inner life.
Many people grow up learning, implicitly or explicitly, that strong emotions are problems to be contained. Anger is dangerous. Grief is weakness. Anxiety is a sign that something is wrong with you. So we learn to push things down, keep moving, and get on with it. The trouble is that this strategy, while culturally rewarded, has real costs.
What James Gross Found
James Gross, a psychologist at Stanford University, has spent decades studying how people manage emotions. His process model of emotion regulation identifies a range of strategies, and not all of them work equally well.
Suppression, in Gross’s framework, refers to inhibiting the outward expression of an emotion after it has already arisen. You feel the anxiety, the anger, or the sadness, and then you put a lid on it. You keep your face neutral. You carry on. The emotion does not go away. It simply goes unexpressed.
The research shows what happens when people do this regularly. Physiological arousal actually increases during suppression. The emotion is still running in the body, even as the outward signal is dampened. Over time, habitual suppression is associated with higher levels of stress, reduced wellbeing, and poorer social connection. When people suppress, they also tend to share less of themselves with others, which erodes the kind of closeness that relationships depend on.
Key Insight: In Gross’s research, suppression does not reduce the emotional experience. It hides it from others while keeping the physiological cost running inside the person.
This is not an argument for expressing every emotion without filter. That is not what regulation means either.
Reappraisal: A Different Strategy
The strategy that consistently shows better outcomes in Gross’s research is cognitive reappraisal. This involves changing how you think about a situation before or during the emotional response, rather than trying to suppress the response once it has already built.
Reappraisal might look like reconsidering what a situation actually means, finding a broader context, or recognising that your initial reading of events may not be the only reading. It is not the same as telling yourself to cheer up, or insisting that things are fine when they are not. Done well, it genuinely shifts the emotional trajectory because it engages with the situation rather than avoiding it.
In studies comparing the two strategies, people who used reappraisal more habitually reported higher positive affect, lower negative affect, and greater wellbeing. They also reported closer relationships. People who relied more on suppression showed the opposite pattern.
Key Insight: Reappraisal works early in the emotional process, before the full physiological response is underway. This is one reason it is more efficient than trying to suppress a response that has already built momentum.
Other strategies matter too. Gross’s model includes attentional deployment, situation selection, situation modification, and response modulation. The point is not that one strategy is always correct. It is that having a range of strategies, and some awareness of when to use them, produces better outcomes than relying on a single blunt tool like suppression.
Regulation Is Not Toughness
There is a version of emotional strength that gets celebrated in many workplaces and families: the ability to hold it together, never let them see you sweat, push through. This is sometimes called being “resilient,” but it is closer to what Gross would describe as chronic suppression.
Genuine resilience, as the research on resilience as a skill makes clear, involves flexibility rather than rigidity. It is the ability to move through difficult emotional states without either being overwhelmed by them or completely shutting them out. That requires actually having access to your emotional experience, not managing it by pretending it does not exist.
Psychologist Susan David, whose work on emotional agility builds on similar foundations, describes emotional rigidity as the tendency to either avoid emotions or to get hooked by them. Both are forms of being stuck. The alternative is a kind of fluid engagement: noticing what you feel, naming it, and responding with some degree of choice rather than pure reaction.
This is more demanding than suppression. It asks you to tolerate discomfort rather than sidestep it. But the evidence suggests it works considerably better over time, for both wellbeing and for relationships.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Recognising the difference between regulation and suppression is easier in the abstract than in the moment. Suppression is often automatic and fast. By the time you notice you have pushed something down, it is already done.
One useful starting point is developing more granular awareness of what you are actually feeling, a capacity the researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett calls “emotional granularity.” People who can make finer distinctions between their emotional states, who can tell the difference between anxious and apprehensive, between frustrated and disappointed, tend to regulate more effectively. They have more information to work with.
This connects to what mindfulness practice actually develops: not relaxation as a primary aim, but the capacity to notice your own experience with some clarity and without immediately reacting to it. That noticing creates a small gap, and in that gap, choice becomes possible.
None of this is about achieving some perfectly managed emotional life. Emotions are not problems to be solved. They carry information. They connect us to other people. Regulation, in the sense that the research uses the word, is about having some capacity to work with that information rather than being at its mercy or refusing to acknowledge it.
If you are exploring what it means to build more flexibility in how you relate to your own emotional experience, the Upward Spiral program works through many of these ideas in practical depth.
Related Reading
- Mindfulness Is Not Relaxation (And That Is Okay)
- Resilience Is Not a Trait. It Is a Skill You Can Build.
Upward Spiral is a 52-week program grounded in positive psychology and neuroscience, designed for people who are functioning but not flourishing. Each week builds on the last. Learn more and start your free trial.
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