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.
Now, the brain is full of similar mechanisms, negative feedback loops, bodily controls, and homeostatic systems. I’m not disputing any of that. What I’m unsure about is the usefulness of the regulation idea when we stay at the psychological level, where we’re talking about feelings, meanings, relationships, understanding, where you can’t point to a thermostat.
There are cases where ‘regulation’ is plainly the right word. For example, a toddler gets overwhelmed. She screams, panics, rages. Her mother picks her up, speaks softly, rocks her, and makes the world feel safer again. The toddler calms. Perspective returns. In this situation, there really are two distinct things, mother and child, in relation, and you can sensibly say: the mother regulates the child’s affect. That is real other-regulation. And over time, something changes in the child. She gradually becomes able to tolerate hunger, disappointment, waiting, missing toys, and being told ‘no.’ She stops melting down so often. She becomes, in the ordinary phrase, ‘more regulated.’
So far, so good.
But there’s a philosophical temptation I don’t think psychology always resists. We see an ability, say, the ability to not breakdown, and we immediately ask: how is that ability exercised? What are the inner mechanics? What is the mental mechanism doing the steadying? And then we feel we must answer. We start telling little stories: perhaps the person can now “bring thought to bear on feeling,” or perhaps they use self-soothing techniques, breathing, calming self-talk, distraction, or grounding. Or perhaps they ‘internalise’ the mother’s soothing voice and now repeat it inwardly.
Sometimes that is exactly right. You get angry with your partner, and suddenly you hear your therapist’s voice in your head: “What part of this belongs to him? And what part actually belongs to you?” You pause. The anger doesn’t escalate. A thought, linked with a remembered tone of voice, interrupts the spiral. That is a real phenomenon; anyone who has done genuine psychotherapy recognises it.
But my objection is this: it’s a mistake to treat that kind of story as the general explanation of why emotionally mature people often don’t ‘break down’. Because a lot of the time, the best explanation is not that ‘they regulate themselves,’ but rather: they no longer have the same crude reactions in the first place.
Not Damping, But Refinement
Here’s another way emotional development can work, and I think it’s closer to the reality of things. The toddler do start out with blunt, dramatic, black and white responses to disappointment. Distress floods the whole system. And because they’re flooded, they can’t learn properly from experience: everything feels catastrophic, which makes everything seem catastrophic.
Then the caregiver intervenes, not merely by ‘calming,’ but by helping the child perceive differently. She supplies finer distinctions: this isn’t danger, it’s frustration; this isn’t abandonment, it’s a delay; this feeling will pass; the world is still here. Through repeated experiences like this, the child’s emotional repertoire becomes more nuanced. She learns how situations actually tend to go. She develops discrimination. And then, later, when she faces the old trigger, solitude, hunger, disappointment, she responds differently from the start. Not because she is actively damping herself down, but because the situation no longer activates the same internal alarm system.
That’s important. Because it changes what the “how?” question even means.
If you ask, “How are you able to read this essay?” it sounds odd. You can answer in terms of biology or development, sure: you learned to read, your brain adapted, you practised. But if you take the question as asking for a psychological method that you are now deploying each time you read, it starts to feel like a misunderstanding. You’re not typically doing a special inner technique called ‘reading.’ You just read.
Likewise, a lot of emotionally mature responding is not a special inner technique deployed called ‘self-regulation.’ It is simply: this is how I now respond.
You might tell a developmental story: your childhood improved, therapy helped, your nervous system changed, you learned new ways of seeing people. But you may not be ‘doing’ anything at the moment of calmness besides being the person you’ve become. Self-regulation talk can become a way of making a basic capacity sound like a hidden method.
Part of the confusion, I think, comes from mixing together three different things that resemble each other on the surface.
Neurological regulation: There may be real negative-feedback processes in the brain that dampen emotional escalation. (I’m not endorsing any specific model; I’m just saying it’s plausible that something like this exists.)
External psychological regulation: caregivers and therapists can, in a very real sense, regulate a distressed person from the outside.
Occasional self-soothing: adults sometimes do actively talk themselves down, breathe, reframe, distract.
Because these three things exist, we’re tempted to assume that ordinary adult emotional steadiness must generally be produced by this ongoing internal self-regulation. But that inference is too quick. It ignores the possibility that what changed is not your ability to dampen a reaction, but the fact that the reaction doesn’t ignite in the same way anymore.
In other words, therapy and emotional development may have moved you into a life where your emotional system is no longer constantly producing escalating states that require regulation. The ‘regulator’ story then becomes redundant. This isn’t just about feelings. The language of self-regulation shows up in philosophy of language, too, especially in accounts of how we learn to use words correctly.
Wittgenstein, for example, describes language learning as a shift from being regulated by a teacher of language to becoming an ‘autonomous practitioner of language’ whose behaviour is regulated by ‘norms.’ Effectively, the teacher brings normative structure; over time, the learner internalises it, and, eventually, the learner regulates themselves within the practice.
Language is ‘normative’ in a basic sense: uses are intelligibly described as correct or incorrect in context. A child says ‘watch’ when they mean ‘clock’ and a teacher corrects them, and so they learn. But to say that language is normative is a conceptual point: it’s part of what it is to use words that there are standards of correctness. That doesn’t yet tell us anything causal about what produces correct speech. And the word ‘regulation’ quietly pushes us toward a causal picture: it suggests that norms are controlling behaviour the way a mechanism controls water level. That is where a slip can happen: a slide from ‘this is what counts as correct’ to ‘this is what makes correctness happen.’
A similar slip appears when we start implying that proper language use involves the ability to self-correct. Sometimes it does. But often it doesn’t need to. After you’ve learned the word, you typically just use it. You don’t hover over your speech, policing it with inner feedback loops. You can self-correct when you stumble, sure, especially when tired. But fluent competence is usually not a constant inner audit. It’s just competence.
Just because we learn via other people’s feedback, it doesn’t follow that our mature practice is maintained by us providing ourselves with ongoing internal feedback.
There’s an older philosophical worry behind all this, and it applies both to language and emotion.
In language: it’s tempting to think that the normativity of speaking comes from internalised rules, rules we ‘have’ and then apply. But it may be the other way around. The practice is already norm-governed in its living use, and the ‘rules’ we formulate are attempts to describe it. The practice is primary and the rule formulation comes later. The rules are correct or incorrect depending on whether they capture the practice and not the other way round.
And something similar seems true for affect (emotion).
It’s tempting to think: I’m calmer now because I regulate myself. But often the calmer response is simply what my, now refined, emotional understanding produces. The improved response comes first; the self-regulation story is grafted on afterwards as an appealing “mechanism.”
Self-soothing can be real, just as self-correction in speech can be real. My point is that both are often irrelevant to the ordinary possession of the capacity.
A Concession
I’m not interesting in banning the term. I want to rescue it from a misleading grammar.
Consider the old ideal of ‘know thyself,’ or the psychoanalytic idea of self-knowledge. Often, it isn’t the discovery of new facts about yourself. It’s the removal of obstacles: defences, distortions, avoidances, that stop you from seeing and expressing what is already there. Self-knowledge is not so much the gaining of something as the removing of something within.
Perhaps ‘self-regulation’ can be understood similarly. Not as an inner regulator damping an inner regulated thing, but as the absence of certain runaway spirals. Therefore, to become self-regulating is not necessarily to start doing a mental technique. It is to no longer be caught in self-intensifying loops, negative thoughts feeding negative feelings feeding negative behaviours feeding more negative thoughts, until perception itself is warped.
To ‘self-regulate,’ then, could mean simply: you are no longer thrown around by those spirals, or you no longer need other-regulation in the way you once did. That is a perfectly respectable idea. You grew. You learned. Your emotional discriminations became more refined. The world ceased to strike you in the same catastrophic way. So the problem that used to require regulation no longer arises in the same form. And in that case, ‘self-regulation’ is not wrong so much as theatrically unhelpful. It names a result, then pretends it has identified the engine.
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