Learning and practicing Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills are one of the primary ways to regulate emotion. There is an entire section of skills that are specifically geared toward regulating your emotions but I find that increasing skills in mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, and distress tolerance will all help to ease the intensity of emotions. Naming and identifying emotions can often be the first step toward regulating them. Accepting that life includes both positive and negative emotion can help you to better deal with negative emotion. It is VERY VERY HARD to sit with a painful emotion but often if you can do it without making the situation worse you wipe out a LOT of secondary negative emotions. Skills such as opposite action where you try a behavior that is the opposite of how your feeling can help change the emotional experience. Doing things to create more positive emotion in your life can also be very helpful in improving your overall well being and also giving you positive experiences to balance out the negative emotions in life which will make them more bearable.