Emotional Regulation at the Highest Levels of Performance

There was a piece in The Athletic recently making the rounds, that argued Victor Wembanyama is changing the NBA by proving that caring is cool. The evidence is hard to miss. After the Spurs eliminated Oklahoma City in Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals, Wemby was in tears on the court, embracing Stephon Castle, pulling his teammates into a group hug. When a reporter asked him why expressing emotion so openly was so rare among elite athletes, he said: “I refuse to carry the burden of having to hide my emotions.”

A 22-year-old said that. On camera. In the middle of a playoff run that had him four wins away from an NBA championship.

The piece is right. Vulnerable emotional expression matters. The old model of athletic masculinity, the stone face, the never-let-them-see-you-sweat posturing, has done real damage to real athletes for a long time. We seem to have come out from under that rock, to an extent. Wemby walking through that door wide open is worth celebrating.

And then you watch Jalen Brunson in the fourth quarter of Game 1 of these same NBA Finals, Knicks down, Frost Bank Center rattling, and something interesting happens. Because if you believe Brunson isn’t feeling that moment just as deeply as Wemby feels his, you’re not watching closely enough. You don’t know the particular competitor in question. The jaw. The eyes after a bucket. The calm. The communication. Brunson cares as much as anyone in the world does about his craft. He just carries it differently. A low simmer where Wemby is a rolling boil.

This is where the nuance is important.

Emotional regulation is not a style. It’s a trainable skill. Psychologist James Gross, whose process model of emotion regulation has become valuable in the performance psychology space, draws a critical distinction between how we modulate our internal emotional experience and how we demonstrate our outward expression of it. Those are two different aspects! And collapsing them into one is where much of the confusion lives.

You can have high internal intensity with low external expression. That’s Brunson. You can have high internal intensity with high external expression. That’s Wemby. What you don’t want in any athlete at any level is low internal awareness paired with either, because that’s where dysregulation turns up. That’s when the emotion is running the player instead of the other way around.

More nuance! In regards to the players in question, Brunson and Wemby, it’s also important to note that it’s not always one way. Brunson has his share of fired up expressionism and Wemby has demonstrated instances of visible composure as well. This is more about their general tendencies and what we notice in watching them is a default mode.

Research in sport psychology is consistent that what matters is not which regulation style an athlete uses, but whether their approach is authentic to them and functional for them under pressure. Suppressing emotion often tends to backfire. But so does the assumption that visible expression is always the healthier choice. The goal is self-awareness first, and from there, a strategy that actually works for that specific person in that specific moment.

Which brings us back to these Finals.

What’s striking watching this series is that both of these players are regulated in their own way, but one simply has more experience (and subsequently, more practice in the development of mental skills). Wemby cries in a postgame press conference and goes out the next night competing like someone from another planet. Brunson absorbs a momentum-shifting body blow without a visible flicker and makes the next shot anyway. The emotion in both cases, expressed or contained, is not running them. They’re running it. (For the most part; it sure seemed Wemby was internally rattled at the end of Game 4. But I digress).

Some coaches want stoic. Some want fire. Most players have absorbed the idea that one particular style of emotional expression is the right one, usually modeled after someone they admire, and they spend energy performing that instead of actually understanding themselves.

The work of coaching emotional regulation, at any level, involves adopting an individualized approach. Every athlete has a different internal landscape. Every athlete has a different emotional expression style. The question worth asking is not “can you be more like Wemby” or “can you be more like Brunson.” It’s: do you know what’s happening inside you well enough to work with it in real time? And is how you’re expressing it actually serving you and those around you?

Two players. Two completely different answers to these questions. Both correct! The key is doing the internal work of getting to know yourself and how you operate best under pressure..

Right now the two best examples of that distinction in the world happen to be sharing a floor in the NBA Finals. Wemby is showing us one version of what emotional expression looks like. Brunson is showing us another. Neither is performing. Neither is suppressing. Both are fully, authentically themselves under the most pressure the game can produce.

The dial matters less than the self-awareness behind it.