Emotion regulation and self-control: Implications for health behaviors and wellbeing

Abstract

This chapter provides a broad overview of the interaction between emotion regulation and self-control, and the implications of this interaction for health behavior and wellbeing. Some forms of emotion regulation are highly effective and result in rather successful self-regulation. Other forms of emotion regulation are doomed to fail at the expense of successful self-regulation. The chapter explores a short introduction on what constitutes self-regulation and self-control and discusses why emotions trigger emotion regulation and what emotion regulation represents. Subsequently, it describes how the domains of self-regulation, and more specifically self-control and emotion regulation, relate to each other within the topic of health behavior and wellbeing. The chapter explains a paradigm case of how emotion regulation can impact the health-related behavior of eating. Emotions and eating are closely connected, as is illustrated by the phenomenon of ‘emotional eating’, which is eating in response to negative emotions rather than hunger.