Emotional Outsourcing: When We Rely on Others to Regulate Us

Recently, I had a manuscript rejected.

If you’ve ever submitted academic work for publication, you know that rejection is part of the process. Even when a paper isn’t rejected outright, the feedback can be blunt, sometimes harsh, and often difficult to read.

My first reaction isn’t always analytical. It’s often emotional.

It’s easy, in those moments, to take it personally, to feel defensive, to want to dismiss the critiques or explain them away. There’s also a strong pull to move quickly out of that discomfort and to seek reassurance, to talk it through, or to look for some external validation that the work is still good.

But over time I’ve noticed something. When I’m able to sit with that initial reaction, to read the feedback carefully, and to resist the urge to dismiss it or escape from it too quickly, something shifts. The critiques that initially feel uncomfortable often become the ones that improve the work the most.

That experience has made me think more broadly about how we respond to difficult emotions.

In many areas of life, there is an increasing tendency to escape from discomfort by relying on external sources like feedback, reassurance, distraction to help us feel better. I’ve started to think of this as a form of emotional outsourcing.

What Is Emotional Outsourcing?

Emotional outsourcing occurs when we rely on external sources to regulate internal emotional states. This can take many forms: seeking reassurance, looking for validation, distracting ourselves from discomfort, or turning to others to help us settle emotionally. 

These responses are not inherently problematic. In fact, they are often helpful. Humans are relational, and connection plays an essential role in emotional well-being. Talking things through, receiving support, and feeling understood can all help us process difficult experiences.

The distinction is not between independence and connection.

It is between using external support as part of the process of working through emotion, and relying on it as the primary way of resolving it.

When support becomes the default response to discomfort—when the first move is always outward rather than inward—the internal process can be shortened or bypassed. The emotion may settle in the moment, but the opportunity to understand it, tolerate it, and integrate it may be reduced.

Over time, this can shift the balance. We may become increasingly skilled at finding relief, but less practiced at regulating internally.

How Emotional Regulation Develops

Understanding this pattern requires stepping back and looking at how emotional regulation develops in the first place.

From very early in life, regulation is not something we do alone. Infants and young children rely heavily on others to make sense of their emotional experiences. One of the earliest forms of this is social referencing, or looking to caregivers to interpret unfamiliar or uncertain situations. A child encountering something new will often glance at a parent’s face, using their reaction as a guide for how to respond.

In this way, emotional understanding begins as a shared process. We learn what to feel, and how to respond, by observing others. The emotional responses children observe do not just shape how they react in the moment; they begin to form the templates they carry forward.

This continues through co-regulation. Caregivers help children manage distress by soothing, reassuring, and providing stability in moments of emotional intensity. Over time, these repeated interactions begin to form internal patterns. The child doesn’t just feel better in the moment; they begin to internalize the process of calming down.

Gradually, this external support becomes internal capacity. Through repeated experiences of being supported through discomfort, children begin to develop self-regulation. Emotional self-regulation is the ability to notice emotions, tolerate them, and respond in more deliberate ways. This shift happens slowly, through consistent exposure to manageable emotional challenges, paired with support that does not remove the experience entirely.

Healthy development, then, is not about eliminating distress. It is about learning how to move through it.

This is where the tension begins to emerge. If external regulation remains the primary response and if discomfort is consistently resolved through reassurance, distraction, or immediate relief then the internal system may not fully develop. The individual may learn how to feel better, but not necessarily how to regulate.

Why Emotional Outsourcing Is Increasing

In many ways, what we are seeing now is not a new phenomenon, but an extension of this developmental process that has been reshaped by the environments we now inhabit.

Humans are cognitive economizers. We tend to conserve effort, avoid discomfort, and move toward the path of least resistance when it is available. This is not a flaw; it is a basic feature of how we operate. What has changed is how easy it has become to act on that tendency.

Digital environments provide immediate access to external regulation. We can reach out, receive feedback, distract ourselves, or shift attention within seconds. Emotional discomfort no longer has to be endured for long before relief is available.

Over time, this can shorten the natural cycle between emotional activation and resolution. Instead of moving through discomfort, we move around it.

We are not more dependent because we are weaker. We are responding to environments that make external regulation faster, easier, and more accessible than internal processing.

What Emotional Self-Regulation Actually Requires

Emotional regulation is not the elimination of emotion. It is the ability to remain with it long enough to understand and move through it.

This process is often less visible than the outcomes we associate with it. It does not look like immediate relief. It looks like a pause, like discomfort, or like staying with a feeling before knowing exactly what to do with it.

At a basic level, regulation involves noticing what we are feeling, tolerating the discomfort that comes with it, and gradually making sense of the experience. It may involve recognizing an initial reaction, questioning it, and allowing it to shift over time rather than acting on it immediately.

For example, reading critical feedback and noticing the urge to become defensive, but choosing to sit with that reaction before responding. Or feeling anxious after an interaction and allowing time to reflect, rather than immediately seeking reassurance.

This process is often slow, uncomfortable, and effortful. But it is also where emotional capacity is built.

Without that internal processing, emotions may be resolved in the moment, but not integrated. Over time, the ability to manage similar experiences independently may not fully develop.

When Regulation Is Outsourced

The pull towards emotional outsourcing is often subtle. It can look like needing immediate reassurance when uncertainty arises. It can look like difficulty sitting with uncomfortable feelings without distraction. It can show up as a reliance on others to determine whether we are okay, or as a tendency to move quickly away from emotional discomfort before it has been processed. 

For example, receiving a critical email and immediately reacting or reaching out to someone to interpret it, rather than sitting with the initial reaction. Or feeling unsettled after a conversation and seeking reassurance before taking time to reflect on what actually happened.

These are not character flaws, they are patterns shaped by repeated experience, and over time, they can have consequences.

The Developmental Cost

If regulation is consistently outsourced, the internal system can’t fully develop. Without repeated opportunities to experience and work through discomfort, distress tolerance remains limited. Confidence in one’s ability to manage emotional challenges may not fully form. Emotional stability becomes more and more dependent on external input.

Paradoxically, this can contribute to increased anxiety. When the threshold for discomfort is low, more experiences begin to feel overwhelming. What begins as a strategy for feeling better in the moment gradually reduces the capacity to handle difficulty over time.

A Necessary Reframe

None of this suggests that we should move away from connection. Relationships are essential and support matters. Co-regulation remains an important part of how humans function across the lifespan. 

The goal is not independence from others, but the ability to return to oneself. External support should help us process and move through emotional experiences but not replace that process entirely.

What Might a Healthier Approach Look Like?

A healthier approach recalibrates how we use external support. It may involve pausing before immediately seeking reassurance, allowing some space to process emotions internally first. It may involve naming what we are feeling before sharing it, rather than using others to define it for us. It may involve staying with discomfort just a little longer than feels natural, and building tolerance over time. When we do turn to others, it shifts the role of support from solving the emotion for us to helping us work through it. 

In my own work, the most uncomfortable feedback has often been the most useful if I can stay with it long enough to understand it.

That isn’t always my first instinct. The initial reaction is to move away from it, to defend against it, or to look for reassurance that the work is still good.

But the moments that lead to growth aren’t the ones where I feel better quickly. They’re the ones where I stay with the discomfort long enough for something to change.

If the aim is to build emotional self-regulation, feeling better immediately is not always the most useful outcome. What matters more is the gradual development of the capacity to move through difficult emotions with increasing steadiness.

That capacity is not built by avoiding discomfort, but through repeated experiences of staying with it long enough to understand and process it.

Are We Raising Emotionally Avoidant Adults and Calling It Self-Care?

Recently, a student emailed me to let me know that she wouldn’t be attending class for the next few weeks because she was ‘prioritizing herself’. It’s something that I’ve been seeing more frequently. This one message stood out to me, not because self-prioritization is inherently wrong, but because of how commonly withdrawal is being reframed as growth. When did avoiding challenges become synonymous with strength?

I frequently hear phrases like ‘protecting my peace’, ‘this is triggering’, ‘I need to step away for my mental health’, or ‘I don’t have the capacity for this right now’. Mental health absolutely matters, and there are times and situations when stepping back is necessary, such as illness, grief, and acute mental health crises. Compassion and flexibility matter, but ordinary stress, frustration, or challenges are not the same as harm, and if we continue to treat them as such, we risk shrinking the very capacities that young adults need to develop. If higher education becomes organized primarily around comfort, it ceases to prepare students for life beyond university.

University is inherently demanding, and intellectual growth requires some cognitive discomfort. Similarly, relational growth often requires navigating conflict. If we are truly trying to help young adults to prepare for life after graduation, we must allow space for discomfort, not to overwhelm, but to teach them how to regulate, endure, and ultimately solve problems with increasing independence. 

Digital environments increasingly allow us to curate not only our social interactions, but our ideas. When young adults are consistently shielded from intellectual friction, confirmation bias deepens, and critical thinking can be short-circuited. Growth, whether emotional, relational, or cognitive, requires engagement with, not elimination of, discomfort.

The Line Between Regulation and Avoidance

An important distinction that is often missing from this conversation is that emotional regulation is not the same as emotional avoidance. On the surface, both can look similar; both may involve stepping back, taking space, or reducing intensity. But psychologically, they’re different processes with very different outcomes. 

Emotional regulation involves recognizing distress, calming the nervous system, and then re-engaging with the challenge from a calmer, steadier place. It isn’t about eliminating discomfort but rather increasing one’s capacity to remain present within it. For example, emotional regulation allows one to acknowledge that ‘this is difficult’, and ‘I need to gather myself so that I can face it.’ Over time, this process builds confidence because each successful encounter with stress becomes evidence that hard things can be managed. 

In late adolescence and early adulthood, identity formation is a central developmental task. This period is characterized by change, instability, and increasing responsibility. The capacity to manage stress doesn’t develop by removing it. It develops through repeated, supported exposure to manageable challenges. 

Emotional avoidance, in contrast, removes the stressors rather than building capacity to face them. It may involve withdrawing from a difficult conversation, dropping a demanding course, ignoring feedback, or avoiding situations that provoke discomfort. In the short term, avoidance reduces anxiety. The relief that comes from avoidance is immediate and can even feel empowering. Digital environments have made avoidance easier than ever; a mute button, an unfollow, a closed tab, and in so doing have normalized it as a default response.

Social media platforms reward emotional certainty and moral clarity. They often amplify language about ‘protecting your peace’, ‘cutting off toxicity’, often without nuance or context. Algorithms privilege content that validates rather than challenges, and decisive emotional messaging spreads more easily than developmental complexity.

At the same time, constant exposure to curated lives and public commentary heightens social comparison and perceived threats. Ordinary stress can feel amplified if it seems like everyone else is succeeding. The threshold for tolerable discomfort shrinks when the nervous system is saturated. 

If avoidance becomes the primary strategy for managing stress, the nervous system never learns that discomfort can be tolerated and worked through. The difficult class is never completed, the tense discussion is never repaired, and the challenging assignment is never revised after failure. Each escape reinforces that discomfort is something to be avoided.

In higher education, this distinction is especially important. University is not just a place to acquire information; it is a developmental training ground for adulthood. Students aren’t just learning content, but also how to handle deadlines, disagreements, evaluations, uncertainty, and responsibility. If the default response to stress is to disengage, many of these developmental opportunities can be missed.

None of this suggests that students should push through genuine crises or ignore serious mental health needs. It's also worth acknowledging that not all withdrawal is unfounded. Some students are navigating genuinely under-resourced environments, inadequate mental health support, or institutional failures that make discomfort feel less like growth and more like neglect. The answer in those cases isn't more endurance, it's better support. But that's a different problem than the one this piece is addressing. If ordinary academic and relational challenges are consistently framed as threats to well-being, we may be inadvertently making things harder for our students in the long run.

Beyond the Classroom

The consequences of this shift don’t end at graduation. Patterns rehearsed in adolescence and early adulthood tend to solidify over time. If withdrawal becomes the primary stress response, young adults may enter the workplace less prepared for feedback, less tolerant of ambiguity, and more likely to interpret ordinary professional pressure as personal harm. 

Work environments often require navigating criticism, managing deadlines, resolving conflict, and persisting through projects that are sometimes neither exciting nor affirming. Relationships might require repair after disagreements. Parenting requires endurance. Civic life requires engagement with perspectives that may not align with personal views. None of us is exempt from these demands. 

When distress tolerance remains underdeveloped, anxiety often increases rather than decreases. Novelty feels threatening, feedback destabilizing, conflict intolerable. Resilience is not only built in moments of crisis; it’s also built in the ordinary, repeated experiences of doing difficult things and realizing one can survive and even grow through them.

Building Capacity Instead

So what might a healthier model look like?

First, we must reclaim the original purpose of self-care. Self-care was never meant to eliminate challenge. It was meant to restore capacity. Rest isn’t the same as relief. Where relief removes discomfort, rest rebuilds strength. When self-care becomes synonymous with exit, we confuse temporary ease with long-term resilience.

Healthy self-care allows a student to say, “I need a moment,” not “I am done.” It creates space for recovery so re-engagement becomes possible. Regulation is what allows us to return. Avoidance ensures that we don’t.

For example, a student overwhelmed by deadlines might take an intentional evening of rest, stepping away from screens, sleeping, exercising, or speaking with a friend, and return the next day prepared to complete the work. Or a student upset by difficult feedback might pause to regulate the initial surge of emotion before revisiting the comments with curiosity rather than withdrawal. In digital life, logging off temporarily to calm comparison or outrage can serve the same purpose. In each case, rest restores capacity so that engagement remains possible. The challenge isn’t erased; the student is strengthened.

Second, we must acknowledge the role of digital architecture in shaping our thresholds for discomfort. Digital platforms are designed to reduce friction. They offer immediate distraction, curated agreement, and emotional validation at scale. When relief is always one scroll away, the skills required to sit with discomfort weaken. If our environments consistently remove cognitive and emotional friction, we shouldn’t be surprised when tolerance declines.

This doesn’t mean abandoning digital media. It means becoming intentional about it. Following diverse perspectives rather than only affirming ones. Pausing before disengaging from ideas that unsettle us. Creating spaces, online and offline, where disagreement is navigated rather than muted. If algorithms are optimized for comfort and certainty, development may require us to deliberately reintroduce complexity and nuance.

For example, a student who notices rising frustration while scrolling through political or social content might resist the instinct to immediately mute or unfollow. Instead, they might pause, read the argument fully, and ask, “Why does this unsettle me?” This does not require agreement, but it builds cognitive flexibility. Similarly, intentionally following a small number of thoughtful voices across perspectives can counteract the narrowing effect of algorithmic curation. The goal is not exposure for shock value, but exposure for growth.

Third, institutions of higher education can model a different narrative. Compassion and accountability are not opposites. We can validate distress while still inviting growth. We can design classrooms that normalize struggle as part of mastery. We can teach emotional regulation and distress tolerance explicitly, rather than assuming they will emerge naturally.

Early in a semester, an instructor might discuss the difference between harm and discomfort, explaining that confusion, frustration, and cognitive strain are often signs of learning, not failure. Students can be taught simple regulation strategies: how to pause before reacting to feedback, how to break overwhelming tasks into manageable steps, and how to tolerate the discomfort of not immediately understanding. When struggle is normalized and skills are named, students learn that difficulty is not a signal to exit but an invitation to grow.

Across my recent writing, I’ve returned repeatedly to a similar tension: we are mistaking comfort for well-being. In digital life, we mistake stimulation for meaning. In self-care culture, we mistake relief for restoration. In education, we risk mistaking avoidance for strength. The through line is consistent: when friction disappears entirely, growth stalls.

The goal is to raise adults who know that feeling overwhelmed is survivable. Adults who can rest, recalibrate, and return. Adults who can sit with disagreement without collapsing. Adults who can encounter difficulty without immediately interpreting it as harm.

If we want resilience, we can’t build lives organized entirely around the elimination of discomfort. We must build lives and learning environments that teach young adults how to move toward and through challenges with steadiness rather than away from them. That student who emailed me may eventually return to class, or she may not. Either way, the question isn't whether she needs space. It's whether that space is being used to prepare for re-entry, or to avoid it entirely.