Emotional regulation in care settings helps healthcare professionals recognize the usefulness and transience of emotions, as well as manage their influence and not get carried away on the emotional side.
Emotional regulation requires skills to recognize, manage and control our emotions, from the point of view of psychology, it is conceived as a basic process within emotional intelligence, intelligence that is crucial for the development of communicative skills, so necessary to work with patients.
- However.
- To practice emotional regulation in health settings.
- You first need to know exactly what this process is and what is emotional regulation an exercise.
- The ability to be open to both pleasant feelings and those who are less open?( Fernandez.
- 2010).
The model of emotional regulation based on the emotional treatment of Hervás (2011) divides this process into several tasks, or phases, that must be traversed until regulation is achieved:
There is a two-way relationship between emotions and thoughts, both feed on each other and failure in one dimension puts the other at risk, so a constant negative thought, which we cannot get rid of, affects the way we feel.
Likewise, a negative emotion that does not adapt to reality influences the way we think, a very common example among health workers is that they do not see patients correctly for lack of time.
This dissatisfaction generates emotions of frustration, stress or helplessness that, in turn, these emotions feed the thought causing a gradual worsening of the situation.
Faced with these problems, a solution is to change the situation through action, but there are situations in which you cannot change what is happening or the probability of change is very low, this occurs especially in the health field when works with symptoms. who do not always have remission, with diseases that may not improve, with limited time or resources, etc.
Therefore, it is necessary to have tools to manage one’s emotions, in this way you can continue to offer a quality treatment, working for and for the improvement of the patient.
Several studies have established a negative relationship between emotional intelligence and occupational stress, noting that the greater emotional intelligence training, lower stress level and greater burnout prevention (Under Gallego and González Hervas, 2014)
“Burn-out, or burnout syndrome, generates professional dissatisfaction, deterioration of the work environment, deterioration of the quality of work, absenteeism, abandonment of the profession and adoption of passive-aggressive attitudes towards patients. ” – Leal-Costa, Daaz Agea, Tirado-Gonzàlez, Rodroguez-Maron and Van Der Hofstadt, 2015-
Mindfulness can be translated into mindfulness, and consists of focusing on the present, returning attention to the here and now, following these guidelines:
Mindfulness has been shown to increase emotional regulation. In addition, in patients, regular practice may:
The purpose of mindfulness is not to leave the mind empty, but to accept the thoughts and feelings we feel, detaching ourselves from them. Understand that both are transient phenomena and do not define who we are.
Therefore, the person who practices mindfulness regularly becomes an expert in regulating their emotions.