Emotion affects mental health, so what is the relationship between emotional regulation and mental health?

Emotional regulation is closely related to mental health;

(A) emotional regulation helps to maintain a stable mental health.

I think mental health refers to a state of good adaptation to life and society. In this state, individuals can establish and maintain harmonious interpersonal relationships with others, maintain internal physical and mental balance, exert their potential and pursue self-realization. To maintain a state of mental health, people need to adjust their emotions frequently. In school and family, to maintain and develop good interpersonal relationships, it is necessary to effectively control negative emotions and maintain or enhance positive emotions.

In recent years, people's increasing concern about academic emotions also reminds us of the importance of emotional regulation for mental health. Academic emotions emphasize students' academic-related emotional experiences, including happiness, boredom, disappointment, anxiety and anger. Researchers and educators have noticed that there is a general negative academic mood among some children and adolescents. For example, some children and teenagers show obvious and persistent weariness of learning, and when it comes to learning, they are upset, depressed and resistant to homework. If these negative academic emotions are not adjusted in time and effectively, they will affect their daily study and academic performance, and will form learning obstacles over time, which will lead to other psychological and behavioral problems.

It can be seen that emotional regulation is to make people keep functional adaptation in the situation of emotional arousal and help individuals keep their internal arousal within the manageable or optimal performance range. Only in this way can people adapt to society, have harmonious interpersonal relationships, study and work happily, and maintain stable mental health.

(2) Emotional regulation helps to promote individual mental health.

When emotion regulation makes emotion, cognition and social behavior coordinate, happiness and life satisfaction improve, this regulation is a good regulation; Adjustment is a bad adjustment when individuals lose their active control of emotions, their physical and mental functions are damaged, their cognitive activities are blocked, their academic and work achievements are reduced, and their interpersonal relationships are destroyed.

Good emotional regulation can promote individual mental health. As mentioned above, cognitive reappraisal is one of the most commonly used strategies for good emotional regulation. Individuals who make good use of cognitive reappraisal strategies can often effectively improve their mood and mental health. Cognitive reappraisal strategy grasps the key factor in the mechanism of emotion production and regulation-cognitive evaluation, which is an indispensable link in the process of emotion production.

Learning a good emotional regulation process and repeating it in our daily life can reshape people's nervous system to a great extent and make structural changes in the interconnection between neurons. In this way, the active adjustment process can be transformed into an automatic adjustment process. We know that automatic adjustment is the least cost of cognitive resources. Therefore, we should guide children and adolescents to use good emotional adjustment strategies, especially cognitive reappraisal strategies, as soon as possible in educational practice, so that good emotional adjustment can become a habit and a stable automatic process, thus shaping their appropriate emotional response mode and making it a part of their personality.