Bottom-up and top-down regulation

If you experience strong feelings of anxiety, or have had severe distress or trauma experiences, the chances are that experiencing a sensation/stimulus which relates to these - the response - is going to be a survival mechanism. In other words, flight, fight or freeze.

Regulating your emotions from the bottom up refers to the alarm in your brain (amygdala) being triggered. The body is too busy reacting for the brain to think. This fight, flight, freeze, or fawn part of the brain is the first to develop, and it can hijack higher parts of the brain. To prevent this from happening, the lower parts, responsible for sensory-motor and survival, need to function effectively before the higher parts can take over.

Bottom-up regulation deals with brain stem responses, which are cues to take action to gain safety and survive. Learning to regulate these triggers so that you can begin to observe the emotions triggered, and process them in a safe way is part of therapy, and specialised trauma approaches such as EMDR support you to practise these.

The bottom-up approach starts with information acquired from the body’s sensations.  The life-saving stress response that pushes you into looking and acting dysregulated is noticed. We begin to address this by using strategies such as breathing, grounding, throwing a ball/sock, paper into the air, and drinking water, followed by a calming exercise such as a calm or safe place.

When you can achieve safety and stability, you can begin to work with what arises in these states, feeling feelings in the body and keeping awareness in the mind. This dual awareness then allows trauma and distress to be reprocessed and the information is stored differently so that stimuli do not impact in the same way.

Using top-down approaches to regulation, we are dealing with the Prefrontal Cortex. This part is associated with thinking and logic, or higher-order emotional awareness, and speaking. Top-down emotions are conscious responses to how we think about our circumstances. In this way stimuli occur, our thinking patterns make us aware of what is happening, and then we feel something in response.

When addressing our responses from the top down, awareness of our thoughts and feelings as an “observer” of ourselves supports us to manage effectively. Mindfulness, yoga, and awareness of automatic thoughts, tracking inaccurate or negative thinking and challenging these, or creating practices to notice and respond, can help you to alter the way you are impacted.

It is likely that for most of us, a combination of approaches works best to support regulating emotions, so finding out through therapy, and/or your own practice can give you a good set of tools for regulating. If you are experiencing PTSD or struggle to regulate, therapy can support you to acquire these skills and practise them safely. Safety and stabilisation are essential to process trauma and acquiring strategies to regulate will be the first part of any work to address these debilitating experiences.

Find an experienced therapist who can offer you this specialist support if you want to overcome trauma and develop your regulation tool kit.