selfregulation

Selfregulation, sometimes written as self-regulation, is the ability to manage thoughts, emotions, and actions to pursue long-term goals. It involves monitoring current experiences, evaluating progress, and adjusting responses to align with intentions. It supports tasks such as resisting temptations, delaying gratification, and sustaining effort across domains like learning, health, and work.

Core processes include goal setting and planning, self-monitoring, cognitive reappraisal, problem solving, and the use of implementation intentions—if-then plans that link cues to actions. Environmental factors, feedback, and social supports can strengthen or undermine selfregulation.

Developmentally, selfregulation emerges in early childhood and improves through adolescence, stabilizing in adulthood for many individuals. Neurobiologically, it relies on executive-function networks in the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex, integrated with emotion-related regions of the limbic system to regulate attention, emotion, and impulse control.

Measurement combines behavioral tasks (delayed gratification, response inhibition) and self-report scales measuring perceived self-control or regulatory capacity. Contextual methods such as experience sampling and diary studies provide data on daily regulatory processes in real life.

Applications span education, public health, and clinical contexts, where training in planning, emotion regulation, and self-monitoring aims to improve goal pursuit and well-being. Selfregulation intersects with, but is distinguished from, self-control in some theories.