Emotional instability can come from stress, unresolved trauma, or major life changes. It doesn’t mean something is wrong with you it’s a sign your mind needs support and balance. With the right tools and habits, you can regain emotional control.
Emotional instability means your feelings and reactions are out of your control, and you often experience dramatic mood swings. These are common anxiety symptoms. Sometimes they can be purely emotional and temporary or even natural, other times linked with any underlying mental health disorder.
Mood instability is reported in 40–60% of those with depression, anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
In this article, we’ll discuss emotional instability in detail, its causes, symptoms, and treatment options.
We completely understand that emotional dysregulation can severely impact daily life and relationships, but you’re not alone in fighting it. Digipsych is with you every step of the way.
What’s Emotional Instability?
Emotional instability is a term referring to unexpected and extreme reactions that are out of the person’s control.
Please note that sometimes it’s natural for everyone to experience a range of emotions; the term emotional instability is used for people who experience this more often and face difficulty regulating their emotions most of the time.
Is emotional instability linked to mental instability?
Mental instability is a condition where a person’s way of thinking, emotional regulation, and behaviour are affected in a way that they can’t think with clarity, can’t control their emotions, and find it hard to focus on daily life activities.
Whereas emotional instability means your emotions change quickly, or you find it hard to control yourself.
So, mental anxiety covers a wide range of issues, including anxiety disorders, mood disorders, and psychosis.
But many mental health conditions include frequent emotional instability, intense mood swings, and difficulty regulating feelings.
A large study found that mood instability occurs in 8 out of 10 people presenting to adult mental health services, across disorders such as:,
- Bipolar disorder 22.6%
- Schizophrenia: 15.5%
- Personality disorders:17.8%
In simple terms, if you find yourself emotionally unstable often, it may not just be “bad mood days.” It can be a sign your emotional regulation system is under strain, potentially linked to underlying mental health issues.
Recognizing it early means you can seek help sooner and regain control.
Causes of Emotional Instability:
Emotional Instability has the following causes:
Stress:
Whenever you’re stressed, it activates the fight or flight response in the body. These responses stimulate the limbic system in the body to be more sensitive and reactive to fear or danger.
As the limbic system also regulates emotions, when its activity is increased, it makes emotional responses uncontrolled or unstable.
The rule is simple:
The higher degrees of stress, fear, or anxiety your body experiences, the higher impact it can have on your emotions.
And as long as the stress or the danger persists, the emotional instability persists.
Hyperstimulation:
Hyperstimulation is another common cause of unstable emotions. When stress responses occur too frequently because of anxious behavior, the body can’t completely recover. As a result, incomplete recovery leads to “stress-response hyperstimulation”, because stress hormones are stimulants.
Hyperstimulation affects the body the same way as an active stress response does, creating chronic emotional instability symptoms.
Anxious Behavior
Unhealthy anxious behaviors such as perfectionism, procrastination, all or none thinking, people pleasing, over-responsibility, unnecessary physiological fears, all can add up to an overactive limbic system, affecting your emotions badly.
Sleep Deprivation
Insufficient sleep leads to impaired brain function, increases blood sugar and pressure, stresses the nervous system, increases mood swings, increases cortisol to compensate for feeling tired, which in turn increases stress. All these effects worsen the anxiety system, leading to emotional instability.
Fatigue:
Fatigue or unrest is a thief that destroys peace silently. It causes difficulty in thinking, foggy head, lightheadedness, dizziness, trembling, memory issues, shortness of breath, pain, and heart palpitations, all of which lead to emotional instability.
Low Blood Sugar Level
Low blood sugar levels impact the body badly, causing sweating, increasing anxiety, and emotional instability, leading to uncontrolled reactions or mood swings.
Medication or Recreational Drugs:
Certain medications mimic, cause, and increase anxiety symptoms in the body. Talk to your pharmacist if you feel anxiety symptoms, especially after any particular medicine.
Similarly, substance use or recreational drugs also cause anxiety symptoms, especially those that affect the nervous system.
Health Issues:
Such as nutritional deficiency, dehydration can lead to headaches, concentration problems, fatigue, muscle twitching, heart palpitations, all of which add up to the existing anxiety symptoms.
Hormonal Changes:
Hormones control major reactions in the body, affecting the whole body in many ways. Any sufficient change in hormones can cause anxiety-like symptoms and worsening emotional instability.
Pain
Pain activates the stress response in the body. If the pain is chronic and frequent, it can aggravate hyperstimulation, ultimately leading to uncontrolled emotional responses or mood swings.
Symptoms of an Emotionally Unstable Person:
The emotionally unstable individuals usually represent the following symptoms:
- They feel a roller coaster of emotions. One time they’re happy and in no time, they get sad, angry, or frustrated.
- They experience unsettled emotions that change all the time.
- Unpredictable and uncontrolled reactions to normal life situations.
- Feeling completely distressed or hopeless in life.
- Feel like they can’t predict their emotions; they used to.
- Uncontrolled emotions of fear, rage, sorrow, guilt, panic, or terror.
- Long-term feelings of emptiness.
- Usually, people with emotional instability are either low-confident or self-obsessed.
- Emotionally unstable people don’t understand other people’s point of view and always want to win the argument.
- They are too intense, either soft and kind enough to bear everything or aggressive enough not to bear even minor mistakes.
- Face difficulty in dealing with problems because of a scattered mindset, fears, or self-doubt.
- Never admit that they’re wrong.
- They fear criticism and even minor rejection can hurt their self-esteem.
All these symptoms are collectively referred to as “mood swings”. These symptoms can occur temporarily in response to any stressful situation in life or persist throughout.
Sometimes the symptoms appear in response to any nervousness, anxiety, fear, and stress, or otherwise occur “out of the blue” for no reason.
Similarly, the intensity can vary from slight to moderate to severe. The symptoms can keep on changing from day to day, moment to moment, or stay constant.
The symptoms become more evident when you’re free, resting, undistracted, or have time to think.
How Does Emotional Instability Impact Daily Life?
Emotionally unstable people usually keep thinking about how they’re feeling right now. And when unstable emotions combine with constant worry, it makes already anxious individuals more symptomatic and concerned, further worsening the unsettled emotions. It affects the body physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
Emotional instability impacts an individual’s ability to make sound decisions, leading to impatience, impulsiveness, and risky behaviour. It leads to negative outcomes, which further worsen the emotional functionality.
An emotionally unstable person needs love from family members and friends. Constant mood swings, anger issues, and a constant urge to dominate others can lead to conflicts, arguments that impact family and social life.
Similarly, when a person is emotionally disturbed, they might not be able to focus better on their role, in studies, or at work because of unpredictable emotions, uncontrolled thoughts, and unclear focus.
We completely understand that living with emotional instability is hard, but getting rid of it or managing your emotions is completely possible. You just need to accept it, try to fix it yourself, and if self-help doesn’t work, seek expert medical support and learn to regulate your emotions and regain control of your life.
How Can You Fix Your Emotional Instability?
First of all, embrace yourself. Don’t develop self-hatred or homelessness. If you’ve discovered that you’re facing emotional instability, deal with yourself with patience and compassion. Here are some quick suggestions to fix it with self-help:
- When emotional instability is caused by external factors, such as any person, workplace, etc, addressing those factors can settle the emotions.
- When the emotional instability symptoms are caused by anxiety, pain, or stress response, ending the active stress stimulant will end the unsettled emotions.
Keep in mind that:
“ Every emotional response takes at least 20 minutes or sometimes more for the body to recover from a major stress response.”
It’s completely normal.
Don’t expect your anger to be shut down immediately. Understand your body and give it the time it needs to recover.
- If these symptoms are caused by hyperstimulation, the body needs a longer time to recover and eliminate symptoms. In fact, the body requires getting rid of the causes of hyperstimulation first.
At last, give your body its recovery time, remove the distractions and the factors that cause stress in your body, and see if your emotional instability symptoms reduce. If the symptoms still persist, psychotherapy and medication can help with the support of expert mental health professionals.
Treatment Options for Emotional Instability:
Different treatment options are available for emotional instability, depending on the root cause. For general understanding, we’re dividing into the following categories
- Lifestyle and self-care
- Psychotherapy
- Medication
- Support groups
Starting from the very basics, if the root cause of your emotional instability is a minor physical or mental stressor, your psychologist can help you with basic counseling and advice on lifestyle changes such as regular exercise, mindfulness, adequate sleep, healthy diet, journaling, etc. Your psychiatrist will help you do this with consistency until you achieve regulation.
Though for lifestyle changes, you don’t inherently need a psychiatrist, but if you do it with expert support, the chances of consistency and better outcomes increase. It’s because if you’re doing without support, chances are you lose heart in the middle and leave it incomplete. The expert support stays with you until you achieve your recovery!
If the root cause of your emotional instability is any underlying mental health condition, psychotherapy is the treatment of choice. Several types of psychotherapy can be helpful, such as:
- CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, helps people identify and rectify negative thought patterns and behavior.
- DBT, dialectical behavior therapy, helps people develop skills to manage intense emotions.
- Psychodynamic therapy helps individuals to find underlying hidden conflicts, trauma, and repeated behaviors.
If your emotional instability is because of any severe mental health condition, the psychiatrist may prescribe mood stabilizers, antidepressants, or other medications, depending on the specific condition.
Support groups provide a sense of community, a hope, and a safe place with like-minded people for growth, recovery, and staying on track.
So, in short, the first step is lifestyle changes. If that works, you don’t need to follow psychotherapy or medication. Otherwise, based on your diagnosis, your psychiatrist will prepare your treatment which psychotherapy and medication you need for thorough treatment. will prepare your treatment plan.
Online Telepsychiatry Services for Emotional Instability in the USA:
In 2022, an estimated 59.3 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States had AMI. The observed prevalence of AMI was higher among females (26.4%) than among males (19.7%).
In the study, AMI means any mental illness, including behavioral, mental, and emotional disorders.
Online telepsychiatry services make healthcare accessible for everyone from the comfort of your home. No commute stress, no short leaves from work, no missing responsibilities.
Connect with Digipsych, fill out our online form, and our representative will arrange your online consultation session with our psychiatrist, Dr Hussain. He’ll thoroughly assess your situation, take proper history, make your diagnosis, and start your personalized treatment journey based on your struggles. We provide complete support with compassion until you achieve your recovery goal.
Book your consultation now and regain control of your life.
FAQs:
Warning signs that someone is emotionally unstable?
If someone gets angry without reason, reacts more on usual matters, is unable to control their reaction, or finds it hard to manage their relationships, all of these can reflect emotional instability.
Am I emotionally unstable?
If you want to measure your emotional instability, use this as a yardstick: your emotions change quickly, you get upset over small matters, you feel lonely or sad more often, you can’t even control your reactions, and you feel empty. If you feel any of these symptoms, it indicates emotional instability, and it’s always best to consult a mental health professional for clinical diagnosis and treatment (if required).
How is emotional instability related to borderline personality disorder?
Borderline personality disorder is a psychological condition including emotions, thinking behaviour, and relationship instability. The disorder has three major groups, and emotional instability is one of them. Psychologically, it’s also known as “affective dysregulation”. So, emotional stability doesn’t mean borderline personality disorder; it’s just one group of that major disorder.
How to help an emotionally unstable person?
First of all, don’t make them feel embarrassed; deal with them with warmth and patience, understand their feelings, and make them feel safe. If their condition seems beyond a self-help approach, gently guide them to professional help such as therapy or counseling.