The importance of self-regulation - YouTube

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about positive emotions,

but how do we manage negative emotions? What should we do with children to manage them?

There are a couple of things to think about around that.

The first one is to understand about emotions; it’s about managing them, not stopping them.

We have 6 fundamental emotions, main emotions that every human being has.

They are Anger, the one that causes the most problems for parents and teachers,

but without anger we wouldn’t be able to deal with things that are going really wrong.

Countries have risen up and overthrown dictators because of anger;

we have Sadness, another fundamental emotion;

Fear, which is one of the things that keeps us alive,

makes us run from danger so we stay and deal with things.

Some others that people don’t know:

Disgust; Joy; and the final one is Surprise.

People are often not sure about that one

but it’s when something novel comes we go ‘Wow!’ We take it in;

we see if there’s something we can learn from that.

We have a problem around emotions:

joy is positive, surprise might be neutral and the rest are all negative.

We have a bias for that.

People come to me and ask if we can do some anger management with a child,

can you stop them feeling anxious or angry?

These are fundamental emotions, how we feel. We shouldn’t try to stop them.

However, with each of these there is a behaviour we’ve learnt to do when we feel like that.

Some people when they feel angry they’ve learnt to throw things and shout at people.

What we have to try to change is not the emotion, but the dealing with that emotion.

I can be very angry with my children and I can choose to talk calmly to them.

I do lots of presentations in front of lots of people;

people ask ‘How do you stay so calm? You’re not scared!’

I feel terribly anxious before doing the talk

but I’ve learnt I can feel anxious and I can do the talk.

It’s not about stop people feeling those ways,

but about how we help them learn the right behaviours and skills to do it.

Let’s take fear and anxiety, fear of exams, of looking foolish,

of trying something new in case you get it wrong.

There’s three areas we can work on.

We’ll call them ACT, easy to remember, three basic things.

The first one is Action:

if we’re feeling really anxious we do something that distracts us from that feeling.

We may do some exercise, listen to music, go for a walk in the park;

anything that takes us away.

That concept of flow and engagement, especially something that stops us thinking about it.

I play football on a Monday night, and for that hour I can’t think of my work,

my worries, my family or anything. I’m just immersed in it.

That’s taking you away from the worry, so do something different.

Generate positive emotions which stop the negative emotions happening.

How do we help children, what activities?

I work with young people who would be worried about the exams but they escape it by doing art.

They make sure they fit it in each day.

The C stands for Calming,

learning techniques to calm yourself down, breathing techniques, meditation,

a big thing at the moment is mindfulness, learning to be in the moment,

recognize what’s causing the anxiety, you’ve catastrophised it.

Some people combine these two and do yoga, martial arts,

anything that allows you to develop that, calming strategies.

I teach to teachers; they are really stressed and I ask who actively works on

meditation, relaxation or mindfulness: very few.

A final thing which is probably the one most people would not be aware of is to change our Thinking.

Any kind of negative emotion narrows down our thinking and makes it catastrophic.

Something bad happens and we think something worse is gonna happen.

We fail one exam and we think “I’m never passing tests again,

I won’t go to university, and my life will be ruined”.

Learning to think in a different way, in particular optimistically,

about how you can move on, to minimize the thing that is making you anxious,

using thinking strategies that remind you of past success and that other people believe in you.

So it’s developing that self-talk and those cognitive strategies

that minimise the impact of the anxiety.

All skills in that are teachable and learnable.

When we work with young people around anger or sadness or anxiety,

it shouldn’t be about stopping that but about teaching them

self-regulation skills so they can manage it better.