Holding Space: What Mindfulness Teaches Us About Emotion Regulation
- Eva Peters
- Sep 4, 2025
- 4 min read
Emotion regulation is one of the most transformative outcomes of mindfulness practice — and one of the most misunderstood.
We often think of regulating our emotions as “calming down,” “being rational,” or “not getting carried away.” But real regulation isn’t about suppression or forced control. In fact, the emotional energy that arises within us isn’t something we can simply eliminate. As physics reminds us, energy cannot be created or destroyed — only transformed.
Emotions Are Energy
Every emotion has a physiological footprint. Anger may come with heat in the face and chest, a rapid heartbeat, and clenched muscles. Anxiety might show up as shallow breath, stomach tension, or racing thoughts. These aren’t incidental side effects — they are the emotion, expressed in body and mind.
When we try to rationalize away or suppress what we feel, we don’t erase the emotion. We displace it. Often into our bodies, or into unconscious behaviors, or into relational dynamics that get more confusing with time.
Mindfulness offers a radically different — and more sustainable — approach.
Regulation = Relationship, Not Removal
Mindful emotion regulation doesn’t aim to change the emotion itself. Instead, it changes our relationship with the emotion.
This means:
Being able to sit with the often uncomfortable physical and mental sensations of emotion.
Observing the emotion without identifying with it.
Allowing the emotion to arise and pass in its natural rhythm — without clinging to or resisting it.
It’s about holding space.
As we develop this capacity, we learn to respond instead of react. And in that space lies our greatest power.
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."— Viktor E. Frankl
The Science of Mindful Emotion Regulation
Studies have consistently shown that mindfulness enhances emotion regulation through two main mechanisms:
Metacognitive Awareness — the ability to observe your thoughts, emotions, and sensations as events in the mind, not as definitions of the self.
Decentering — a psychological process of stepping back from immediate emotional identification.
For instance, a meta-analysis by Guendelman et al. (2017) found that mindfulness is associated with lower emotional reactivity and greater emotional clarity. Another study by Hölzel et al., (2011) showed that mindfulness training increases activation in the prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for executive control and regulation, while decreasing activity in the amygdala, which is linked to emotional reactivity.
These neurological shifts support our ability to remain present with challenging emotional experiences — not shutting them down, but relating to them with openness, curiosity, and care.
Naming What We Feel: Emotional Literacy Matters
Emotion regulation isn’t only about observing what we feel — it also requires the ability to name it.
Developing a richer emotional vocabulary (sometimes referred to as emotional granularity) is a powerful way to deepen self-awareness and make sense of our internal landscape. When we move beyond basic labels like “mad” or “sad” into more nuanced words like “disappointed,” “frustrated,” “wistful,” or “resentful,” we become better able to understand our needs and respond with clarity.
This ability is sometimes impaired in people with alexithymia — a condition marked by difficulty identifying and describing emotions. Research has shown that lower interoceptive awareness (the sense of internal bodily signals) is often linked to alexithymia (Herbert et al., 2011; Murphy et al., 2017). In other words, when we are disconnected from our bodily sensations, it becomes harder to know what we’re feeling, and that impairs our emotional literacy and regulation.
The good news? Both interoception and emotional vocabulary can be trained. And mindfulness — especially when practiced in conjunction with emotional labeling — supports both.
A Simple Practice: Name It to Tame It
One powerful and accessible exercise is the practice of noticing and labeling emotions in real-time.
Try this:
Pause and take a few conscious breaths.
Tune into the body. Where is the emotion showing up? Heat, tension, hollowness, tingling?
Ask yourself gently: What am I feeling?
Name the emotion. Use a specific word if you can. (If not, even “I don’t know” is a helpful start.)
Breathe with the emotion, holding it in awareness without judgment.
Remind yourself: This too will pass.
Doing this over time builds not only emotional awareness but also emotional confidence — the sense that you can be with what you feel without becoming overwhelmed.
Final Thoughts
Emotion regulation isn’t about silencing what’s difficult. It’s about listening deeply, naming clearly, and responding wisely. Through mindfulness, we learn to hold space for our emotional life — not as a problem to fix, but as a vital part of being human.
As you move through your day, notice how emotions show up in your body. Try labeling what you feel. Take that space between stimulus and response. It may just be the place where your next moment of growth begins.
Tip: Use the Emotion Wheel as a tool to expand your emotion vocabulary.
References
Guendelman, S., Medeiros, S., & Rampes, H. (2017). Mindfulness and emotion regulation: Insights from neurobiological, psychological, and clinical studies. Frontiers in Psychology, 220.
Herbert, B. M., Herbert, C., & Pollatos, O. (2011). On the Relationship Between Interoceptive Awareness and Alexithymia: Is Interoceptive Awareness Related to Emotional Awareness?: Interoceptive Awareness and Alexithymia. Journal of Personality, 79(5), 1149–1175. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2011.00717.x
Hölzel, B. K., Lazar, S. W., Gard, T., Schuman-Olivier, Z., Vago, D. R., & Ott, U. (2011). How does mindfulness meditation work? Proposing mechanisms of action from a conceptual and neural perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(6), 537–559.
Murphy, J., Brewer, R., Catmur, C., & Bird, G. (2017). Interoception and psychopathology: A developmental neuroscience perspective. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 23, 45–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2016.12.006
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