Your emotions at work aren’t fixed, even when they feel completely overwhelming during high-pressure situations. We can change them (with some effort and practice) to improve our performance, enhance our leadership effectiveness, and achieve our career goals. Emotions are not something we should suppress or ignore in professional settings; that’s an outdated approach that misses how essential emotional intelligence is to workplace success. We shouldn’t aim to subordinate our emotions to reason or vice versa, but we should aim for a careful collaboration between the two.
If you want to regulate your emotions to be informed by their wisdom but not ruled by their grip, here are some of the most tested strategies.
Switch up the circumstance.
The easiest way to regulate an emotion like anger is to remove the cues you interpret as angering. This means avoiding situations and people you code as triggering, for example, spending less time on social media, keeping your distance from your boss toward the end of the quarter, and avoiding that one vegan who won’t stop talking about doing CrossFit. Eliminating or reducing the cues that we interpret as angering diminishes the experience of unpleasant emotions.
This strategy, however, does not help you directly address the beliefs and assumptions that helped manufacture the emotional response in the first place. For example, if you interpret your news feed as angering, shutting the app will reduce instances of anger, but it does nothing to help you process and change the beliefs and expectations contributing to your rage. Nevertheless, if your reaction is too heated and you don’t yet have the necessary skills to try other emotion-regulating methods, switching up the circumstance can be a good way to avoid doing more damage.
Look, over there!
When you can’t escape the situation, a second strategy for managing your emotions is to distract yourself from the unpleasant cues. You might tune out your annoying Uncle Charlie at Thanksgiving dinner and focus instead on the cousins you want to see. A similar strategy is to catch yourself ruminating on negative events and actively intervene, like when you notice your boss hovering for the hundredth time, and turn your attention instead to helping your customers.
While this strategy has been shown to reduce unpleasant emotions in the short term, it can weaken your long-term resilience, just like the circumstance-switching strategy. For example, research shows that when people trained to distract themselves from a negative interaction are re-exposed to their troublesome situations, they can actually have a stronger adverse reaction than before. Similarly, suppressing emotions by pushing them down or ignoring them doesn’t work; in fact, suppressing emotions can enable stronger negative reactions to things that are unrelated, like when you swallow your anger when your company fires half its employees, the CEO doubles her salary, and then you find yourself in your car screaming at the drivers going out of turn at the four-way stop. So, distracting yourself and suppressing emotions are merely short-term strategies to control anger.
Reframe.
A third strategy for addressing negative emotions like anger is to change how you interpret the negative stimuli by reframing the situation. What might seem like an annoying act, like when your colleague rephrases every suggestion you offer in a meeting before accepting it, is less annoying when you realize there’s something else going on here—it’s how your colleague processes information. Reframing allows you to change the thoughts that create an emotion and thus decrease the negative emotions you feel. Indeed, reframing a situation to see yourself from an observer’s perspective creates psychological distance and can help manage intense feelings. For reframing to work, you must really believe the new perspective; it can’t be a faint-hearted attempt to deceive yourself. “I know that bankruptcy will make me stronger!”
Reframing is one of the most studied interventions for emotional regulation and is better for long-term resilience than distraction or removing the triggering stimuli. This strategy is particularly useful for uncontrollable negative stimuli. It is not as good for controllable cues because reframing can also make you complacent and reticent to make changes. One risk of reframing is that you can become less motivated to act directly against the cues and situations you interpret as angering.
Also, we can reframe our emotional experiences more effectively if we have a richer emotional vocabulary. For example, when you can more carefully distinguish between feeling frustrated, insulted, or nervous, you can take targeted actions addressing your feelings. But if you can only describe your emotional states as either fine, tired, or hungry, then your strategies for intervention are similarly blunt. A richer set of emotion words can help you more carefully identify the thoughts, patterns, and situations that contribute to your experiences and thus manage them more intentionally. When you can tell the difference between feeling powerless and petrified, you stand a better chance of doing something about it. The subtle differences are essential to help yourself calm down, channel your energy positively, or cope more effectively.
Try something new.
Finally, when you are upset and angry, a variety of behaviors can accompany your emotions. You can scream, whisper threats, cry, go silent, get curious, pound your fists, start yelling, or even start laughing or get really friendly. Modulating your responses is not about changing your emotions but about changing how you choose to express them. When we read an angering tweet, we can ignore it, joke about it, tweet something positive, change the subject, report the tweet, ask a question, reply with a counterpoint, organize a protest, and many other things. Similarly, when you feel upset, going for a walk, setting out on a run, or exercising can help you manage the physiological reactions and channel them toward a positive end. Regulating our responses is a powerful tool for being informed by our emotions and being intentional about how we express them.
The goal isn’t to eliminate emotions from your professional life but to work with them more skillfully. When you master these strategies, you’ll find that your emotions become valuable allies rather than obstacles to your workplace success.
Adapted excerpt from Radical Doubt by BIDHAN L. PARMAR, available now wherever books are sold. Copyright © 2025 BIDHAN L. PARMAR. Printed with permission of the publisher, Diversion Books. All rights reserved.
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