What is emotional dysregulation?
Emotional dysregulation is a mental health symptom that involves trouble controlling your emotions and how you act on those feelings. To those around you, your emotions and reactions will seem out of proportion compared to what you’re reacting to. It’s similar and closely linked to executive dysfunction.
When you manage or regulate your emotions, you can steer and direct how you feel and react. Most people learn how to do this as children and develop it as they get older. It’s also a key part of being adaptable or resilient to challenges, learning and more.
You can think about emotional regulation like volume control for your feelings. When you use the volume control for a device, you can keep it from being too loud. With emotional dysregulation, your brain can’t regulate emotion signals. In effect, your volume control doesn’t work like it should, making your emotions “louder” and harder to manage.
An example of learned emotional regulation is how children eventually outgrow temper tantrums. During childhood, tantrums are normal and an expected part of your child’s development. As children get older, they generally learn how to manage their emotions. That’s why tantrums become less frequent and eventually stop.
What does emotional dysregulation look like?
The effects of emotional dysregulation are most visible in what you say and how you act. Some examples of emotional dysregulation include:
Having trouble steering your moods, causing you to feel stuck or unable to make yourself feel better, especially with negative moods and emotions like depression, anxiety, etc.
Becoming easily frustrated by small inconveniences or annoyances.
Mood swings.
Impulsive behavior.
Mania or hypomania.
Trouble with emotions interfering with how you pursue goals and achieve desired outcomes.
Being prone to losing your temper.
Persistent irritability or anger between outbursts.
When does emotional regulation become a problem?
When emotional dysregulation is severe, it can cause symptoms that disrupt your life, social relationships, career and more.
Some of the more severe effects can include:
- Verbal outbursts (shouting, yelling, screaming or crying).
- Aggressive or even violent behavior (towards objects, animals or people).
- Trouble maintaining friendships, relationships or other forms of social connection.
What are the most common causes of emotional dysregulation?
Emotional dysregulation is a symptom of differences or issues with how certain parts of your brain communicate or work together. It can be a symptom of mental health conditions. But it’s also very common in people who are neurodivergent. Many people with emotional dysregulation have more than one condition that causes or contributes to it.
Emotional dysregulation is most likely to happen in three main groups of people:
- People with mental health conditions. These conditions usually involve disruptions in mood, personality and self-control ability.
- People who are neurodivergent. These are people whose brains developed or work differently than expected. People whose brains developed and worked as expected are “neurotypical.”
- People with damage to certain areas of their brain.
Executive Dysfunction definition:
Executive dysfunction is a symptom that happens with conditions that disrupt your brain’s ability to control thoughts, emotions and behavior. It’s common with conditions like ADHD, but can also happen due to brain damage or degenerative brain diseases.
What is executive dysfunction?
Executive dysfunction is a behavioral symptom that disrupts a person’s ability to manage their own thoughts, emotions and actions. It’s most common with certain mental health conditions, especially addictions, behavioral disorders, brain development disorders and mood disorders.
What are executive functions?
To better understand what executive dysfunction is, it helps to know more about executive functions. The main executive functions are:
Working memory.
Cognitive flexibility.
Inhibition control.
Working memory
Working memory is the kind of memory that involves whatever you’re doing right now. If you’re reading, taking notes or having a conversation, then your working memory is part of the process.
Cognitive flexibility
Also known as fluid or flexible thinking, this refers to how well your brain can shift and move from one topic to another. The more flexible your thinking, the better you can adapt to whatever is happening around you. This also helps you react to unexpected changes in your situation.
People who are better at flexible thinking are often very creative and imaginative. This ability lets them connect concepts and ideas that might not ordinarily seem linked, which also helps with creative problem-solving.
Inhibition control
Inhibition control is your ability to steer or manage your thoughts, emotions and actions. This is a huge part of executive function, and we’d be unable to control our impulses and thoughts without it. There are two main ways that inhibition control works:
Behavioral control. This is your ability to keep yourself from doing things that you think you shouldn’t do. An example of this is staying silent around an extremely annoying person because you believe in the saying, “If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all.”
Interference control. This is the ability to steer or manage your thoughts. It includes focusing on something that needs your attention and ignoring whatever doesn’t. Sometimes, the attention and focus are outside of your head. Sometimes, you have to apply interference control to your own thoughts, which might distract you from whatever needs your attention.
Higher-level executive functions
Working memory, cognitive flexibility and inhibition control are the foundation of executive function. There are also higher-level processes that can happen, including:
Planning.
This is when you mentally map out a series of actions that’ll help you reach a goal.
Reasoning.
This is the ability to apply critical thinking. It’s a key way for you to build on your stored knowledge to think creatively or break down something complicated into easier-to-understand pieces.
Problem-solving.
This function can involve all three main executive functions, as well as planning and reasoning. This is how you apply what you know and how you think to overcome obstacles or problems that are in front of you.
What are some examples of executive dysfunction?
Because executive functions involve so many processes inside of your brain, executive dysfunction can take many forms.
Some examples of executive dysfunction include:
Being very distractible or having trouble focusing on just one thing.
Focusing too much on just one thing.
Daydreaming or “spacing out” when you should be paying attention (such as during a conversation, meeting, class, etc.).
Trouble planning or carrying out a task because you can’t visualize the finished product or goal.
Difficulty motivating yourself to start a task that seems difficult or uninteresting.
Struggling to move from one task to another.
Getting distracted or interrupted partway through a task, causing you to misplace items or lose your train of thought (like leaving your keys in the refrigerator because you wanted a snack, but your hands were full, so you put your keys down inside the refrigerator and forgot about them).
Problems with impulse control, like snacking when you’re trying to manage your diet.
Struggling with thinking before you talk, causing you to blurt out the first thing that pops in your head without considering that it might hurt someone’s feelings.
Having trouble explaining your thought process clearly because you understand it in your head, but putting it into words for others feels overwhelming.
Possible Causes
What are the most common causes of executive dysfunction?
Experts don’t fully understand why executive dysfunction happens, or why it can take so many different forms. However, experts have linked this issue to several conditions that affect the way your brain works, including:
Addictions (especially alcohol use disorder and drug use disorder).
Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Autism spectrum disorder.
Depression.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Schizophrenia.
Brain damage and degenerative diseases
Executive dysfunction can also happen if there’s damage to or deterioration of the areas of your brain that contribute to executive function abilities. Some common examples of conditions or circumstances that can cause damage or deterioration include:
Alzheimer’s disease.
Brain tumors (including cancerous and noncancerous growths).
Cerebral hypoxia (brain damage from lack of oxygen).
Dementia and frontotemporal dementia.
Epilepsy and seizures.
Head injuries such as concussions or traumatic brain injuries (TBIs).
Huntington’s disease.
Infec
tions (such as those that cause encephalitis or meningitis).
Multiple sclerosis.
Stroke.
Toxins, such as carbon monoxide poisoning.
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