My Problem With 'Self-Regulation'
Why I Find the Common Use of the Term Quite Infuriating
The idea of ‘self-regulation’ is everywhere, and its application has become rather lazy. On social media, an inability to ‘self-regulate’ is simultaneously a trauma response and the antidote to all nervous system dysfunction. It is designated as the missing piece that completes the puzzle of psychological well-being. It is somewhat infuriating. Not because the term is always wrong, but that it very often pretends to explain something while really just restating it in a fancier dialect.
We observe that emotionally mature people don’t spiral into a breakdown every time life is disappointing the way a toddler does, and then we add: because they can ‘self-regulate’. This can look like an explanation. But it’s only a relabelling: “They don’t spiral because they have the ability not to spiral.” It has the air of an explanation. But very often it is only a relabelling, saying, in effect, that they don’t spiral because they have the capacity not to spiral.
A separate but noteworthy frustration I have with the term is that it emphasises the self as the regulator, when much of what keeps us steady is never fully self-generated. Human beings are social organisms, and our nervous systems (and much of our other physiological systems) are continually shaped, steadied, or destabilised by the people around us. Conversation, shared attention, being understood, being corrected, being held in mind: these are not optional extras but ordinary conditions of psychological equilibrium. Yet our culture’s individualistic ethos, uncomfortable with dependence, has a marked tendency to translate these relational processes into private duties. We are urged to self-soothe, self-care, self-medicate, self-manage, and self-regulate, as if stability were something one ought to manufacture alone. But regulation, in its most literal sense, implies an external regulator distinct from what is regulated. Much of what gets called self-regulation is better understood as the subtle, ongoing co-regulation of life with others, so familiar and so continuous that it disappears from view, leaving us to mistakenly credit an inner mechanism for what is, in fact, a shared human achievement.
Nevertheless, the particular peculiar process that is so often mistaken for ‘self-regulation’ does deserve closer analysis.
Actual Regulation
The genuine concept of regulation suggests two things:
something doing the regulating (a regulator), and
something being regulated, and then a causal relationship between them (often a dampening relationship, a “steadying” one).
A classic example is a thermostat. The temperature of the room rises or falls, and the thermostat responds by turning the heating off or on, keeping the system within bounds. It does not interpret the room or understand comfort; it merely corrects deviations. That is regulation in its most literal form.
