Your emotions are a large part of your life. Some say your emotions let you know that you’re alive. What happens when you can’t regulate your emotions? The effects of ADHD are known to affect focus, attention, motivation, executive functions, memory, and other aspects of life. However, ADHD also has a substantial impact on emotional regulation.
There is a name for this phenomenon; it’s called Deficient Emotional Self-Regulation (DESR).
What is Deficient Emotional Self-Regulation (DESR)?
Deficient emotional is a term that describes the difficulty people with ADHD face with self-regulating their emotions. DESR can manifest as low frustration tolerance, where a person will become frustrated easily. DESR can also be associated with:
- Being easily emotionally excited
- Negative reactions
- Impatience
- Difficulty refocusing from emotionally triggering events
How Does ADHD Affect Emotions?
ADHD causes difficulty in the regulation of certain behaviors. For example, people with ADHD can have issues regulating their focus on a task that does not guarantee an immediate sense of gratification. This same regulation issue extends to emotions as well.
Up to 80% of children with ADHD experience problems regulating their emotions. These areas of difficulty can manifest as:
- Frequent mood changes
- Difficulty noticing other people’s emotions
- Experiencing extremely intense emotions
How Can DESR Affect Your Child?
Deficient Emotional Self-Regulation can affect many areas of your child’s life. Children are just learning to understand their emotions with or without ADHD. DESR can make it difficult for your child to understand the importance of their feelings at a given moment. This is because of how ADHD impairs working memory.
Children with ADHD may not understand the importance of how they feel in a given moment because their memory doesn’t always allow them to store the information regarding that emotion. This can lead to a myriad of emotional issues down the line.
Sadness and low self-esteem can also be a by-product of untreated DESR. This is because many people with untreated ADHD suffer from dysthymia. Dysthymia is a mild, long-term mood disorder. As it relates to ADHD, dysthymia is often caused by frustrations, difficulties, emotional dysregulation, and stress associated with living with untreated ADHD.
How To Help Your Child Regulate their emotions
Whether your child has ADHD or not, they can have difficulty regulating and understanding their emotions, as they are still learning themselves. For a child with ADHD, this difficulty can be intensified. One of the best things you can do to help your child regulate their emotions is to validate their thoughts and feelings.
Here are a few things you can say to help validate your child’s emotions:
- “It feels bad to lose….”
- “We all get angry when…”
- “I can understand why you are feeling…”
- “That can be annoying…”
- “I feel the same way when…”
- “I bet you are sad because…”
The Power of Mindfulness
Some studies have shown that mindfulness can be a helpful tool in regulating emotions in children with ADHD.
What is mindfulness?
In short, mindfulness is being in the moment and not judging your thoughts. We have many thoughts throughout the day, but they are just thoughts, even negative thoughts. Mindfulness helps you to be aware that you are not your thoughts.
Mindfulness can help kids refrain their thoughts in the moment. In addition, mindfulness brings about a feeling of calmness.
Bottom Line
ADHD plays a vital role in how your child’s emotions may manifest. If you notice that your child has
- trouble regulating their emotions,
- Getting over emotionally triggering events, or
- difficulty seeing the emotions of others,
Your child could be experiencing Deficient Emotional Self-Regulation (DESR). Luckily, you can do methods at home to work with your child to help them learn how to regulate their emotions on their own! Mindfulness and validating your child’s thoughts and feelings have proven effective.
You can also work with your child’s healthcare provider for treatment.
Are you looking for a pediatric provider? MYCHN offers pediatric behavioral health services and ADHD treatment services. Please visit our website, or call (281) 824-1480 to learn more.
Resources
How to Help an Overly Emotional Child (verywellfamily.com)
How ADHD Triggers Intense Emotions In Your Brain (additudemag.com)
Anger Issues and ADHD: Emotional Dysreguation, DMDD & Bipolar Disorder (additudemag.com)
The Importance of Mindfulness for Kids | Understood – For learning and thinking differences
