As I’ve become more mentally and emotionally healthy, I’ve noticed that emotional ups and downs tend to come less frequently, and with less severity. In my head, this looks a bit like sine waves of varying frequency and amplitude:

// Image of a sine wave or more than one of diff frequency

But obviously (is it?), being in a healthy or regulated state doesn’t simply mean that my emotional state is constant. No ups and downs would be horribly boring. Generally our minds are pretty adaptable, so pretty quickly “good” would feel normal, right? So we need some downs as well, so the ups feel “good”, I suppose.

So a more regulated state doesn’t just mean a low amplitude sine wave. Of course a sine wave is too simple to represent our real emotional state, since ups and downs aren’t regularly spaced apart and of the same intensity all the time. But as a shorthand, it’s a useful visual representation to me – disregulated feels like high amplitude, high frequency, and shifted down; while more regulated feels like lower frequency, somewhat lower amplitude, and shifted up the y-axis: