How to Control Emotions Without Shutting Them Down: A 3-Step Process That Actually Works, and the Neuroscience Behind the Technique

What if the secret to control isn’t shutting emotions down, but listening to them? Discover VET, a science-backed 3-step method to help you Navigate Emotions from overwhelm to clarity. Based in neuroscience and the Adaptive Theory of Emotions, this approach helps you respond with insight instead of reacting on autopilot. Here’s how it works.

by Joshua Freedman, MCC

You Don’t Need to Suppress to Stay in Control

I’m in the midst of a difficult conversation with a colleague, and my first reaction is to pretend everything’s fine. I push away the feelings and try to be rational. Again. Then I realize how I’m totally messing this up. I take a breath, and let myself feel the feelings. Then, with the tremor of emotion, I say: “I’m feeling really sad and worried about how this conversation is going, I really care about you, and I want us to work on this together.”

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What if the real definition of emotional control is rooted in understanding feelings? The secret is listening to emotions without thinking we need to obey or fix the feelings. Acknowledging without being overtaken.

That’s the heart of the VET framework: Validate, Explore, Transform. It’s a process for navigating emotions rooted in the Adaptive Theory of Emotions and neuroscience. In practice, it helps us move from emotional hijack to empowered insight. 

Why Controlling Emotions Feels So Hard

Have you ever felt like a switch flipped in your brain, and suddenly you were flooded with anger, or anxiety, or shame? That’s not your imagination. It’s your biology. And, according to the world’s largest study of emotional intelligence, for most of us, it’s even more difficult today than it was a few years ago. 

Emotions are chemical messengers. As I shared in a talk on the neuroscience of how to actually control emotions by Navigating, these chemicals are produced in the brain (especially the hypothalamus), and they travel throughout the body. They prepare us for opportunity or threat. Then they multiple through a cascade effect.

Each molecule lasts just six seconds. But they trigger a chain reaction. One cell receives the message, responds by producing more chemicals, which in turn activate more cells. It becomes a cascade. This cascading chain reaction helps explain why we sometimes get emotionally overwhelmed. It’s not weakness. It’s neurochemistry. And it’s shaped and accelerated by the conditions of escalated stress that’s all around us in today’s polarized world.

When we react from that flooded state, our cortical brain shuts down, a phenomenon known as “downshifting.” In this state, the rational part of the brain takes a back seat while older, faster-reacting emotional systems drive behavior. According to Antonio Damasio, a pioneering neuroscientist in the study of emotion and decision-making, this is not a flaw: it’s a feature of our biology. Emotions are not just noise; they are embodied responses rooted in neural and physical processes that evolved to help us survive.

In a seminal article in Nature, Fundamental feelings, Damasio explains that emotions begin as changes in the body triggered by the brain, such as shifts in heart rate, posture, and gut activity, which are then mapped and interpreted by neural circuits. These embodied responses form the substrate of what we experience as feeling. He writes, “The mapping of body states associated with emotions constitutes the foundation for the mental experiences of feelings.” In other words, emotions shape our experiences, they change our bodies and brains continuously and automatically.

You can’t just will them away. You have to work with them.

Rethinking Feelings: Choosing to See that All Emotions Have Value

One of the most challenging steps towards this inside-out approach to emotional mastery is to let go of the myth that certain feelings are negative or bad.

As soon as we start labeling some feelings as desirable, we get into an internal conflict about our feelings which makes them harder to manage:  I feel mad, but I shouldn’t feel this, and now I feel both mad and ashamed.

The level of emotional complexity in the world today is intense. Fueled by political divisiveness, environmental destruction, economic uncertainty, war, the runaway pace of technological change – more and more people feel lost, distressed, overwhelmed. In the State of the Heart report, I refer to a concept of Meta-Crisis as a way to explain this escalating ball of pain. A just-released journal article finds AI is making this even more intense.

On top of that, if we are creating an internal conflict of “I shouldn’t feel ____,” we’re making a difficult situation worse.

We get out of that internal conflict by a simple decision that all emotions have value.

There’s a powerful body of research showing that how we think about emotions changes how we feel them. This is known as cognitive reappraisal: the ability to reinterpret emotional experiences in ways that reduce distress and increase resilience.

A 2023 study using fNIRS brain imaging showed that people using reappraisal (vs suppression) activated broader brain networks including the prefrontal cortex and temporal areas associated with empathy and regulation.

Another recent study published in NeuroImage (March 2025) found that frequent reappraisers showed greater gray and white matter density in areas associated with executive functioning and had lower biomarkers of stress).

The Hidden Cost of Suppression

When people say “control your emotions,” they often mean “suppress them.” But suppression doesn’t lead to clarity; research shows suppression actually increases pressure, disconnection, and volatility. When we try to contain what we feel, the emotion we end up in an internal conflict which intensifies the pressure. 

That may be why, per research from Psychological Science, that interacting with someone who habitually suppresses their emotions disrupts communication and leads to higher stress levels. So not only does suppressing emotions make it worse for yourself, it also spills over to others. 

Suppressing emotions doesn’t help; they come out sideways, intensified and harder to manage. It’s like trying to dam a river: the pressure builds until it comes out, usually in escalating anger (here’s how to handle anger when it’s directed at you).

Instead of suppression, what if we engaged emotions with compassion?

Validation doesn’t mean agreement. It means witnessing. Listening without judgment. That’s the first step to changing our inner dialogue. We can use a coach-approach to change the way we talk to people, including ourselves.

In simple terms: your mindset about emotions changes your biology. Here’s how to use this approach to actually control your emotions – without the negative side effects of suppression.

VET: A Framework for Emotional Mastery

At Six Seconds, instead of “manage” or “control,” we use the term Navigate Emotions to remind ourselves to get out of the traps described above. I began to experiment with this when my son was a toddler, and I realized that I could not use control or logic if I wanted to have positive outcomes; I needed to learn to connect with that little person at an emotional level. I learned about validating feelings. Here’s the simple process to help people engage with emotions more constructively:

Validate > Explore > Transform.

• Validate: Name the emotion and value its presence.
• Explore: Get curious about the message and meaning.
• Transform: Allow the emotion to guide you to purposeful action.

Each step builds space between stimulus and response. Let’s break it down.

The 6-Second Pause: Your Reset Button

If you get stuck, here’s a trick from neuroscience: you can interrupt an emotional cascade with six seconds of deliberate thought.

Try this:

• Recite a poem or math problem.
• Imagine scaling a recipe.
• Say your phone number backward.

Each of these uses different parts of the brain; and resets the flood of emotional reactivity.

That’s why we’re called Six Seconds. Because a six-second pause can change everything.

Listening Is the New Control

Real control isn’t about shutting down. It’s about tuning in.

When you Validate, Explore, and Transform, you move from chaos to clarity. From flood to flow.

So the next time you feel a wave rising inside you, pause. Don’t fight it. Don’t obey it. Just listen.

Because emotions aren’t the problem. They’re the signal.

Let’s start listening better.