The area of emotional regulation is broad and considerable however we feel the three most important things for teachers to know are:
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- What is emotional regulation?
- Why is emotional self-regulation so important for healthy functioning and early intervention?
- What can teachers do to improve and support emotional self-regulation of the young people they support?
What is Emotional Regulation?
Emotions are important. They help us organise our inner worlds and guide us as to what we focus on and how we respond to the world around us. The relationship we have with our emotions and how we regulate the impact of emotion is known as emotional regulation or self-regulation. We can think of this as the system we use to appropriately deal with stress and then recover.
Developing the emotional brain
Humans are not born with the ability to emotionally regulate themselves, it is something we develop throughout our childhood and into young adulthood. As such babies and infants rely on others, such as their parents, to regulate their emotions for them. It is usually around the time of toddlerhood that children begin to co-regulate their emotions with those they have developed secure with. This marks an important step in a child developing an ability to self-regulate, a gradual process that typically continues into early adulthood. However, interruptions to this process in the form of or aspects relating to can disrupt or delay the development of healthy emotional self-regulation.
To understand how the brain develops this capacity for self-regulation as we grow it can be useful to understand a bit more about how this relates to the development of the brain itself.
Old brain, New brain
In a simplified manner the brain is sometimes referred to as the triune brain and having developed in 3 stages, often inaccurately referred to as the reptilian, the mammalian and the human. This is an over simplification, brains have evolved over 100s of millions of years, from simple neural nets across a body (think jellyfish) to the incredibly complicated brains that humans possess today. It can be useful here to understand a little bit about the architecture of the brain. We can do this by using a cut section of the brain as a visualisation so we can get a sense of how it appears our brains have evolved.
Perhaps a more useful way of looking at the triune brain is to not only look at when it evolved but also what the primary function of each part is.
Our instinctive brain is thought to have evolved first is located in the brain stem and is associated with everything we need to keep us alive. It controls our breathing, heart rate and sleeping patterns as well as multitude of other things essential to our survival that we would not be able to sustain if we had to pay conscious attention towards (imagine having to consciously direct each beat of our hearts!). It is still a very complex part of the brain but it is an unthinking instinctual part that is set up to respond to danger and aid our survival.
Deep in the middle of the brain situated just above the brain stem is the limbic system which is thought to have evolved second, we can think of as our emotional brain. The limbic system is home to lots of important parts of the brain that are associated with things such as mood regulation, habit forming and learning. It is also home to two very important structures called the amygdala and hippocampus which are associated with our flight, fight and freeze response (and the basis of what we call ) signalling to our instinctive brain to prepare the body for this response.
Surrounding all of this is what we call the neocortex, which is the pink folded mass that we often think of when we think about the brain. This part is the part of the brain that evolved last (only about 200,000 years ago) and is the part of the brain we can think of as the thinking brain. It is comprised of 4 regions; the frontal lobe (associated with decision-making and goal directed behaviour), the parietal lobe (associated with sensory information and spatial awareness), the occipital lobe (associated with visual functioning) and the temporal lobe (associated with language, emotions and meaningful memories). These lobes all work together to create a consistent sense of ourselves and identity and give us a way of influencing and controlling our thoughts and behaviour.
The power of the mind
The order in which the parts of our brains evolved over hundreds of millions of years mirrors how our brain develops from birth to young adulthood. There are obvious reasons for this in that we need the parts of our brain to control our biological processes essential for survival, and we need to be able to respond to dangers in our environment before we learn to think in words. This puts our thinking brains at a disadvantage as it is still maturing whilst learning to manage the more established and unthinking parts of the brain.
There are big advantages from our thinking brain developing last. This allows older parts, more determined parts of the brain to provide the foundation for more diverse thoughts. This means we can adapt consciously to our environments in a variety of ways and future proof against changes in the environment. This means however, that we must learn how to regulate emotions, which has big implications for our behaviour. It also means young people are vulnerable to things like stress and emotion whilst they are still developing this part of the brain.
Why is emotional self-regulation so important for healthy functioning and early intervention?
Stress and the brain
Without the ability to regulate emotion, or having an impaired ability to regulate emotion, a child or young person quickly becomes unable to cope with the stress and emotions they are experiencing.
A young person’s stress response is, for the most part, a good thing. However, the body’s stress response is somewhat crudely based on two powerful hormones; adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline and cortisol work together to set the body up to respond and perform. With any given situation there should be a suitable amount of these hormones released to cope with the situation in hand, and then there should be quick recovery. It is this process of calibrating emotional responses with recovery that is at the foundation of healthy emotional regulation. To put it another way we need to learn to how to manage our emotions through a process of challenges and recovery. We call this ability to respond and recover to stress.
However, as the brain is still learning and physically developing its capacity for self-regulation, a young person may find that unsuitable levels of stress hormones get released or are released at inappropriate times. Heightened stress-levels trigger our survival response which influences and impairs higher functioning parts of the brain.
We can think of the brain here as an inverted triangle with our brain stem (instinctive brain) at the bottom with powerful but limited responses and the wider top representing our neocortex (thinking brain) and its multitude of potential responses.
When feeling safe the higher functioning parts of our brain can work as they should do but when we perceive danger our brain stem seeks to inhibit or shut down these high functioning parts. This can reduce a young person’s ability to hear (you may notice yourself hearing buzzing or other low frequency noises when stressed), think rationally, and most importantly, to read “affective cues” (facial emotions and body language). Being unable to read facial emotions means neutral faces can be perceived as threatening or concerned faces as angry.
This can all make communicating and interacting with others very difficult and has implications for a young person developing aspects of and.
In a maladaptive way of coping a young person may learn to simply try and avoid stressful situations, cutting themselves off from environments in which they can develop coping strategies. Therefore, when inevitably they are presented with a stressful situation, they are unable to manage their emotions, often resulting in what we observe as meltdowns or confrontational attempts to ‘end’ a stressful experience (shouting, getting angry etc..).
Over time these problems can become embedded and impact negatively on a young person’s immediate wellbeing and future health. The inability to regulate emotions effectively is called emotional dysregulation.
Emotional dysregulation is associated with the development of more serious mental health conditions in later life and if a young person cannot adequately manage stress internally then they may seek external maladaptive methods of coping such as using alcohol, drugs and other self-destructive behaviours such as .
What can teachers do to improve and support emotional self-regulation of the young people they support?
Teacher wellbeing
As with all matters of wellbeing taking time to focus on areas such as emotional intelligence and social confidence helps to build an outlook that feeds into the interactions a teacher has with the young people they support. Whilst we are preparing ourselves to help others we must also look after ourselves, we’ve got some advice and guidance on this in the teacher wellbeing section.
Recognise the role of stress on behaviour (for teachers)
A young person in a heightened stressful state becomes hyper-sensitive to the world around them. A good analogy for this is a leaf falling on a car and setting its alarm off, for the observer this can seem like a tantrum based on nothing, however it is the sensitivity of young person’s impaired stress response which is driving the behaviour. Remember a highly stressed young person may not be interpreting what is going on accurately.
In order to counter this, we need to reframe the behaviour of the child or young person from a view point that this is someone that is not simply losing control but has an impaired capacity for monitoring and managing their own emotions. Once we have this set in our own mind we can look to start helping children and young people to develop their own self-regulation strategies and try and create the neural foundation for healthy self-regulation.
Dr Stuart Shanker from the self regulation institute has created series of videos that handle each element of emotional regulation in 60 seconds.
Talk about emotions
Talking about emotions in a safe, inclusive environment helps a young person identify and understand what their emotions are. As adults we take it for granted to be able to name, label and understand our emotions. The truth is that we learnt how to do this. Let’s talk about real-life situations that young people might have found themselves in. For example, if someone had a fight with a sibling that morning, then hold discussions exploring how we all have emotions and how they can be tricky things to manage sometimes.
Use multi-sensory approaches
Emotions are feelings, whilst it is useful to explain using words and labels, it can sometimes be useful to incorporate other senses to explain and explore how a child or young person is feeling.
We have also created some exercises and resources that can be shared with young people and discussions facilitated around them.
