24 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
desire to avoid your boss but not let these things dictate your
eventual action. By exposing yourself to this feared situa-
tion, you could alter the way in which you naturally
responded to it. Another common example of response
modulation is suppression. For example, high levels of anger
may prompt you to lash out at whomever or whatever caused
your frustration; however, this might not be appropriate in
certain situations. If you are in public, yelling or venting may
attract unwanted attention and exacerbate the situation.
Conscious efforts to suppress or subdue the expression of
anger may be required.
Practice Think of recent times in your life when you regulated
your emotions using these different processes (situation selection,
situation modification, attention, cognitive appraisals, and response
modulation). Consider how you selected and modified your situa-
tion, how your interpretation of the situation and use of attention
inf luenced your emotions, and whether you tried to change the
course of action your emotions guided you to take.
With these models of emotion and emotion regulation
in mind, we devote the remainder of the book to specific
ways in which efforts to regulate your emotions can go
wrong and how you can overcome these challenges.
Successfully regulating your emotions requires careful f lex-
ibility and knowing when to use certain strategies. There’s a
wealth of research on the ways in which certain emotion
regulation strategies affect mental health and anxiety. Our
integrated account of emotion regulation and mindfulness
(our next topic) will enable you to determine under what
conditions you should use certain techniques and why these
emotion regulation strategies work the way they do.