Is ‘dysregulated’ a pop psychology buzzword, or something to measure and fix? Why the term isn’t just about having intense emotions, it’s about reacting to those emotions in an out-of-proportion way.
The other week, a friend told me ‘I’m so dysregulated today’. When I asked ‘how so?’, she said she felt super-emotional and that other people might notice. But is that the same thing as being ‘dysregulated’?
I’ve heard the noun ‘dysregulation’ and the adjective ‘dysregulated’ quite a few times recently, on podcasts and in person. My initial reaction was oh, it’s probably just a new buzzword. But turns out it ain’t.
The American Psychological Association defines dysregulation as “any excessive or otherwise poorly managed mechanism or response. In the field of psychology, a commonly studied type of dysregulation is emotional dysregulation, which has been shown to negatively impact well-being.”
Emotional dysregulation is basically what it sounds like: having difficulty managing the intensity (and sometimes the duration) of your emotional state. It’s not just about having intense emotions – it’s also about acting on, or reacting to, those emotions in ways that are out of proportion to the situation. Something that can hurt you and people around you.
When my friend and I looked up ‘dysregulation’ on our phones, she decided she wasn’t dysregulated, because she was managing the intensity of her feelings. That’s not to undercut the validity of her emotions at all. She has a demanding job, three kids, and a big mortgage. “Maybe ‘disregulated’ is just something we say nowadays to reflect an emotional state when we feel out of whack,” she says. I mean, is anyone not feeling out of whack right now, between Covid, climate change, higher rents, higher mortgage interest rates, the state of our healthcare system, and the three-headed monster that is the New Zealand government? Not to mention overseas atrocities.
The Words To Describe ‘Your Terminal Unease’
The words ‘dysregulated’ and ‘dysregulation’ are being, well, said much more often. Rachel Sugar (yes, her real surname) has written a story for The Cut called: “When Did Everyone Get So ‘Dysregulated’? How Managing Our Mental Health Became A Matter Of Monitoring Our Nervous Systems”. She writes that “for better or for worse, a buffet of terminology has emerged that might help explain your terminal unease. By early 2024, we seem to have landed on our latest favourite diagnosis: Have you considered the possibility that you might be dysregulated?”
Sugar says she first experienced ‘dysregulation’ as a new mum. “‘I am dysregulated,’ I thought, crying in the shower. I couldn’t decide if it made things better, but it was so flexible. In a sentence, ‘dysregulated’ could replace everything from ‘panicked’ or ‘overstimulated’ or ‘irrationally flipping out’ or ‘being in acute crisis,’ and transform those messy conditions into something isolatable and objective… unlike ‘triggered’ or ‘boundaries’ or other classics of the genre, ‘dysregulation’ felt dispassionately medical. It locates your problem in your biology rather than your personality, which is comforting.”
Sugar explains how a nervous-system dysregulation happens when the sympathetic nervous system (responsible for the fight-or-flight response) and the parasympathetic nervous system (which is more rest and digest) are out of sync. She writes that “the dozen or so therapists, clinicians, and historians I spoke to couldn’t precisely pinpoint how or when ‘dysregulation’ crossed over from the clinic into popular imagination, but they had theories. One obvious explanation is simply that as therapy and psychiatric diagnoses grew more mainstream, ‘dysregulation’ rode its coattails.”
A Spectrum of Dysregulation
Is there a danger of using the word ‘dysregulation’ too casually? Because emotional dysregulation can be a symptom of mental-health conditions, including PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder), BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) and anxiety disorders. Emotional dysregulation can also be a challenge for neurodivergent people (whose brains work differently from typical ones) – including people with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).
For other people, emotional dysregulation intrudes less on their lives, but can involve impulsive behaviours and decisions, mood swings, or emotional reactions that don’t match the situation.
For most people, emotional dysregulation is a useful concept. An acquaintance tells me: “I think it’s a bit more neutral to notice that I’m dysregulated, rather than thinking of it as overreacting, freaking out, etc.”
In this story, I’m looking only at adults, as dysregulation in children and young adults is another topic (as is ‘co-regulation’ by ‘momfluencers’ who model a Zen-like state to help regulate their children).
‘A Window Of Tolerance’
Lou Gane, who is neurodivergent, is a New Plymouth ‘neurodiversity-affirming’ health coach and educator: a neurodiversity-affirming approach recognises that neurodivergence is not a flaw or illness to be corrected, but can come with its own set of strengths, interests, and support needs in how people interact with the world. “I’ve heard people recently talking about dysregulation as an unnecessary pop-psychology buzzword,” Lou tells me, “and was surprised because I find it such a helpful catch-all for emotional distress”.
Lou, who facilitates a neurodivergent support group, recently wrote a personal piece called ‘The Window of Tolerance’ with the subtitle: ‘thinking about distress and dysregulation, and why ‘anxiety’ doesn’t describe everyone’s experience’.
“We all have a range of stress or emotional activation within which we can function well, engaging socially and problem-solving to the best of our abilities,” Lou says. “It’s really healthy and normal to fluctuate within this window throughout each day, with our sympathetic nervous system energising us when needed and our parasympathetic nervous system bringing us back to a calm state. The range we can tolerate depends on a lot of things, but it’s worth being aware that people with trauma histories and those with neurodivergent traits often have a narrower window of tolerance and larger fluctuations within it. So it [this window] is extra relevant with many of the people I’m supporting in my work.”
Lou talks to many of them about dysregulation. “It helps by externalising things to an extent, and, compared to other terms, is much less judgmental.” And using the word to describe her own experience “not only helps me understand my own experiences under stress and history of depression, but also makes sense of the variety of responses to stress”.
Keeping Up Appearances
WedMD article ‘What Is Emotional Dysregulation?’ states that “emotional dysregulation is a term used to describe an emotional response that is poorly regulated and does not fall within the traditionally accepted range of emotional reaction”. That wording got me wondering: is the effort that some of us put into emotional regulation less about how we feel in ourselves, and more about how we feel we should present ourselves to others?
As in, many of us feel we must act and react according to social norms. For instance, you might pretend to be unbothered if someone callously criticises a report (even if you had bugger-all time to write it), or you might always say yes when asked if you’re having a good day (even when you’re not). In other words, is it problematic if we feel unable to express the legitimate emotions that we have? Obviously it’s always a case-by-case basis; no one should yell at the waiter.
Also, I think the term ‘dysregulated’ suggests that we can regulate our way out of this! We just need to apply ourselves! But when dysregulation is framed as a problem we should solve, might a failed attempt to ‘regulate’ ourselves actually make us feel more dysregulated? And I’m wary of a future where, alongside our REM sleep and our daily steps, we measure things like emotional regulation/dysregulation on our gadgets. Because what if we regulate ourselves out of feeling at all?
