Work requires more than completing tasks, making decisions, and solving problems. At the same time, we continuously regulate our attention, emotions, impulses, and behaviour. This less visible effort can become an additional burden, but it can also be an investment in more effective performance. What determines its cost, and when does self-regulation actually help us?
The Invisible Work of Self-Regulation
Imagine a brief meeting with your manager. They make a comment you perceive as unfair. Anger rises almost immediately. Your heart rate and breathing quicken. You hold back a sharp response. You try to manage the tension by pushing your emotions down. You listen, monitor your tone of voice, and carefully choose your arguments so that you can respond professionally.
You have just engaged in self-regulation: the process of adjusting your reactions, attention, and behaviour to serve what you want to achieve, rather than simply following an immediate impulse. At work, we do this almost constantly. We are, in a sense, always on alert. But what does this effort cost us? Holding back an impulsive response can be beneficial. The problem arises when managing ourselves becomes an additional, ongoing task.
The demands on our self-regulation do not arise solely from individual choices. Exploitative leadership, unclear priorities, mergers and organisational change, conflicting roles, new systems, geographically dispersed teams, open-plan offices, and constant interruptions can all place additional demands on employees. These conditions may contribute to cognitive fatigue, procrastination, decision-making difficulties, and even intentions to leave an organisation.
As employees, we often have limited influence over these conditions. In this article, I will therefore focus on the aspects of self-regulation that we may be able to influence.
The Short-Term Perspective: Self-Regulation as an Immediate Expenditure of Energy
Does self-regulation drain our energy, or does it help us conserve it and avoid chaos? Both.
In the short term, consciously directing our thoughts, emotions, and behaviour can involve genuine cognitive and physiological effort.
Throughout the day, managers and employees make numerous difficult decisions. They adjust how they express themselves to meet social expectations and attempt to control unwanted thoughts and emotions. Sometimes, these efforts have the opposite effect: trying not to think about something requires us to keep checking whether the unwanted thought has returned.
This additional mental effort can contribute to cognitive fatigue, making it harder to remain flexible, concentrate, and make considered decisions. Under demanding conditions, it may also increase the likelihood of mistakes, impulsive behaviour, procrastination, and reduced wellbeing.
The solution, however, is not to abandon self-regulation. Without it, we would be much more vulnerable to immediate rewards and passing distractions, like a child in a toy shop, constantly abandoning one activity for another.
What matters, then, is not only how much effort we invest in self-regulation, but how we regulate ourselves. Repeatedly suppressing emotions or resisting impulses can be costly. Yet we can also develop strategies in advance that help us respond more effectively, with less effort, when similar situations arise. What initially requires conscious practice may eventually become a resource we can draw upon.
Self-Regulation as an Investment
Investing our resources — time, energy, and discipline — in developing skills and effective ways of responding may help us build resilience and prepare for future demands.
This perspective is reflected in Steven Hobfoll’s Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, which describes how people strive to acquire, protect, and retain valuable resources. Resource losses can be particularly damaging, sometimes contributing to further losses in what Hobfoll describes as loss spirals.
Investing in self-regulation may help protect us against future demands, but it is not without cost, particularly when we are already operating under significant strain. So how can we reduce the immediate effort of self-regulation without giving up its benefits? There is no single approach that works for everyone. Some strategies reduce the number of situations requiring conscious control. Others help us prepare for difficult events, manage our immediate reactions, or recover resources after periods of effort.
1. Reducing Unnecessary Decisions: Routines and Work Organisation
At work, we make many of the same small decisions every day. If we repeatedly have to decide when to respond to messages, where to start, or how to organise our tasks, we create additional mental work for ourselves.
Establishing routines can reduce this effort.
- Automating everyday behaviours. A consistent daily schedule, regular blocks of focused work, or eliminating trivial decisions — even something as simple as having a standard work outfit — can reduce unnecessary demands on attention. Well-established habits allow certain actions to become more automatic, reducing the need for continuous conscious monitoring.
- Protecting against attention residue. When we leave tasks unfinished or repeatedly switch between incomplete activities, part of our attention may remain focused on the previous task. This phenomenon, known as attention residue, can make it harder to concentrate fully on what comes next. Completing a task, or clearly identifying where we will resume it, may make the transition easier.
2. Preparing for Difficult Situations: Planning Our Responses
We do not have to wait until a difficult situation occurs to decide how to respond. When we know which events regularly trigger tension, we can prepare certain responses in advance.
- Implementation intentions. Rather than making a new decision every time, we can create a simple if–then plan: “If situation X occurs, I will do Y.” For example: “If my manager raises their voice, I will take a slow breath and count to three before responding.”
- Stimulus control. We can adjust our environment before starting work by turning off notifications, limiting distractions, or choosing a quieter place to concentrate. Reducing exposure to distractions means spending less effort repeatedly resisting them.
- Setting boundaries around working time. Establishing a clear end to the working day and limiting time spent on low-value, shallow work can help protect periods of focused attention and leave more room for recovery.
3. Regulating Our Responses: Emotions, Thoughts, and Physiological Arousal
When it comes to emotions, an important distinction is whether we intervene early in the emotional process or try to suppress a reaction that is already underway.
- Cognitive reappraisal and defusion. We can reconsider how we interpret a situation, distinguishing observable facts from our assumptions about them. Cognitive defusion involves taking a different relationship to our thoughts: recognising them as mental events rather than unquestionable facts. Both approaches can help us respond without automatically treating our first interpretation as the only possible one.
- Responding to unexpected situations. Sometimes events catch us off guard, and we feel pressure to maintain a professional appearance despite strong emotions. Managing our outward emotional expression in this way, often described as surface acting, can involve considerable effort. Slowing our breathing, particularly allowing a longer exhalation, may help reduce physiological arousal.
- Decompression. Emotional activation can be accompanied by physical responses such as trembling hands, faster breathing, flushing, or muscle tension. Immediately returning to demanding work while still highly activated may add to our sense of exhaustion. Giving ourselves a few minutes, taking a short walk, changing our surroundings, or briefly stepping outside can help the body gradually settle.
4. Replenishing Resources: Recovery Outside Work
An important part of making this investment sustainable is allowing ourselves to recover outside working hours.
Several types of recovery experiences can be particularly helpful:
- Psychological detachment from work: mentally switching off from work-related matters during leisure time, perhaps supported by a consistent end-of-day ritual.
- Relaxation: engaging in activities that help reduce physical and emotional arousal, such as a walk or a quiet hobby.
- Control over leisure time: having some freedom to decide how we spend our time outside work.
- Mastery experiences: pursuing satisfying activities such as sport, hobbies, or learning a language. Although these activities require effort, they can strengthen our sense of competence and self-efficacy.
These strategies are not an exhaustive list. They differ in how they work, when they may be useful, and how well they fit our needs and goals.
Flexibility Rather Than Excessive Control
Trying to exert even greater control over our reactions may only add to the strain. Does every emotion need to be suppressed? Does every worrying thought require several layers of analysis? Sometimes we need to hold back an impulse. At other times, we may benefit from reconsidering our interpretation of a situation or relying on an established pattern of behaviour. What matters is flexibility: choosing how to regulate ourselves according to the situation, while considering what we are trying to regulate, how we are doing it, and why.
Let’s return to the meeting with our manager and look at the self-regulatory processes behind what might appear to be simple behaviours. The manager makes a comment we perceive as unfair. Anger, physical tension, and the urge to respond immediately may arise automatically. At the same time, we may feel compelled to hide our emotions to maintain a professional image. What could we do in this situation? For example:
- I notice my reaction (a brief pause and self-observation).
- I give myself a moment to regulate my arousal (slowing my breathing).
- I stop fighting the emotion and allow it to be present (acceptance).
- I check what I know and what I am assuming (facts versus interpretations).
- I decide what I want to achieve (setting an intention).
- I choose how to respond (curiosity, questions, assertiveness).
- I consider whether further action is needed (setting a boundary, clarifying the situation, or changing the circumstances).
- I allow the tension to subside after the conversation (decompression — perhaps taking a longer route back to my desk or briefly changing my surroundings).
Flexibility does not mean applying every available technique or ticking off a checklist whenever a difficult emotion appears. It means recognising which strategies are useful, and when. It also means distinguishing between situations in which we need to change our own response and those in which we may need to change the circumstances — or leave them altogether.
Expanding our repertoire of responses takes practice. New strategies are often easier to learn in situations where emotional tension is still relatively low, before attempting to use them under greater pressure.
The fatigue associated with work and the fatigue of constantly managing ourselves often coexist. It is worth recognising not only the tasks we perform, but also the effort we invest in regulating ourselves while performing them. More importantly, we need to notice when that effort helps us act effectively and recover our resources, and when it becomes another, not always necessary, source of strain. Self-regulation is an inseparable part of how we function, but not every way of regulating ourselves comes at the same cost.
*Translated from the original Polish into English with AI assistance.
