Emotional regulation is a dying art.

There was a time when adults could feel something without screaming at you about it. We could disagree, hard, in a meeting and walk out with our faces still attached. Bad news arrived at the dinner table and the meal finished anyway. Call it discipline: the capacity to feel a thing in full and still choose what to do next.That capacity is going the way of the Buffalo. You can watch it disappear in real time on any platform that rewards reaction; the faster the feedback loop, the worse the regulation. People are unleashing their feelings, unbounded and uninhibited, before they’ve finished having them, which means they aren’t really having them at all. They’re skipping the inner step where a person sits with a sensation and decides whether or not it deserves to leave the body.The new orthodoxy says suppressing emotion is harmful. This might be true, but outside of a therapist’s office, it’s trivial. Suppression and regulation are different animals. Suppression is shoving the feeling…