Emotional Lability: What It Is, Symptoms, Causes And Treatment

Emotional lability or pseudobulbar syndrome, as its name indicates, consists of the abnormal variation in a person’s emotions during a certain period of time, whether this time is short or longer. Specifically, the meaning of emotional lability is emotional instability due to sudden changes in mood.

We have seen what emotional lability is in psychology and, below, we will talk about the symptoms, causes and treatment of emotional lability.

There are various signs that can help you distinguish if you are going through a period of emotional lability. Let’s see what the symptoms of emotional lability are:

• Sudden crying attacks or laughter, those of crying being more common.
• One of the symptoms of emotional lability disorder is self-esteem problems.
• Low tolerance to frustration.
• Sleep problems such as insomnia.
• Temporary states of euphoria. In them the person has an extremely optimistic outlook and is exaggeratedly extroverted.
• Temporary states of sadness. These consist of showing apathy, tiredness, irritability and a pessimistic view of the world.
• Irritability.
• Unsafety when making decisions.

Emotional lability in psychology is caused by different factors. Next, we show you the causes of emotional lability:

• Due to a stressful time: Emotional lability in teenagers or adults during times of hard work, exams or in the months before your wedding is completely normal. In this case, it is not a big problem because the effects are temporary. For example, emotional lability during pregnancy is very common.
• As a personality factor: On other occasions, emotional lability is part of the person’s usual behavior. This is because, in addition to the genetic factor, he has learned it throughout childhood or, rather, he has not learned to have adequate emotional management or adequate assertiveness when expressing what he thinks.

Disorders that cause emotional lability

There are various disorders that can cause a state of emotional lability or pseudobulbar syndrome:

• Cyclothymia.
• Premenstrual syndrome.
• Anemia: produces fatigue, tiredness and dizziness, among other symptoms. In this article, we answer your question about why I feel so tired and not looking forward to anything.
• Multiple sclerosis.
• Anorexy. Discover how to prevent anorexia.
• Other psychological disorders related to emotional lability are depression wave anxiety.

The treatment of emotional lability will depend on the symptoms and causes that each person presents. However, depending on the severity of these factors, one treatment or another may be applied.

Pharmacotherapy

In the most severe cases, pharmacological treatment will be required to treat emotional lability. It is quite common to use medication such as antidepressants, but, in addition, there is another type of medication that has been designed exclusively for this syndrome. Specifically, dextromethorphan hydrobromide and quinidine sulfate or nuedexta.

Psychological treatment

On the other hand, psychological therapy helps you learn different skills that will help you manage emotional lability more permanently than with medication. Let’s see what are the steps to follow in the psychological treatment of emotional lability:

1. First of all, make emotional management exercises. To do this, the first step is to learn to detect your emotions from the moment you start to feel them.
2. After that, remove the stressful situation in order to prevent these emotions from escalating.
3. The next step is to perform relaxation techniques. Depending on the person, breathing or meditation exercises can be performed. In this article, we tell you about the effects of meditation on the body and mind. Ultimately, the idea is to direct attention to another activity other than thinking about what happened. These relaxation activities should be done as part of your daily routine to reduce stress levels more consistently.
4. Next, social skills are trained in order to learn to express what one feels and what one thinks in an appropriate and respectful way without reaching the point of emotionally exploding. Sometimes, people with emotional lability suffer from it because they accumulate everything they feel. Avoiding these situations reduces the level of stress, the main cause of emotional lability. Discover the importance of social skills.
5. Finally, work on values it can help. This consists of setting different objectives related to the areas that each person considers most important. Examples of this are working on getting closer to your family, finding a new job or improving your relationship. All of this will help the person have a more positive state of mind.

This article is merely informative, at PsychologyFor we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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