You’re Not Regulating Your Emotions, You’re Repressing Them 🧠

Why your “healing era” might actually be your avoidance era and how to finally break the cycle (10min Read)

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TL;DR Summary

• You’re not “regulating” your emotions; you’re repressing them in socially acceptable ways.

• Real regulation isn’t about control, it’s about capacity.

• The nervous system can’t heal through intellectualizing; it needs to feel safe while feeling.

• Emotional avoidance keeps you in the same attachment loops, different partner, same wound.

• Learn the neuroscience behind true regulation, and 3 tools to finally break the cycle.

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You’re Not Regulating, You’re Surviving

If I hop onto one more call with a woman telling me she’s ‘regulating her emotions’ after a breakup, when I can literally see her body is in fight-or-flight, I might lose it.

I say that lovingly because I get it. I’ve been there.

And I work with women like this every day, the ones who’ve read Attached, who journal religiously, who meditate and quote Gabor Maté, but still end up in the same heartbreak story over and over.

The problem? You’re not regulating your emotions.

You’re repressing them, but you’ve learned how to do it in ways that look spiritual, productive, and “healthy.”

You tell yourself you’re staying busy, focusing on your glow-up, manifesting peace…

But really, you’re surviving… Intellectualizing your pain so you don’t have to feel it.

You’re not calming your system. You’re outperforming your pain.

That ends today!

Let’s dive in.

When “Regulation” Becomes Repression

Here’s the thing: regulation and repression can look identical from the outside.

Both might look like deep breaths, meditation, even stoic composure.

The difference lies in what your body is actually doing under the surface.

• Repression happens when the prefrontal cortex, the rational, controlling part of your brain, suppresses signals coming from the limbic system. You’re literally muting your body’s distress signals.

• Regulation happens when you learn to listen to the distress signals, allow them to rise and fall, and shift yourself back into a parasympathetic state. It’s like your vagus nerve telling your limbic system, “You can feel this, and we won’t die.”

One numbs the feeling. The other metabolizes it.

The trouble? Ambitious women, especially ones conditioned to stay “collected,” are absolute experts at turning regulation into another performance metric.

You tell yourself, “I’m fine, I’m focusing on me.”

But your body’s still in fight-or-flight, your jaw’s tight, and your stomach’s a knot.

That’s not regulation, that’s your sympathetic nervous system trying to protect you from feeling the loss.

You’re staying busy because slowing down feels dangerous.

You’re intellectualizing your feelings because vulnerability feels like failure.

You’re meditating or doing yoga to avoid your emotions instead of meeting them.

And your brain, bless it, thinks this is success.

The Neuroscience of Repression

Let’s get one thing straight: your brain isn’t trying to sabotage you.

And emotional repression isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s an efficient strategy from your brain’s perspective.

When you experience emotional pain, your brain’s limbic system (especially the amygdala and insula) lights up like a fire alarm.

If your prefrontal cortex, the “manager” part of your brain, has been trained over years of stress or perfectionism to prioritize performance and control, it steps in fast.

It says, “Nope, not safe to feel that. Shut it down.”

Your nervous system then reroutes that emotional energy into action…

Work harder, stay busy, stay positive, keep it together.

That’s repression, not regulation.

And it’s why ambitious humans excel at repression.

Our brains have literally wired safety to doing instead of feeling.

It’s not a moral failure. It’s neuroscience.

Evolutionarily, this makes sense. For millennia, emotional pain was a survival threat.

Being excluded from your tribe meant death. So your brain evolved to prioritize functioning over feeling.

But here’s the catch: what kept your ancestors alive keeps you stuck.

When you skip over emotional processing, your nervous system never learns safety; it just learns suppression.

Feeling vs. Fixing

Here’s what happens inside the brain.

When you repress emotion, your amygdala fires an alarm, threat detected.

Instantly, your prefrontal cortex jumps in to override it, telling your body, “Shhh, we’re fine.”

It suppresses the physiological cascade that would normally help you discharge that emotion, the shaking, the tears, the heat in your chest.

That’s why you might feel numb, detached, or “weirdly calm” in moments that should feel anything but calm.

You didn’t regulate the emotion, you just muted the signal.

But when you allow the emotion, when you actually feel it in your body instead of fixing it with logic, a different neural network lights up.

Your insula, your interoceptive awareness center, becomes active.

It helps you sense what’s happening inside, your heartbeat, your breath, the tightening in your throat, so you can process emotion through the body, not around it.

At the same time, your anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) comes online.

The ACC acts like a translator between feeling and awareness, integrating the emotional charge (limbic system) with compassion and meaning (prefrontal cortex).

That bridge is regulation.

It’s the moment your brain learns: “I can experience this emotion without being consumed by it.”

Repeatedly moving through emotions this way, allowing awareness and bodily sensing, can help your nervous system form new associations of safety with emotion, instead of reactivity or shutdown.

This practice strengthens the regulation networks connecting your limbic system, insula, ACC, and prefrontal cortex, building emotional resilience over time.

That’s what true rewiring looks like, not forcing calm, but teaching your body that calm can exist inside emotion.

Emotional Repression Disguised as Healing

To make matters worse, repression has had a rebrand.

It’s not cigarettes and stoicism anymore… It’s productivity and positivity.

It looks like:

• “Focusing on yourself” by overworking.

• “Being spiritual” by bypassing anger or grief.

• “Staying calm” by dissociating through mindfulness.

• “Regulating” by intellectualizing everything you feel.

It’s emotional procrastination wrapped in self-help language.

And underneath it all, you never actually process the breakup, the loss, the betrayal, etc.

You just move from pain to performance.

And then you’re confused when six months later, you end up in the same situation with a different guy or job, and end up on a call with me asking, ‘Why does this keep happening to me, Cody?’

Because you never actually regulated, processed, and healed what happened to you…

You just avoided it in socially acceptable ways, and no one around you had the balls to call you out for it.

Well, I do.

The Real Meaning of Regulation

What most people think regulation is:

• Staying calm.

• Controlling your reaction.

• Staying positive.

• Not letting anyone see you break.

• Talking yourself out of “negative” feelings.

But regulation isn’t about control. It’s about connection.

It’s not about keeping your emotions small enough to manage.

It’s about letting your body complete the stress cycle so it can return to safety.

That’s not tidy work.

It’s letting yourself actually feel the emotion in your body without rushing to fix it.

It’s crying, shaking, breathing, trembling, and staying present through it, even if it’s ugly at first.

It’s allowing grief, anger, pain, etc, to move through instead of thinking your way out of it.

Because your body doesn’t need you to fix the emotion.

It needs you to witness it.

How to Ride the 90-Second Wave

Here’s what’s wild: an emotion, biologically speaking, only lasts about 90 seconds in the body.

That’s it. Ninety seconds.

That’s how long it takes for the chemical surge, adrenaline, cortisol, norepinephrine, to peak and begin to fade if you don’t interfere.

But most of us never let that wave crest.

We interrupt it. We grab our phones, check our email, “get productive.”

We tell ourselves, I shouldn’t feel this way.

We layer story on top of sensation, and each thought re-triggers the loop.

So instead of ninety seconds, we end up living inside the same emotion for ninety days.

Real regulation is learning to ride that wave.

To stay present as your body trembles, your throat tightens, your chest burns, and to breathe through it without turning it into a mental project.

You don’t think your way through the wave; you feel your way through it.

That’s how you show your nervous system, I can feel this and survive it.

Why You Keep Repeating the Same Story

When you repress emotions instead of processing them, you don’t delete them; you just store them.

Imagine your emotions as emails.

Each one arrives with a subject line like: “Fear,” “Grief,” “Loneliness,” “I Miss Him.”

Every time you ignore it or “stay positive,” you’re just marking it as read, without ever opening it.

And your nervous system doesn’t forget. It keeps resending the same email until you finally click open.

That’s why you end up with the same pattern over and over again: different partner, same wound.

Because your body’s trying to finish a conversation, your mind keeps ending too early.

So, you’re not crazy for ending up in the same story over and over.

You just never change how you move through the space between endings and beginnings.

You rush it, skip the emotions, and call it progress.

You’ve built your whole life on high-functioning through pain, but you can’t logic your way into regulation.

You have to feel your way there.

Ok, Cody, great, you keep saying I need to feel it, but how do I actually do this???

Great question, here are 3 tools you can use TODAY!

Three Tools for Real Regulation

1. Get a Trauma Therapist, Not Just a Trauma-Informed One

There’s a big difference.

I’ve even written a full blog on this: Why “Trauma-Informed” Therapy Might Be Keeping You Stuck

Bottomline? Trauma-informed means they understand trauma.

A trauma therapist knows how to work with it in your body.

Modalities like EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, or IFS (Internal Family Systems) don’t just reframe thoughts, they rewire your neural pathways by helping your system complete the defensive responses that got frozen during past pain.

They can help you do exactly what I’ve been talking about for this entire blog.

It’s the difference between talking about the fire and actually putting it out.

2. Learn to Ride the 90-Second Wave

When emotion hits, don’t fix it — feel it.

Name it. Locate it in your body. Belly breathe into it.

Don’t fight it, accept that it’s there, and let that be ok.

Imagine your body as an ocean, and the emotion as a wave; you can’t stop it, but you can learn to surf it.

Each time you ride it through, you teach your nervous system that emotions aren’t forever.

They pass in under 90 seconds.

They resolve themselves and dissipate. They can be survived.

That’s how safety gets rewired, not through logic, but through lived experience.

3. Stop Performing Healing and Start Practicing Stillness

You don’t need another book, another “healing era,” or another productivity-branded self-care routine.

You need stillness, the kind that’s quiet enough for the grief, anger, or fear you’ve been outrunning to finally catch up to you.

Healing isn’t glamorous. It’s boring, slow, and often invisible.

But that’s where regulation lives, in the moments you choose presence over performance.

The Middle Space: Where Real Change Happens

You don’t get different results by changing partners, jobs, or zip codes.

You get different results by changing how you move through the middle space.

That raw gap between endings and beginnings. That’s the part everyone rushes.

You skip the discomfort, call it strength, and move straight into “I’m fine.”

But your body knows when you’ve skipped a chapter.

And until you slow down long enough to feel it, your story won’t change.

You’re not broken. You’re just high-functioning through pain, and no one ever taught you that repression can look like progress.

But you can change that.

You can sit still long enough for your body to remember it’s safe to feel again.

Because healing isn’t about managing emotions, it’s about integrating them.

Alright, rant over. I believe in you.

And until next time… Live Heroically 🧠

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Supporting Research

• LeDoux, J. E. (1998). The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. Simon & Schuster.

• Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton.

• Damasio, A. R. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Harcourt.

• Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press.

• Taylor, J. B., & Kassel, J. D. (2008). “The 90-Second Rule: Emotional Regulation and the Amygdala Response.” Harvard Health Publishing.

• van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.

• Craig, A. D. (Bud). (2013). Anterior Insular Cortex and Emotional Awareness. Brain Structure and Function, 219, 443-453. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-013-0541-4

• Menon, V. (2024). Insular cortex: A hub for saliency, cognitive control, and interoceptive awareness. Stanford School of Medicine. https://med.stanford.edu/content/dam/sm/scsnl/documents/insular_cortex_2024_menon.pdf​

• Gross, J. J. (2014). Cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression strategies’ role in emotion regulation: neuroimaging evidence. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 8, 175. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00175