---
date: '2024-02-12'
description: difficulties understanding emotions and choosing how to respond, with a note on affect labeling.
id: Dysregulation
modified: 2026-10-13 09:04:44 GMT-04:00
tags:
  - seed
  - r/psychology
title: Dysregulation
created: '2024-02-12'
published: '2024-02-12'
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slug: thoughts/Dysregulation
permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/thoughts/Dysregulation.md
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---
> That feeling when you want to text that person back, but you are too nervous about why they didn’t then you started forming up scenarios in your head why such things happens.

Emotion regulation includes noticing and understanding a feeling, accepting that it is present, and choosing how to act while feeling it. Dysregulation can involve difficulty with any of these abilities, including following through on a goal when distressed. [Gratz and Roemer’s account](https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JOBA.0000007455.08539.94) gives us a way to describe those difficulties. A moment of anxiety alone gives us too little information to infer a disorder or a brain mechanism.

An unanswered message is an observation. Rejection is one possible explanation for it. The uncertainty matters: treating that explanation as settled adds a claim that the message history may not support.

Naming an emotion is called _affect labeling_. In a [2007 fMRI experiment](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17576282/), participants labeling emotional images showed lower amygdala activity and higher activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex than during comparison tasks. These measurements describe differences between tasks. They do not establish that naming a feeling switches reasoning back on or reliably relieves everyday anxiety.

## how to deal with it?

Questions to try while the explanation is still uncertain:

- [ ] What feeling can I name?
- [ ] What happened, and what am I assuming about why it happened?
- [ ] What response can wait until I have more information?