Know

All of us have experienced times when our emotions have hijacked our behavior. Most often after those experiences, we feel regretful and wish that we were better at controlling our emotions. The good news is there are ways to improve the management of our feelings so that we do not experience them as tsunamis washing away our reason and self-control. The ability to control and manipulate our emotions has been linked directly to mental health states, cognitive functioning, feelings of well-being, and social relationships. Practicing proper strategies for emotional regulation will help lead to a calmer self and a more relaxed mood. It may also lead to more positive outcomes in interpersonal transactions.

Mapping the Influence of Emotions

Think back to an interaction with a child in your care, a parent, or colleague which did not “go well” in your opinion. This simply means that the outcome you wanted was not achieved. Reflect on the various elements of the situation to gain an understanding of the many things that shaped your emotional reaction and its effects. An example is provided to guide your reflection.

In completing this exercise, you may have noticed a pattern. Thoughts and feelings (both emotional and physical) influence our behavior in positive or negative ways. These reactions lead to intended or unintended consequences. No teacher or caregiver intentionally wants to cause fear in a child. The good news is many of our emotions can be controlled, through identifying them, relaxing the body and mind, or disrupting self-defeating thinking patterns.

Impact of Emotions

From helping us to achieve goals to derailing our thoughts and behaviors through miscommunicating our intent, emotions are powerful agents. The table below outlines some emotions and connected effects. See how each emotion has a unique message and impact on both the sender and receiver.

Stress and Relaxation

Teachers and caregivers are air-traffic controllers of learning within the classroom. You strive to set up course plans for flight, manage the task of staying on course across the journey, and bring the learning in for a successful landing at the end of a lesson, activity, or project. During the journey, you are attentive to unique atmospheric conditions that include sensitivity to particular children’s or families’ needs, classroom or program disruptions, being mindful to follow your daily curriculum, being responsive to administrative demands, and managing your own emotions. Across the day, each flight is different. Each requires your full presence and your talents for success. Much of what you do may seem like invisible work, but it takes a high level of skill and energy to balance demands and remain focused on learning outcomes, developmental needs, and responsive caregiving.

Take a moment and simply reflect on a typical day. Recognize the level of commitment, energy, and skill consumed. Think about the total number of "typical days" across the year. This is why resilience and good self-care are so critical to your vitality.

Learning to recognize when you are stressed is the first step in good self-care. Many times, you might not even notice that you are experiencing stress in your body. Becoming aware of your body's stress response as a reaction to either some internal or external stimulus is critical to self-calming. Under stress, your focus for responding is narrowed (remember we are programmed to identify and overcome the threat). Consequently, you are less likely to have use of rich cognitive resources for problem solving. Tension and relaxation are incompatible states; you cannot be tensed and relaxed at the same time. Consequently, if you feel stress-related tension in a particular body part and are successful at calming your mind and body then tension will be reduced. For example, jaw clenching will relax, fearful thoughts will subside, and that pain in your neck and shoulders will diminish. Calm body. Calm mind. Calm emotions. Calm and rewarding teaching.

You will remember that under stressful circumstances, our sympathetic nervous system ramps up for self-protection. This protective call-up, while appropriate under conditions where our life is threatened, may be an overreaction to a rude comment by a stranger in the supermarket or a careless colleague in the workplace. Frequently visiting your nervous system to make energy withdrawals depletes your reserves. Thus, the more frequently you make withdrawals, the more likely it is that you will be left feeling drained with less reserve to deal with real emergencies or a long-term, life-threatening struggle. The key then is to strive for proper management of your energy reserves by identifying when it is or is not appropriate to make a withdrawal.

Emotional Regulation

Your behavior is dynamic across time, moment to moment, depending on the situation in which you find yourself, how you interpret that situation, your physical state, and your current emotions and mindset. You are constantly regulating your emotions (sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously) during the course of a typical day.

All people experience the influence of emotions on their thoughts, feelings and behaviors, but humans have the capacity to manage strong emotions so that they do not have a negative impact on behavior and social relations. Emotional regulation is how we change a current emotion into one that is more appropriate, given the current context and the immediate goal. Recognizing emotions and reframing how we see the stressful or emotion-provoking event is healthier than just suppressing emotions, which has been linked to negative effects on health and to burn out in the work setting.

Three positive cognitive strategies for regulating emotions are distraction, labeling, and reappraisal. Typically, distraction is used before an intense emotion actually occurs in response to the negative aspect of a situation. This mental strategy involves focusing attention on a neutral or positive aspect of what is happening. Labeling our emotions has been found to change what part of our brain is involved in processing the emotional aspect of a situation, moving it from the more primitive survival area (the amygdala) to the reasoning portion (the prefrontal cortex). When we use reappraisal, we make a cognitive change to the meaning of the emotion-invoking situation. That is, we try to think about the situation in a different way. Research has shown that people who tend to use reappraisal strategies are less likely have symptoms of depression and to have greater well-being.

While there are many different emotional regulation strategies to choose from, some of them healthy (e.g., talking with a friend) and others not (abusing alcohol or avoiding difficult situations). The key is finding healthy ones that work for you, and practicing and implementing those strategies.

See

Activity: Just Breathe Video

Take a few minutes to review this video to see how controlled breathing helps to calm the mind, a strategy that is fundamental to both resilience and emotional regulation.

Video: Just Breathe

Julie Bayer Salzman & Josh Salzman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVA2N6tX2cg

Do

Because resilience waxes and wanes across the life span and across careers, it's particularly important to build a personal collection of strategies that can be used during challenging times. Below are some healthy strategies that can be used to help deal with emotions. Use the Emotion Regulation Strategies resource (in the Learn Activities section below) to think about and note whether you want to use any of these strategies more regularly.

Examples of Emotion Regulation Strategies

• Focusing on controlled breathing
• Talking with friends
• Thinking differently about a situation
• Writing in a journal
• Going for a walk
• Reading a book
• Exercising
• Getting adequate sleep
• Meditating