Find alternatives to expressive suppression in high-stakes moments

When you must manage what you show, use reappraisal or slow your breath rather than white-knuckling the expression down.

Why it works

There are genuine contexts — a job interview, a difficult client conversation, an emotional negotiation — where full emotional expression is not appropriate. The mistake is suppression as the default tool. Reappraisal (changing the meaning) achieves the same reduction in expression without the cognitive tax because it reduces the emotion being generated, not just its outward display. Slow breathing is a lower-cost alternative that engages the parasympathetic system rather than fighting the emotion with willpower.

How to do it

1. Before the high-stakes moment, find a genuine reappraisal: what is a more accurate, less reactive reading of this situation?
2. During the moment, use slow, extended exhale breathing as a low-cost physiological anchor.
3. If suppression is happening anyway, acknowledge the emotion privately afterward rather than burying it permanently.
4. Evaluate after the event: did you choose a regulation strategy, or default to suppression under pressure?

Evidence

Comparison studies by Gross and colleagues show that reappraisal achieves similar or better expressive management as suppression, with substantially lower cognitive cost and without the sympathetic activation that suppression produces. The slow-breathing alternative rests on well-established vagal physiology. (rct)

In extreme high-stakes moments under time pressure, finding a reappraisal may be difficult; having pre-prepared appraisals is more effective than generating them in the moment.

Sources

• Gross & Levenson (1997), physiological and expressive differences between suppression and reappraisal

Common mistake

Using suppression as the go-to for professional contexts and justifying it as "being professional," when what is actually happening is a high-cost strategy that erodes performance over time.