Linking A nxiety, Emotion, and Mindfulness 39
that they once again serve a useful function, rather than
create problems for you.
As we have discussed, emotion regulation will help you
f lexibly manage the intensity of your emotions by lessening,
maintaining, or increasing the intensity of your emotional
reactions (Gross 1998; Davidson 2010). Imagine that you
have to take an exam at work. For some people, taking an
exam might evoke a great deal of anxiety; others may feel
apathetic about the entire process. Your reaction will depend
on what the exam means to you. For example, is your perfor-
mance on the exam important to obtaining a promotion, or
is it ultimately inconsequential? Depending on your reac-
tion to having to take an exam, you may have to lessen or
increase the intensity of your emotional state so that you can
adequately prepare for it.
Practice Think of recent times in your life when you purposely
had to lessen, maintain, or increase the intensity of your emotional
reaction. For example, the last time you felt sad, did you do some-
thing to adjust the amount of sadness you were feeling? Similarly,
the last time you felt overly anxious, what did you do, if anything ,
to manage your anxiety? Sometimes people avoid thinking about
what’s causing the emotion by distracting themselves, denying
their experience, or focusing more on their symptoms of anxiety
than on what’s actually causing them to feel anxious. By thinking
about ways to manage the intensity of your emotions, you can iden-
tif y those strategies that have been helpful and those that have been
unhelpful in changing your emotional experiences.
The concept of emotion regulation has been increas-
ingly investigated in the last decade, and this work has
important implications for advancing theories on why