Should You Accept or Regulate Your Emotions?

I recently wrote that meditation, mindfulness, and movement, while useful life-aids, can serve to do more harm than good if we’re using them as distractions from deeper problems that remain unresolved.

Discussing emotional management with a friend over UFC245 on the weekend (as you do!), we hit upon the idea of nuance in emotional regulation.

Questions We Asked

• Are there times when you should suppress negative emotions?
• Are there times when you should use them as a guide?

Risk Management and Emotional Regulation

Many moons ago, before I pursued entrepreneurship — about 3,000 moons, in fact — I worked in the space of risk management for a large investment bank.

Anybody who has ever worked in risk management knows that there are five ways to manage risk (accept, avoid, transfer, mitigate or exploit).

It strikes me as fitting, that these five methods can be appropriated for managing our emotions, albeit with a slight twist.

My version of it for emotion management is as follows:

• Accept the emotion
• Ignore the Emotion
• Reframe the emotion