Emotional Regulation as Preventive Health: A Missing Piece
by Natalie Grinvalds, MPH, PhD, BS, CHES
Introduction
Despite significant investment in workplace wellbeing initiatives, many organizations continue to see rising burnout, disengagement, and stress-related absence. This points to a key gap in many strategies: limited attention to how employees respond emotionally to workplace stressors. Emotional regulation, the ability to manage and respond to emotional experiences in adaptive ways, plays a central role in determining whether work-related stress leads to sustainable performance or long-term harm. In the workplace, it shapes how employees cope with pressure, adapt to change, navigate relationships, and sustain wellbeing over time. This article examines emotional regulation as a preventive force for health and resilience, outlining why it matters for workplace wellbeing leaders and how it can be integrated into wellbeing strategies to support both employee wellbeing and organizational sustainability.
Understanding Emotional Regulation
Emotional (or emotion) regulation is not about staying calm all the time or suppressing emotions. It is how we manage and respond to our emotions intentionally. It involves a deliberate pause to avoid reactive behavior, creating space to choose actions that are aligned with our core values. Emotion regulation includes managing one’s own emotions and helping others regulate their emotions (co-regulation). These complementary processes are fundamental to leadership, teamwork, learning, and wellbeing in the workplace.
Emotional Regulation as a Preventive Health Skill in the Workplace
Emotional regulation extends beyond mental health to influence physical health, leadership effectiveness, job satisfaction, and organizational performance. As an upstream protective factor, it shapes how employees respond to work demands, with chronic dysregulation increasing risk of burnout and stress-related illness. Because emotional regulation skills are learned rather than innate, many organizations address emotional challenges reactively instead of developing them as a core component of preventive health.
Why Emotional Regulation Matters for Organizations
Employees with stronger emotional regulation skills experience lower emotional exhaustion, higher engagement, better collaboration, and greater job satisfaction, particularly during periods of organizational change. Emotion regulation and positive work experiences reinforce one another, shaping both attitudes and performance. Leadership plays a critical role, as leaders’ ability to regulate their own emotional responses shapes communication and psychological safety, while poorly regulated leadership can intensify stress. At the organizational level, workload, autonomy, role clarity, and leadership norms shape emotional demands, reinforcing emotional regulation as both an individual skill and a systems-level capability central to sustainable performance.
Evidence-Informed Approaches for Workplace Wellbeing Leaders
From a systems perspective, emotional regulation is not located in one role, department, or intervention. For wellbeing managers, the most effective strategies are those that span systems rather than sit within a single program or function. These approaches are reflected in the delivery of workplace wellbeing across sectors. In my work with organizations, we seek to embed emotional regulation into leadership development, everyday work practices, and job design, supporting employees in managing pressure and sustaining behavior change over time. This applied work reinforces the value of systems-aligned approaches that position emotional regulation as a practical capability embedded within work, rather than a standalone wellbeing intervention.
Supporting emotional regulation within organizations does not require creating entirely new wellbeing programs. Research suggests that greater impact is often achieved by strengthening and aligning existing efforts across leadership development, job design, and stress management when emotional demands are already present. Making emotional regulation explicit within these systems helps connect siloed initiatives and embed wellbeing into everyday work. The following strategies operate as cross-cutting system levers that wellbeing leaders can influence through leadership practices, job design, and everyday ways of working.
Key strategies include:
Building individual capability through skills-based training
At the individual level, skills-based training supports employees to recognize emotional signals, understand how stress appraisals influence behavior, and apply adaptive regulation strategies under pressure. For wellbeing managers, this may look like short workshops or learning modules embedded into existing training calendars, focused on identifying early signs of emotional overload and practicing responses such as reframing demands, pausing before reacting, or prioritizing time to recharge. When positioned as a practical work skill rather than a mental health intervention, these approaches are more likely to be adopted and sustained.
Strengthening leadership as a system-level regulator
Leaders shape how stress is interpreted, how emotions are expressed, and whether recovery is supported. Leadership development that emphasizes emotional intelligence and role modeling regulation supports healthier communication, decision-making, and psychological safety. Evidence shows that managers’ self-regulation positively influences employee performance under uncertain conditions, underscoring the practical benefit of investing in leaders’ emotional regulation capacity.
Designing work to reduce unnecessary emotional load
Emotional regulation capacity is strongly influenced by job and workflow design. High workload, role ambiguity, and constant interruption increase emotional strain and make regulation more difficult, even for skilled employees. From a systems perspective, wellbeing managers can work with operational leaders to review how work is structured, clarify decision-making authority, sequence demanding tasks more intentionally, and ensure recovery is built into work cycles. These changes reduce reliance on individual coping and support emotional regulation at scale.
Embedding regulation into everyday work practices
Rather than adding standalone wellbeing activities, emotional regulation can be integrated into existing routines. Evidence suggests brief, low-burden practices are most effective when embedded directly into daily work processes, supporting both wellbeing and performance. Research also indicates that regulation strategies such as cognitive reappraisal are more sustainable when practiced in context, as part of routine task management and decision-making, rather than delivered as isolated training. In practice, this may include structured pauses between meetings, short team check-ins during peak periods, or end-of-day reflection moments that support emotional and cognitive closure.
Using digital tools as supportive infrastructure
Digital wellbeing tools can support emotional regulation when used intentionally and without promoting constant self-monitoring. Evidence indicates benefit when tools encourage awareness, reflection, or brief regulation practices, and when they complement, rather than replace, supportive leadership and healthy job design. For wellbeing managers, this means selecting tools that integrate smoothly with existing systems and clearly communicating that they are optional supports, not performance-monitoring mechanisms.
Across these strategies, values-informed decision-making provides a unifying framework. When leaders and teams are guided by shared values, emotional responses become sources of information rather than obstacles to manage. This supports clearer communication, more consistent leadership behavior, and stronger alignment between stated wellbeing commitments and everyday work practices. These strategies align with international guidance on mental wellbeing at work, including World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations emphasizing supportive leadership, healthy job design, and the integration of wellbeing into organizational systems.
Implications for Workplace Wellbeing
Many employees only begin developing emotional regulation skills in response to burnout, illness, or prolonged stress. Embedding emotional regulation into workplace wellbeing strategies can improve long-term physical health, mental wellbeing, collaboration, and organizational sustainability. In practice, this includes reducing burnout-related turnover, supporting healthier leadership cultures, and strengthening resilience during periods of ongoing change.
Conclusion
Emotional regulation is a strategic capability that underpins employee health, performance and organizational resilience. For workplace wellbeing leaders, embedding emotional regulation into leadership practices, job design, and everyday decision-making shifts wellbeing from isolated initiatives into an integrated organizational capability that drives sustained engagement and long-term performance.
About the Author
Dr. Natalie Grinvalds is a health behavior scientist, coach, educator, and workplace wellbeing strategist with over 15 years of experience designing evidence-based, human-centred wellbeing strategies across the U.S. and U.K. She integrates academic rigor with applied practice to help organizations embed physical activity, behavior change, and wellbeing into everyday systems of work. A Research Associate, Lecturer, and Wellbeing Consultant at Sheffield Hallam University’s Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, and Founder of Resilience Fitness + Wellbeing, her work focuses on reducing health inequalities and building resilient organizational cultures. Natalie is a speaker, educator, exercise professional, and advisor translating behavioral science into practical solutions that position wellbeing as a core organizational capability. For more information, connect with Dr. Grinvalds on LinkedIn.
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