Emotional Regulation in Adult ADHD: The Key to Self-Mastery

Emotional Regulation in Adult ADHD:
The Key to Self-Mastery

Moodiness, irritability, and anger are just some of the characteristics of this brain-based challenge. Not only do you experience a roller coaster of emotions, you can go from zero to 100 in a second. And then stay at 100 much longer than you’d like.

Learning to ride these waves of emotional reactivity is critically important to getting started on tasks, completing them, making wise choices in the moment, and nurturing your most important relationships.

The degree to which you are skilled with your emotions is the degree to which you are in charge of your life.

Great planning, executing and self-management require your nervous system to be calm. But there may be a part of you that doesn’t want to cultivate calm.

Adults with ADHD often use their emotions to kickstart their focus. The pressure of deadlines – and the threat of public shame if they don’t meet them – is powerfully effective for most people with ADHD. But it comes at a huge cost.

Once your adrenal glands are on high alert, it’s harder to calm them down. In the long run, you risk burnout, job loss, depression, higher anxiety, substance abuse, and interpersonal problems.

How do you give up the intensity you rely on to get work done? 

If you’re looking at it as ‘giving up’ something that you need to be productive, this scarcity mindset will keep you in a reactive cycle of searching for intensity.

The truth is, you’re not giving up anything except a perspective that isn’t serving you.

Instead, you can choose to create an abundance of inner peace. This will bring an expansiveness that will allow you access to your executive functioning – which exists whether you have ADHD or not. And calm is NOT boring – no matter what your ADHD brain tells you.

So how do you regulate your emotions?

Become emotionally literate

Learn to name your emotions. If your emotional vocabulary is  limited, decide to expand it — as if you were learning a new language. Accurately naming what you feel is key to being wise with it.

Ask yourself:

• What emotions can I name?
• What tells me when I’m feeling something – even if I can’t name it?

How would I describe the physical sensations that go with my emotions?

See your emotions as useful

Clear up any misunderstandings you may be holding about emotions. There are no bad emotions. There are uncomfortable ones. But they’re not bad and they’re not a sign of weakness.

They provide good information about actions we want to take, about what we want to communicate to others — and to ourselves.

Ask yourself:

• What emotions do I tolerate best? Which ones am I unwilling to feel?
• What information are my hard feelings telling me about myself?

How often do I let joy into my everyday life?

Wise Mind is the intersection between your logic and your emotions. It’s the place where good information from both emotion mind and from logic mind come together so that you can choose a wise course of action.

For example, you may recognize that you’re angry with your partner’s request (emotion mind) and want to lash out. But you don’t. Instead, you tap into what that anger is telling you. It may be that a personal boundary of yours has been crossed. Then you look at the facts. (logic mind) Your partner was stressed about work. You decide your wisest action is to acknowledge both their feelings and your need to reassert your limits calmly.

Cultivate the habit of Wise Mind

Check in with yourself routinely.

Ask yourself:

• What is fueling my choices in this moment?
• Am I experiencing a sense of urgency?

Am I listening to all the facts including my emotions?

Practice distress tolerance

Practice distress tolerance

When you’re in a crisis, distress tolerance skills will help you ride the wave of what may otherwise feel intolerable.

Riding the wave means feeling them and accepting that they are present. This will allow them to move through you.

You could try to:

• Get back into your body. Take 4 slow, deep breaths, in and out, focusing on the sensations in your body.
• Tap your thymus gland for 15 seconds.
• Splash cold water on your face to slow and regulate your heart rate.

Improve the present moment by using imaging, finding meaning, or reminding yourself that this is temporary and that you are much stronger than you think you are.

Self-soothe your adult ADHD

Self-soothing is about accepting how you feel in the moment and nurturing yourself into a calmer state.

Ask yourself:

• What would soothe my body? A massage? A hot, fragrant bath?
• What would soothe my thinking? Forgiveness? Knowing I’m loved no matter what?

What part of me needs my unconditional acceptance?

As you learn to navigate your emotional experience masterfully, remember: you are the best source of loving for everything that arises.

May you love yourself as you are.
May you love and be loved.
May you be awake to it all.

Adult ADHD emotional regulation IS possible. Live into that reality.