Anxiety is an emotional state that orients cognition towards potential future threat. Despite serving a useful function, this can be unpleasant and pathological when experienced chronically, or in inappropriate situations. Simple strategies for emotion regulation, such as self-distancing and attention-focusing can reduce perceived negative emotion, but the neural mechanisms are unclear. This study aims to investigate brain responses underlying the efficacy of these interventions, by combining self-reported anxiety measures and fMRI data.Prior to scanning, personalised, anxiety-provoking scenarios are generated and converted to audio for each participant based on an initial interview. In the fMRI scanner, participants hear these scenarios and visualise them as vividly as possible. Scenarios are divided into physical and social categories to allow decoding of neural representations of the events. Participants report their anxiety level immediately after hearing each scenario, and again, after 30s of either self-regulation or continuing to imagine the scene in the same way.Pilot behavioural data (n=10) confirmed that regulation by self-distancing and attentional focusing both reduced reported anxiety, relative to the control condition (p<0.05). Initial data replicated this benefit in 7 of 8 scanned participants, accompanied by deactivation of the core Default Mode Network during the regulation conditions, relative to the control condition.In the full sample (n=68), we predict that the two interventions will be associated with differential engagement of brain networks, including the multiple-demand and default mode regions, and that successful regulation will be associated with decreased multivariate representation of emotional content