Mindful Living for Better Mental Health

Social and emotional skills are more important now than ever. As educators, we can find ways to better identify and manage our own emotions, which, in turn, can help our students do the same. We’ll explore how emotions can both help and hinder attention, decision-making, relationships, health, and performance.

Managing Emotions

Take a moment to reflect on the past several months. How have you been feeling? Really, how have you been feeling? Our lives have been a roller coaster of emotions. Research shows that our feelings and emotions significantly impact everything in life—from attention and memory to learning, decision-making, relationships, physical and mental health, creativity, and performance.

The good news is that researchers and practitioners have spent decades developing strategies, tools, and resources to help us manage emotions, especially stress, more effectively. This information will deepen your understanding of the science and biology of stress and provide the skills needed to support your health and well-being, as well as others’.

Introduction and Logistics

In this course, you’ll learn about the vital role emotions play in daily life. You’ll explore their impact on attention, learning, decision-making, mental and physical health, and performance. But first, let’s review the logistics of this course.

Learning Objectives

Educate school staff on the science and impact of stress.
Provide opportunities to build and apply social and emotional skills and strategies.
Support school staff in identifying and managing their own emotions.
Offer strategies for helping students identify and manage their emotions.
Share resources and ideas relevant during this time of heightened stress and uncertainty.

The first objective focuses on enhancing your emotional awareness, language, and regulation skills. The second emphasizes helping others—especially students—understand and regulate their emotions.

We’re all experiencing a range of emotions right now. Life is an emotional roller coaster, now more than ever. A survey conducted by Yale University in 2022 asked many school staff members how they were feeling. Their answers included words like anxiety, stress, nervousness, loneliness, overwhelm, frustration, concern, and confusion. They also asked many teachers and parents how their children and students were feeling. Their answers included frustrated, worried, confused, bored, lonely, angry, sad, disappointed, with a few responses like happy, playful, and loved.

All these emotions we are experiencing come from real events happening in our world. We experience strong emotions when things in our environment trigger them, which isn’t always a bad thing. Our response to these events and emotions, particularly our stress response, is our body’s way of helping us adapt to threats in our environment. While it may feel unpleasant, this response has helped us survive for millions of years. However, when we feel stress or anxiety over a long period of time, it can negatively impact our health, relationships, and our ability to be present, teach, work, and learn. Anxiety can make us replay things over and over in our heads and crave control. When we are anxious, we often think that nothing will work out.

The hopeful news is that researchers have been studying these emotions for decades. Practitioners have transformed those findings into strategies, routines, and habits that help people cope with these emotions, particularly stress and uncertainty.

These practices have been formalized into what we now know as social and emotional learning. Social-emotional learning (or SEL) is the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions. SEL can also provide us with the necessary skills to cope with situations that may or may not be within our control.

For example, in unjust or unfair situations, people skilled in SEL might leverage their anger in constructive ways. They might channel their anger and passion into educating others, pushing for change, seeking allies, fighting for justice, or volunteering to support a cause. To cope with a wide range of emotions, those skilled in SEL may find ways to express empathy, amplify positive experiences and emotions, express gratitude, and connect with others to seek and provide support. Importantly, even though SEL involves managing our emotions, it isn’t about control, subordination, or conforming. It’s about finding our truth and navigating emotions effectively, leading us to productive ways to achieve our goals, support others, and attain well-being.

SEL and Emotions: Let’s continue by exploring the basics: What are emotions, and why do they matter?

Why emotions matter:

Attention, Memory & Learning :

Why emotions matter. There are five critical reasons.

Emotions matter for five critical reasons. The first is attention, memory and learning. When we experience a lot of strong, unpleasant emotions, we go into survival mode—not teaching and learning mode. In fact, what we know is that we enter the fight, flight, or freeze response. The areas of our brain responsible for taking in information literally get cut off when we’re experiencing high levels of stress.

Importantly, moderate levels of stress are okay. The stress associated with trying to learn something new or playing a new game is considered good stress. However, what we are talking about here is bad stress. Many students are distracted, overwhelmed, and frustrated, which may look like they have learning problems. The point to emphasize is that this might not be a learning difference but rather the result of unmanaged stress manifesting in this way.

Interestingly, other emotions can be very helpful for learning. For example, when we experience inspiration and curiosity, the areas of our brain responsible for thriving and surviving literally light up.

The key messages here are:

We must manage stress effectively—both our own and our students’.
We need to create learning environments for both adults and children where there is a sense of safety, security, connectedness, and belonging.
We should create as many opportunities as possible for ourselves and our students to experience inspiration and curiosity.

Why Emotions Matter: Decision Making

The second way emotions matter is in decision-making. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, in total control of our judgments and choices. However, the truth is that how we feel significantly influences our decisions.

For example, imagine you’ve had a rough morning—you didn’t sleep well, you’re irritable, and maybe you had an argument at home. Then, at work, someone asks you to do something, and you respond with, “No, I can’t do that,” or they ask for your opinion, and you say, “I don’t think it’s that great.” What we don’t realize is that these choices or judgments are often influenced by how we felt earlier in the day.

This happens with both positive and negative emotions. For instance, when we’re sad, we might look at a task and think, “This is going to be really difficult.” Conversely, when we’re in a positive mood, we might think, “Not a problem, that’s easy.”

One way to become more skilled in this area is to check in with your feelings. Between work and home or vice versa, take a moment to pause and ask yourself, “How am I feeling right now?” Research shows that when we attribute our feelings to their actual causes, those feelings are less likely to influence our subsequent choices or decisions.

Why Emotions Matter: Physical and Mental Health

Another reason emotions matter is that they influence our physical and mental health. Stress, for example, exists on a continuum. At one end, there’s no stress, when you’re calm, tranquil, and at ease. Next, there’s positive stress, like when you’re under pressure to perform at your best or face a challenge. Then there’s distress, including acute distress (momentary stress), chronic stress, and toxic stress, which occurs when stressors persist over a prolonged period at high intensity.

As you might expect, the more toxic the stress, the greater the negative impact on physical and mental health. Interestingly, research shows that our mindsets about stress can influence our health. For instance, in a study, participants watched videos of people engaging in intense activities. One group saw stress as harmful, while the other saw it as enhancing performance. Four weeks later, those in the “bad stress” group reported worse physical and mental health symptoms.

Organizational climates also directly affect our feelings, which in turn influence our health, creating a continuous cycle. Finally, research shows that experiencing more pleasant emotions can buffer against the negative effects of stress.

Why Emotions Matter: Relationships

Emotions also play a key role in the quality of our relationships. Emotions act as signals, guiding us to either approach or avoid interactions.

For instance, when you wake up feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, you might think, “I don’t want to engage with people today.” On the other hand, on days when you wake up in a pleasant mood, you might feel like talking to everyone you know.

Similarly, we observe emotions in others through their facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice. Research shows that people displaying negative emotions send signals like, “Stay away. I may not respect you. I don’t want to engage.” Conversely, those displaying positive emotions signal, “I’m approachable. Come talk to me.”

For students, negative emotions might stem from difficult circumstances, causing them to act out, look overwhelmed, or appear anxious. While their behavior may seem uncomfortable to us, it’s often a signal that they have unmet needs. My hope is that you’ll see this as an opportunity to approach and address those needs.

Why Emotions Matter: Creativity

The fifth reason emotions matter is their influence on creativity and performance. Emotions fuel the creative process, but our emotional skills determine whether we turn that process into a tangible product.

Many students possess the cognitive abilities to achieve their dreams, yet not all do. Why? Often, it’s because they lack the emotional skills to handle disappointment, unmet expectations, frustration over a project not going well, anxiety about performance, or difficulty managing feedback.

Research shows that people who have the skills to manage their emotions are more likely to achieve their goals and dreams.

Why Emotions and SEL Matter Now

As explored, emotions affect everything we do. Strong emotions are not inherently good or bad—they can help us focus on what’s important but can also derail us from achieving our goals. What matters most is how we handle these emotions, as this impacts our well-being, our performance, and our relationships.

Looking Ahead: We hope the information above will be useful to you during these uncertain times. Decades of research show that your emotions matter. Developing the social and emotional skills needed to support ourselves and those we care about is a lifelong journey!

Introduction to SEL and the Emotions Matter Mindset, Identifying Our Emotions:

Introduction to SEL and the Emotions Matter Mindset
Identifying Our Emotions
Managing Our Own Emotions with Action Strategies
Managing Our Own Emotions by Shifting How We Think
Becoming a Culturally Responsive Emotion Scientist
Identifying Others’ Emotions
Helping Others Manage Emotions
Putting It All Together: Making Commitments to Lasting Change

Now, we’ll take a deeper dive into how we can get better at accurately identifying our emotions, understanding their causes, and regulating them in ways that serve our goals.

How Are You Feeling?

How are you feeling today? Take a moment and try to answer honestly. It may be harder to answer than it seems, especially these days as we grapple with uncertainties and economic and political divides. These issues evoke complicated emotions that can be hard to express in words.

Sometimes our feelings are trickier to pinpoint. We may catch ourselves saying something out of character—or maybe just feel “off”—without quite understanding why. It happens to us all. With so many demands on our time, it’s easy to put our own emotional needs last. Many of us don’t make time to pause and check in with ourselves.

So, let’s return to the original question: How are you feeling, really? With everything else on your plate, you might wonder: why does it even matter?

Emotions Are Information

As we discussed, emotions are information. When we pay attention to them and understand them, we can use the valuable insights they provide in helpful ways. Consider the scenario below:

What information are Mara’s emotions providing? What may have happened if she hadn’t checked in with how she was feeling? When we are aware of our emotions, we are in a better place to make sound decisions. Being aware of our emotional state also allows us to make better decisions about what to do next, ensuring that our temporary moods don’t negatively impact our relationships.

Just as a proper medical diagnosis is needed before selecting the most effective treatment, knowing how we feel allows us to better manage our emotions.

Identifying Our Emotions Using the Mood Meter

The Mood Meter helps us think of emotions as having two qualities: (1) pleasantness and (2) energy.

First, we can examine our thoughts. Are they mostly pleasant or unpleasant? When you look around your current situation, consider who you are with or the next task on your to-do list. What kind of thoughts come to mind?

Next is energy–do a quick scan of your body. Consider how activated you are. Check in with your heart rate, how quickly or slowly you are breathing, your body temperature, and the tension or relaxation of your muscles. Do you feel full of energy? Exhausted? Somewhere in between?

This self-check-in becomes easier with practice. Luckily, there is a tool that can help. Many of you may recognize the Mood Meter.

The Mood Meter is our tool to help us build better self-awareness and even develop language for our emotions. On the x-axis, it says the word “Pleasantness.” Think about it: every morning, we wake up and think to ourselves, “This is going to be a great day,” or “I wish I could pull the covers over my head.” That’s pleasantness—we want to approach or avoid. We feel pleasant or unpleasant.

On the y-axis, it says the word “Energy.” Energy has to do with both your physical and mental state. Think about it: you wake up in the morning and feel energized, or you feel depleted, tired, and exhausted.

What we do to create the Mood Meter is cross pleasantness and energy. That creates the four quadrants: yellow, red, blue, and green. Each quadrant represents different emotions.

For example, the yellow quadrant signifies high energy and pleasantness—emotions like happiness, excitement, optimism, joy, elation, and even ecstasy. The green quadrant is also pleasant but has lower energy: calm, contentment, tranquility, peace, relaxation, and ease.

The blue and red quadrants represent unpleasant feelings. Remember, unpleasant doesn’t mean negative or bad; it simply means they don’t feel pleasant internally. The red quadrant represents emotions like anger and anxiety in varying intensities—you can feel peeved, angry, or enraged, or go from uneasy to worried, anxious, or overwhelmed.

Finally, the blue quadrant represents emotions such as sadness, loneliness, despair, and even deep depression. These four quadrants of the Mood Meter help take everything going on inside your head and organize it into these categories.

Each quadrant of the Mood Meter is associated with different kinds of thinking and learning activities. When students are in the yellow quadrant, they may experience emotions that promote creative thinking and the generation of new ideas. Brainstorming, energetic group activities, and creative problem-solving are best done in the yellow quadrant.

When students are in the red quadrant, they may experience emotions that heighten awareness and keep them on their toes. The red quadrant is good for competitive activities like debating or passionate expressions, such as promoting a cause.

When students are in the blue quadrant, they may experience emotions that help them focus on deductive reasoning and critical thinking. Additionally, blue emotions prime students to relate well to others’ misfortunes, building empathy. The blue quadrant promotes success in tasks like proofreading, editing, and detailed analysis.

When students are in the green quadrant, they may experience emotions that promote self-reflection and consensus-building. Students feel comfortable, relaxed, and calm. Activities that involve collaboration are ideal for the green quadrant.

The best teachers differentiate instruction using the Mood Meter and capitalize on all quadrants, understanding that all emotions matter.

Emotion Words: Let’s Get Specific

If you’re having trouble naming how you’re feeling, you are not alone! Most of us were not taught emotional literacy, and we don’t get much practice labeling our feelings in everyday life. We tend to express how we feel with just a few words, like “good,” “fine,” “busy,” and “okay.”

Just like math and science have their own unique vocabularies, emotions have a language of their own. When we have more words to describe our feelings, we are better able to understand and communicate them to others. Communicating our feelings precisely is a pathway to managing them effectively.

For example, stress may be relieved through meditation, but someone legitimately overwhelmed with work might need a different strategy—perhaps delegating tasks or making a priority list.

Differences in Understanding Emotions

Our emotions are rooted in our life experiences. While there are global causes of emotions—for example, anger being about a perceived injustice—what makes one person feel anger might not make another person feel the same way. Consider some of the things that make you feel calm and safe. Are those the same things or different from what makes your partner or a colleague feel calm and safe? Now think about the children or students in your life. What makes them feel calm and safe? What differences or similarities exist with the causes you listed for yourself? Similarly, the same situation or event may cause one person to feel one way and another person to feel another way. For example, a thunderstorm may be exciting to a child who loves to tell ghost stories but anxiety-provoking to another child who is sensitive to loud noises. Another example might be when a car is following too closely on the road, honking and flashing its lights. It might make one person angry, while making another driver anxious, wondering if they are driving too slowly or doing something wrong. These differences may be rooted in temperament or adult personality traits, such as whether someone is easily activated or even-keeled, prone to worrying, or quick to anger. Other times, they may be due to past experiences. Cultural differences also play a large role in our experience of emotions. Some cultures have more words than others for different emotions, while other cultures have no words for certain emotions. Additionally, cultural norms, beliefs, and values can influence what might cause someone to feel a certain way. For example, eye contact in one culture may be a sign of respect but disrespectful in another culture. We also may make assumptions and have blind spots regarding people’s feelings. Research shows that we tend to assume that what causes us to feel certain emotions also causes others to experience those same emotions. We also naturally tend to assume that others feel the same way we do about the same things. Pausing to learn what someone is actually feeling and why they feel the way they do reduces misunderstanding and increases accuracy. To practice this skill, think about a relationship you care about or one you might be struggling with. Consider the emotions of frustration and joy. List or consider a few things that make you feel frustrated, then a few things that you believe make the other person feel frustrated. Try the same exercise for joy. What do you notice? How many similarities and differences were there? With the right words, we can communicate our emotions more clearly to our coworkers, students, and their families, as well as to our friends and loved ones. When we can identify specifically what we’re feeling, we’re also in a better position to address those feelings effectively. To find the right words to communicate our feelings, we can use the following steps: consider how pleasant the feeling is, then consider its level of energy. Plot it on the Mood Meter. Consider what may be causing the feeling, then try to find a specific word.

The Impact of Our Emotions on Students

Our feelings come with us to work. Despite our best efforts and good intentions to show up for our students and colleagues, we simply can’t leave our emotions at the door. When we try, they tend to leak out or leave us drained from the effort of showing a different feeling on the outside than what we’re experiencing on the inside. So what do educators’ emotions have to do with our students? As we’ve seen so far in this course, our feelings affect our judgment. They impact how we perceive situations and how we understand others’ behaviors. Our feelings give us a window into why we connect more easily with some students than others and why we may be drawn to support students who seem more like us. Awareness of such natural biases is the first step toward mitigating these effects. Next, we know that emotions impact how we communicate and teach. Emotions are contagious. A passionate teacher can inspire their students, while a distracted teacher may struggle to keep students engaged. To stay aware of how we’re feeling, we can ask ourselves if our emotional state is helpful to our current situation. If it isn’t, we can work on shifting our emotions to be in the most effective emotional place to perform our jobs. Students will define themselves within the emotional space we create in our classrooms and in our relationships with them. Modeling also means monitoring our own biases so that we can see the other person clearly for who they are and what they are experiencing, rather than as mirrors of ourselves or by projecting our own emotions onto them. It’s a step toward meeting our own needs in a healthy way, not making students meet our needs. Teachers who model emotional intelligence are also comfortable showing their students how to identify and manage emotions. For example, after getting some sad news that a colleague is ill, we might say to our students something like, “I’m a little distracted right now because I just got some sad news. I wanted to let you all know that I have that going on, but I’m going to do my best to be present with you during this lesson. One way I’ll do that is by reminding myself how lucky I am to see you all today.”Emotional intelligence doesn’t mean being happy all the time; it means understanding our own and others’ emotions and their value. Remember, classrooms and schools are places with many interpersonal dynamics at play. Race, religion, culture, gender identity, and socioeconomic status all influence how people experience situations, how they feel, and how those feelings are expressed, understood, and sometimes misunderstood. It’s our obligation to be aware of these differences—for example, how the distribution of power and authority shapes our interactions. The sum of these interactions and how they are experienced forge identities and can lead to us versus them categorizations, labeling, and stereotyping.

Managing Our Emotions

So far, we have learned how to identify, understand, and name our feelings. Now, we will turn our attention to strategizing how we express and manage those feelings. Emotion management skills can be hard to master but are very important for helping us navigate our daily lives—especially when we experience intense or unwanted emotions. Managing our emotions is not about suppressing them, controlling them, or conforming to someone else’s idea of what we should do or feel. It’s not just about calming down. We manage emotions so that we can think clearly, make the best decisions, form and maintain healthy relationships, and experience well-being.

Strategies for Managing Emotions

There are countless strategies, from exercising or taking a walk to drawing, listening to music, connecting with friends, or snuggling with a pet. What works for one person may not work for another. Our temperament, personality, and personal preferences all influence the strategies we use. Context or location also affects which strategies we choose and use; a strategy that works at home (like taking a nap) may not be possible at work. Building a toolkit of regulation strategies is a lifelong process. As we grow and face life’s challenges, we continue to learn and try new strategies.

Reflection: How Do You Want To Feel?

Let’s begin our exploration of emotion regulation strategies with a brief reflection. Think about the months ahead. How would you like to feel? What energy would you like to bring to your work? Take a moment to think about or jot down the feelings you would most like to experience at work. You may be wondering how your hoped-for feelings compare with those of your colleagues. We asked thousands of school staff across the nation how they want to feel. Their answers are reflected below. You may already be experiencing many of these feelings. If so, that’s great! In that case, this section and the next one will provide you with some ideas for how to maintain these feelings over time.

Making Sense of How We Feel

During a school survey, stressed, frustrated, and overwhelmed were the most commonly reported feelings, among a mix of other unpleasant emotions. It’s clear that how we want to feel is often different from how we actually feel. We say we want to feel excited, safe, confident, and happy. But in reality, many of us have felt stressed, frustrated, and overwhelmed for years.

Some unpleasant feelings are inevitable and even useful, but the problem lies in how out of balance we are. Unfortunately, 70% of the emotions adults have been experiencing are in the red and blue Mood Meter quadrants, representing unpleasant emotions. A reasonable goal would be to flip these ratios so that we spend 70% of our time in the yellow and green quadrants, experiencing pleasant emotions, and about 30% in the blue and red quadrants.

As mentioned, some unpleasant emotions are inevitable and even helpful. But over time, especially when they are strong or persistent, they can take a toll on our health and well-being. So, why is it so hard to balance our emotional lives?

The reality is that our bodies naturally respond to perceived physical threats by ringing alarm bells to keep us safe. Two parts of our brain play key roles in this process:

The Limbic Region: This deep part of the brain acts like an air traffic controller, constantly scanning for incoming threats. It monitors information from our senses (what we see, hear, etc.), as well as our memories and thoughts. The main job of the limbic system is to keep our bodies safe from danger. It releases neurotransmitters and hormones that direct energy to different parts of the body to prepare for fight, flight, or freeze. Memories of frightening events are also stored here to protect us from similar dangers in the future.

The Prefrontal Cortex: This part of the brain is responsible for thinking, reasoning, planning, and analyzing situations. It acts as the executive manager of our thoughts, helping us see the bigger picture and maintain perspective.

The neural connections between the limbic region and the prefrontal cortex grow throughout childhood and take about 25 years to fully develop. These connections allow our feelings to inform our thoughts and vice versa, enabling us to manage our emotions effectively.

However, when we are highly stressed, the limbic region takes over and triggers all the alarms to help us survive. This shuts down access to the prefrontal cortex, making it difficult to think clearly, learn, or focus. Under stress, the sensory system becomes hyper-alert, locking vision and hearing onto the perceived threat. The limbic region signals the adrenal glands to release adrenaline, activating the heart and lungs to prepare for fight or flight. The stress hormone cortisol is also released, breaking down fats and proteins for energy while storing the memory of the scary event and its context in the brain.

Non-essential functions, such as the immune response and digestion, slow down during this process. Once the threat has passed, the body restores balance and resumes normal functioning. However, repeated or prolonged stress can cause wear and tear, leading to issues like immune disorders, high blood pressure, heart problems, and metabolic imbalances.

While this may sound alarming, understanding the stress response gives us valuable clues about how to manage it effectively.

Managing Emotions in Helpful Ways

Remember, a pleasant or unpleasant feeling is not inherently good or bad; we need to consider its purpose. For example, moderate anxiety can remind us to practice social distancing, while admiration for witnessing a good deed can inspire us to act similarly. Sometimes, our feelings cannot and should not be easily managed. For instance, feelings like grief and sorrow often need to run their course. Whether we aim to maintain, shift, or sit with an emotion, all these approaches require some form of regulation. We’ve been managing emotions our entire lives, but while there is an almost infinite list of emotion regulation strategies, some are more helpful than others.

Unhelpful Action Strategies

Unhelpful ways of managing emotions might provide short-term relief but often have negative long-term effects. For instance, yelling at someone who has offended you may feel satisfying momentarily, but it can damage relationships, harm your reputation, and fail to resolve the underlying problem.

Helpful Action Strategies

Helpful strategies support not only our emotional goals—such as feeling more, less, or the same amount of a given emotion—but also align with our long-term goals, relationships, and overall health.

Healthy Emotion Management

The infographic below shares action-oriented strategies focused on taking care of our bodies, connecting with others, and establishing routines and rituals. These are all actions we can take to help manage our emotions in healthy ways.

Introduction to Healthy Emotion Management

Managing our emotions means learning how to deal with them effectively. It involves checking in with how we’re feeling and asking ourselves if we want to continue feeling that way or shift to a different feeling.

Strategies for managing emotions include action strategies, which are things we can do, and thought strategies, which are things we can think about or say to ourselves. Action strategies might include taking a deep breath or talking to a friend. Thought strategies may involve saying something positive to ourselves or trying to reframe a situation to see it from a new perspective.

We’ve all been managing our emotions since birth—like when we cried to get emotional support from family members. However, many of us go through life using emotion management strategies haphazardly, without much conscious thought. For instance, we might reach for a pint of ice cream or play video games when we’re sad, or avoid people or places that bring back uncomfortable memories.

Managing our emotions well means becoming more intentional and consistent with our strategies. It involves carefully selecting the strategies that work for us, help us grow, support healthy relationships, and align with our long-term goals. Consistent use of helpful strategies not only helps us feel better but also prepares us to handle challenging emotions when they arise.

When we eat and sleep well, move our bodies daily, maintain a strong social network, and have meaningful goals and work, we are better equipped to manage annoyances, frustrations, and stressors in a healthy way.

Breathing: A Helpful Strategy

One of the most fundamental strategies for managing emotions is breathing. With more oxygen, the chemistry of our brain changes, counteracting the effects of stress or excitement that impair our ability to think clearly. Slow, deep breaths relax the body and mind, helping us feel calmer and enabling us to problem-solve effectively.

The most helpful way to do this is to breathe slowly and intentionally, a practice called mindful breathing. Mindful breathing simply means being intentional about something we all do—breathing. There’s a misconception that mindful breathing is only useful for regulating difficult emotions. In reality, breathing can help us be present and fully acknowledge our experiences, no matter how we’re feeling.

There’s no one “correct” way to breathe. You don’t need a specific hand position or posture, though sitting with a slightly taller posture can help allow for more airflow.

To try a mindful breathing exercise, find a comfortable spot and check your posture. Sit upright with your torso straight. Then, breathe slowly in and out. Some people like to count their breaths, while others prefer calming phrases like “in, out.”

For example, you can:

Breathe in slowly for about three seconds, thinking the word in, and exhale slowly, thinking the word out.
Replace in and out with words like deep and slow, calm and ease, or smile and release.

After practicing, reflect on how you’re feeling. How often do you take time to pause and focus on your breath? Can you commit to taking a few mindful breathing breaks each day?

Healthy Eating

In addition to breathing, there are many other action strategies we can practice daily to manage our emotions. Learn more on this page and the following sections.

Having a Plan

No matter what changes you’d like to make to your behavior, research shows that having a plan helps ensure they actually happen. To plan, we can start by asking ourselves what’s most important to change, which is different for everyone. We can identify exactly what we’d like to do—such as what behavior to change and at what times or on which days—and set small goals. It’s important to consider barriers or things that may stand in the way, as well as opportunities, like when you have the most uninterrupted time or the fewest barriers, and when you are most motivated.

You can schedule it by adding it to an online or written calendar, setting an alarm on your phone, placing a note on your fridge, or finding a buddy to keep each other accountable. Of course, celebrate small victories!

Changing our habits is no easy feat. Strategies are unique to each individual and their goals. It’s also important to keep in mind that sometimes the best strategies are simply to breathe or work on changing the way we think. Fortunately, breathing and trying to think differently are strategies available to us no matter the circumstances. Whether we’re in the middle of a stressful conversation or just lying in bed running through all the worst-case scenarios in our minds, we can breathe slowly and challenge ourselves to think differently.

Healthy Strategies Take Effort!

It is much easier to ignore a problem, put off a difficult conversation, or complain to a friend. Most helpful strategies for managing our emotions have the following things in common:

They take effort.
They are practiced, evaluated, and refined.
They are specific to the individual.
They are permitted and encouraged.

No matter what strategies we try for managing our emotions, it’s important to evaluate them periodically to ensure they’re working for us. We all need different things, and no one is perfect—we all resort to unhelpful strategies sometimes. The key is to practice some self-forgiveness, apologize to someone else if necessary, and continue to move forward.

To summarize, we can put our emotion management strategies to the test by asking if they:

Reduce our stress or other unwanted emotions
Lead to better health and well-being
Support the development of healthier life habits
Contribute to more positive relationships
Help us solve our problems

Achieve other goals that are important to us

Introduction: Reflection

In the previous section, we shared emotion management strategies that focus on action, movement, and our physiology. Now, we’re going to turn to strategies that focus on ways we can shift our thinking. These strategies use the higher thinking regions of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex, which we learned about previously.

To begin this section, take a moment to reflect on the following quote. How might this connect to what’s happening in your life right now?

Quote Explanation

The quote appears in Viktor Frankl’s 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning, written about his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. The book, and this quote, describe his approach to finding positivity and purpose while experiencing great suffering and his observation that doing so could, in turn, impact health and longevity.

Introduction to Thought Strategies

We’ve all heard phrases like, “Just think positive,” or, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” But how much power do our thoughts really have? It might feel strange to be asked to change the way you think in order to manage your feelings, but it really works. Thought strategies are powerful tools for helping us regulate our emotions.

There’s a saying in psychology: “What fires together, wires together.” This means that when the same neural connections are repeatedly used, they become stronger. If we repeatedly jump to catastrophic thoughts when something unpleasant happens, that negative way of thinking becomes automatic. When we do this from early childhood without learning helpful strategies, that way of thinking often becomes our default way of dealing with emotions.

What’s the takeaway? What you focus on grows.

The good news is that the brain is plastic. It grows new pathways and is adaptable. This means we can always learn new strategies to help us regulate our emotions. When practiced and refined, these strategies become new, healthy habits. Practice is essential because it strengthens these new connections, making them faster and more readily available to us until they become automatic.

Another reason thought strategies work is that they interrupt the automatic stress response. Labeling our feelings is effective because bringing language to our feelings calms the activation in the limbic system. As the saying goes, “You have to name it to tame it.”

One of the most challenging feelings during COVID-19 was a sense of loss that seemed never-ending. We didn’t know what the protests would lead to, when a vaccine would come, how paid work would resume, or when our family relationships would be restored. Psychologists call this ambiguous loss. It is especially disruptive because it lacks clear resolution and seems to persist indefinitely. Naming ambiguous loss (sometimes called ambiguous grief) accurately can be the first step toward moving forward.

Sometimes, people ask if thought strategies are a form of brainwashing or denial of reality. Not at all! They are simply tools for managing strong emotions. You know the details of your situation and what matters to you. You can choose to tell yourself what feels right or works for you. For example, I often say to myself, “Divyani, take the high road. Divyani, you can get through this.” These affirmations work for me. No one else truly knows what it feels like to be in your shoes.

Thought strategies don’t require you to deny your experience. Even in the most dire circumstances, they give you an opportunity to choose a wiser, more helpful course of action. At the very least, they can help you tolerate uncertainty or remain a little more comfortable with discomfort.

One of the best things about thought strategies is that they can be practiced almost anywhere, anytime. They don’t require planning, equipment, or resources like some action-oriented strategies do. Let’s look at a few types of thought strategies now.

Positive Self-Talk

The first strategy is positive self-talk. What is positive self-talk? Self-talk is exactly what it sounds like—the way we talk to ourselves. It includes the encouraging or discouraging things we say about ourselves. This inner dialogue can happen in our heads or out loud. It may be conscious or unconscious, but it acts as the background music of our day.

Take a moment to think: How do you talk to yourself? When you look in the mirror, are you as complimentary of yourself as you would be to a friend? When you make a mistake, what’s your automatic self-talk? Are you kind to yourself, or are you critical?

Take a moment to write down some of the phrases you tend to say to yourself. Be honest. Share the positive and the not-so-positive ones.

Just as we choose to rally for a sports team, we can choose to be on our own team. One of the main ways we rally for ourselves is through our self-talk.

Where does self-talk come from? Often, it originates from the messages we received in childhood—from family members, teachers, and other influential adults. Perhaps you were told you were smart, athletic, or beautiful. Or perhaps you were told you were too shy, too energetic, or something else. These messages continue into adulthood. Self-talk is also shaped by societal norms around race, class, ability, gender, and other attributes.

The key is to identify where these messages come from and ensure they support, rather than harm, your self-esteem. Negative self-talk often includes harsh judgments like, “I’m not good enough,” or “Nothing ever works out.” In contrast, positive self-talk is uplifting and encouraging.

Positive self-talk boosts confidence, lifts spirits, and helps us find the next step forward. Research suggests it also improves problem-solving, creativity, and coping with stress and anxiety.

For example, when I make a mistake, I used to say, “I’m such an idiot.” After noticing this habit, I realized my mother and son had also started saying it. I’ve since challenged myself to shift to a new, kinder self-talk.

Positive self-talk can sound like this:

“I’m taking one step at a time.”
“It’s okay to feel this way.”
“I may not know the answer now, but I trust it will become clear.”

Are you talking to yourself like a kind and supportive friend would? If not, what could you say instead? Research shows that using your own name in positive self-talk can foster empathy for yourself. For example, I say, “Divyani, take the high road,” or “Divyani, you can do this.”

Positive Reframing

Another cognitive strategy is positive reframing. As Oprah Winfrey said, “Turn your wounds into wisdom.” Positive reframing involves looking at situations from a different, more helpful perspective.

The stories we tell ourselves about challenges and obstacles shape our feelings and actions. Positive reframing allows us to see the silver lining, reflect on lessons learned, and express gratitude for what went right.

For example:

Instead of saying, “Of course my husband lost his job. Nothing ever goes right for us,” try: “This is scary, but we still have our health and each other. We’ll get through this.”
Instead of saying, “Everything’s out of control. There’s nothing I can do,” try: “A lot is outside my control, but I do have control over the choices I make.”

Though reframing isn’t always easy, it’s a choice we can make to see challenges as opportunities to grow.

Other Strategies

In addition to positive self-talk and reframing, there are other ways to use thoughts to influence emotions. On the following pages, explore additional thought strategies.

Mindfulness

A strategy you’ve probably heard a lot about lately is mindfulness. Mindfulness is the practice of paying attention to our minds and bodies without judging them. By increasing our awareness of what we are thinking in the moment, we turn our attention to the present, away from what happened in the past or what might happen in the future.

Research shows that developing a regular practice of mindfulness helps us be more accepting of ourselves and improves our well-being. Research also shows that:

A daily practice of mindfulness can preserve focus and short-term memory and quiet a busy mind, even in stressful, demanding jobs like working in a school.
After weeks of daily practice, mindfulness can change activity in the brain associated with empathy and compassion.

What is Mindfulness?

Have you ever had the experience of your body being in one place while your mind is somewhere else? Maybe you’re physically in the classroom, but your thoughts drift back to an unsettling conversation you’ve had with a friend or family member. This is very common; we’ve all experienced it. What we know from decades of research is that practicing mindfulness can help.

Mindfulness consists of two core practices: cultivating present-centered attention and cultivating open, nonjudgmental awareness.

We cultivate present-centered attention by concentrating on the breath or the body. When our minds wander, we gently bring back our attention to the breath or body. We do this again and again, like training a puppy. Over time, this practice strengthens our ability to focus on the present moment, no matter where we are—in the classroom or at home.

In the second core mindfulness practice, we cultivate open, nonjudgmental awareness by observing the whole picture just as it is, without trying to change it. The whole picture includes both our experiences in the moment and our thoughts and feelings about it. This might include unpleasant or depleting experiences as well as energizing and pleasant ones. Open, nonjudgmental awareness helps us see how we’re relating to whatever is coming up, and it helps us uncover the attitudes in our minds.

With open, nonjudgmental awareness, we’re curious and try to see each thought and emotion as a small wave in the ocean, rather than being swept away by a tidal wave. Woven together as complementary mindfulness practices, present-centered attention and open, nonjudgmental awareness can foster clarity and resilience, helping us engage more effectively in the moment.

Now, let’s return to that busy classroom. This time, imagine you’ve been practicing mindfulness outside of the classroom. Your mind may begin to dart around with everything you need to remember or feel reactive to whatever your students are doing. But on this day, you pause and check in with yourself. You notice your mind’s habitual or reactive response, and with greater self-compassion and awareness, you lightly guide your attention back so that your mind and body are in the same place. Then, you consider what is best for you and those around you. In this stable state of clarity, you respond.

Introduction: Our "Emotion Education"

Imagine a child who is nervous about the first day of school. His parent acknowledges and validates his feelings, helps him identify the specific cause of his anxiety, and offers some helpful strategies. Maybe his parent offers positive self-talk, like, “It’s going to be a day full of new and interesting experiences.” Or perhaps they point out a friend in the child’s class he can lean on. This child is lucky—his parent gives him permission to feel and helps him identify and manage his emotions.

Our “Emotion Education”

Here are a few examples of unhelpful and helpful messages we may have received as children:

Unhelpful: If you cry or yell, people will think you are overly sensitive or unstable.
Helpful: It’s okay to have your feelings. All feelings are valid.
Unhelpful: If you show sadness or fear, everyone will know you’re weak.
Helpful: Talking about feelings makes you stronger.
Unhelpful: If you look a certain way, your passion may be mistaken for anger.

Many of these messages around emotions center on gender, race, ethnicity, and culture. When we internalize them, they influence our behavior. For example, women may contain their anger and frustration so they do not seem overly emotional. Boys may swallow their tears so they can appear strong and masculine. Men of color may learn to speak softly or move slowly to avoid being seen as “scary.” These societal inequities are a psychological burden for many people and take their toll on mental health.If you look a certain way, your passion may be mistaken for anger.

Defining an Emotion Scientist

No matter what emotion education we receive growing up, it’s important to be aware that we carry those messages with us. That’s why it’s important to continue our emotion education by treating our own and others’ emotions scientifically. Just as scientists rely on facts, and are curious, inquisitive, and analytical, educators and school staff who are emotions scientists seek to understand and observe without judgment. Emotion scientists use active listening to obtain information by asking others how they’re feeling, and by paying careful attention to others’ words, expressions, and actions. They think long and hard about their own emotions too, always seeking to better understand their own emotional lives. Emotion scientists evaluate different ways of handling their emotions through trial and error, and strive to discover helpful ways to deal with their own emotions. Emotions scientists also recognize and attempt to undo their own judgmental tendencies. They refrain from quick assumptions or telling others how they feel. They question the source of their own thoughts and opinions about other people’s emotions, and they’re willing to be proven wrong with evidence. They’re open to changing their beliefs and opinions based on data.Here is the big question, are you an emotion scientist or are you an emotion judge? Or maybe you’re an emotion scientist sometimes, and emotion judge in other times. For instance, some people say they’re an emotion scientist with their acquaintances, but [emotion] judges with the people they care about and love the most. Think about it. Imagine the following scenario, you’re handing back graded quizzes, when a student with poor grades, crumples theirs up, knocks over the desk, stamps out of the classroom, and slams the door. You go out in the hallway to de-escalate the student. hat do you do first? Take a minute and consider what you would say. Perhaps you offer a strategy for calming down, taking a walk, getting a drink, deep breaths. Perhaps you told the student the behavior was unacceptable, and sent them to the office. Perhaps you approached with a question, “Why are you angry?” or “What made you so angry?” These aren’t bad attempts, but let’s back up. Do you know that the child is angry? Can you be sure that is the correct feeling?

The answer should be no. Not yet. A child who feels their grade was unfair might be angry, but a child who feels frustrated that they’re not good enough may have responded with the same behavior, so could have a fearful child who will be punished severely by their parents when they bring home a bad grade, or a child whose bully saw the grade, and feels humiliated. Suddenly, you’re hastily-offered strategy is highly disconnected. Taking a walk to calm down is not enough for the child who is fearful of retribution. Asking children why they are mad when they’re not might influence their emotion education potentially in a harmful way. There’s a phrase that can help when trying to be more scientific with motions. “Behavior does not equal emotion.” Yelling does not mean someone is angry, crying does not mean someone is sad, laughter does not mean someone is happy. The same behavior construed as anger or sadness could be an expression of passion about a cause, frustration over a blocked goal, or disappointment over unmet expectations. Sometimes we laugh whenever we are scared.

As emotion scientists, we seek to find out the story behind the behavior in order to find the emotion underlying the behavior. We’re curious; we want to really see and understand, and seeking to find out the story means digging deep. It means that we get to know our students, our colleagues, and others around us for who they are. We pay attention to their unique personalities, experiences, upbringing, identities, and cultures, and meet them where they are and respond accordingly. We are culturally responsive. It’s not always easy. In many ways, we are hard-wired to make quick judgments based on the first thing we see, how others react and what others have told us.Our brains and impulses often automatically and unconsciously rely on quick judgments. In particular, judgments that those who are different or unfamiliar are bad or scary. They have been helpful for ancient ancestors to use these quick judgments to know when they and their families were safe versus in trouble, if they were surrounded by friends or foes. But in our modern world, these mental shortcuts and biases can lead us astray. Fortunately, we are also hard-wired for cooperation and fairness. We can retrain our brains, override unhelpful impulses and overcome fear and biases. To do this, we must be aware of the roadblocks to both approaching our emotions scientifically, and to responding to the unique needs of those around us.

Barriers to Becoming a Culturally Responsive Emotion Scientist

One of the most common barriers to being a culturally responsive emotion scientists is that we often see others emotions as a reflection of our own emotions. We are biased by what we have felt and experienced,and we make judgments based on this biases. We think, “I felt frustrated when that happens, so that person must feel frustrated too. Or when I act that way, it’s because I’m feeling overwhelmed, so she must be feeling overwhelmed as well.” Assumptions in any arena can be harmful, but it can be especially problematic when we assume we understand the emotions of people from backgrounds, races, and cultures that are different from our own. As we learned previously, behavior does not equal emotion. Without asking someone how they feel, there’s a lot of room for a misperception. Research shows we are less accurate in reading emotions of people who look different from us than in people who are similar to us. Being an emotion scientists means pausing and acknowledging our limitations, and often narrow views in

questioning our assumptions about the way someone is feeling. “Do I know for certain that this child is feeling angry? How do I know? What else might they be feeling?” Another common bias is ethnocentrism. The fancy term for ROA is the right way. We often evaluate the behavior of people with cultural backgrounds different from our own,based on our own cultures, standards, and customs. In fact, research shows that we automatically, unconsciously tend to favor people who are similar to us in ethnicity, but also in age, religion, and political affiliation. Interestingly, studies have even shown that people show strong preferences towards others who share their birthday, or a sports jersey of a team they like, or even suddenly resembled themselves especially

if they’re resemblance relates to their own race or ethnicity. This bias may lead us to believe that our way, what we have learned, our customs to seeing and doing is the right way and the better way. It’s these beliefs that have contributed to structural and systemic racism and prejudices to groups of people with different abilities, ages, religious and political affiliations, gender identities, and sexual orientations. Other biases relate to how we explain our own and others behavior. One such bias is the fundamental attribution error.

This is the tendency for people to over attribute someone’s behavior to that person’s personality or characteristic rather than particular circumstances but do the opposite for themselves. For instance, when we assume someone expresses emotions a certain way, because that is a function of that person’s race, age, gender identity, or some other variable. But when we express our own feelings at certain way, we attribute it to the situation and not our personality or character. The most common example of this phenomenon is

people seeing something bad happens to someone else. But 65 percent of the time, observers blame the person’s behavior or personality for the unfortunate incident. Fortunately, more and more research is showing that we can combat both our biases and our related behavior with a few simple methods. Doing the personal work to enhance your skill and perceiving emotions, learning more about others cultures, and getting to know others well, especially those who have different backgrounds than us.

Strategies for Shifting Our Mindset

So, what can we do?

As we work together in the fight to end systemic problems, we also can work on ourselves. We can pause to observe, to ask questions, to really understand our own and others’ emotions—without making value judgments and without forming opinions about whether our feelings are right or wrong. We can think long and hard about our biases and the sources of our opinions of others, their feelings, and how they manage them.

Enhancing Our Self-Awareness and Education

Have Conversations Across Differences

Stay Present and Use Active Listening

Be a Bridge, Not a Barrier

Consider the Difference Between Intent and Impact

Acknowledging Biases and Perspective Taking

Acknowledging our own biases and perspective-taking are also important strategies for shifting our mindset.

Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji: Blindspot-Hidden Biases of Good People

Dr Mahzarin Banaji. is an experimental psychologist. She teachs at Harvard University. She have been fascinated by two things. We call them attitudes and beliefs. These are thoughts and feelings that are in our minds. We can’t see them, we can’t touch them, so how to go about measuring them is the interesting question. For more than a 100 years, psychologists have been at this task of trying to understand, trying to get out of people what their thoughts and feelings are. These particular thoughts and feelings are attitudes and beliefs, that we hold about social groups, and how we use those beliefs that we have about the group as a whole. The Swiss are like this, so the Germans are like that. How do we use those beliefs? Then our judgments about individual people who happened to be members of the group. That’s the interesting question and as I said, for over a 100 years, people have been measuring them in the form of attitudes or prejudices that we might hold, thoughts or beliefs, or stereotypes that we may have about different groups of people. How to go about doing this is the question. We know one easy way to do it, and that is, to ask people, what do you think about X? How likely is it that people from this group will be able to do something of this kind or that kind? What is their inner nature? Are they competitive? Are they collaborative? Are they smart or they not very smart? Are they trustworthy? Are they not trustworthy? Things like that, so we would just ask. But then asking has some problems. There are two problems with asking people. First of all, if you ask me what I think about X, I may not want to tell you about that because that’s a private belief and I don’t want to share it with you. But there’s a second problem with asking, and that is the one I’m most interested in. That is, we may not know our own minds. Our brains do a lot of work silently, quietly. We don’t have access to all of it, and we don’t necessarily have access to the contents of our mind. We don’t know, and this may seem strange to you, but we don’t know what our actual attitudes might be or what thoughts and beliefs are. As scientists, our job is to try to figure out indirect ways into people’s minds to draw out what might actually exist there that even they may not know. We’ve developed tests, tests like the IAT, the Implicit Association Test, which we use to bypass, to get away from asking people what they might think or feel, and instead, just trying to see what might be in their minds. We might look, for example,at how rapidly, or how quickly, or how accurately you can put two things together. The test reveals, in a sense, what it is that might be sitting in your mind that you may not know about. I’ll give you an example, just with me. I am a woman, I have worked outside the home all my life, and yet when I take a test that requires me to associate female with career and male with home,

I can’t seem to do that as well as if you gave me the opposite. If you ask me to associate female with home, male with career, that turns out to be relatively easy for my brain to do. Why? I don’t have this belief that women don’t belong in the workplace or anything like that, and yet my brain contains the thumbprint of the culture in which I live, and that culture has repeatedly associated female and home more so than male and home, and that’s now in my head. That’s the important discovery that we can say consciously, we can say explicitly, what we think and feel. That’s one way in which our minds work. But there is another part of our mind where these associations that are picked up, sucked out of the culture, and sit there, they’re there all the time. Where do they come from? One of the things that we’ve been very interested in, is looking at young children. How do young children come to have the beliefs and attitudes that they do? Do they learn it slowly as they grow up and so on? Our data suggests, that, children are very open to what’s going on in their culture, and at a very early age, at ages like two and three, we can see evidence that they have in their minds, attitudes and stereotypes of the sort we see in adults. So what we now know is that these are picked up pretty quickly and that they exist in the minds of children, even at that age. They’re not always visible, but we can see them in things like conversations. A student of mine, Tessa Charlesworth, has recently been analyzing data from parents and children. These are conversations that parents and children have had, and there are thousands of such conversations. We can use an approach called natural language processing. We can use machine learning to look at whether in the language that parents are using, they actually are relying on these stereotypes that they have no clue that they are. When you ask parents, they’ll tell you, I don’t know where my child pick this up from because I certainly don’t teach it to them, and yet when we analyze these conversations that parents and children have had, we can see in those conversations evidence that parents are indeed associating, for example, female more with home things and male more with career affairs.

Acknowledge Our Own Biases

Get to Know Each Other's Stories

Focus on Perspective Taking

Use Our Feelings as an Impetus for Change

Working with Students

As an adults working with the next generation of children and students, we hold a powerful position to shape their emotional biases.

Consider this metaphor about horses and their ropes. From a young age, domesticated horses are taught to wear harnesses on their heads, and when led by a rope, they must follow. While they are small and their trainer ties their ropes to a post, the young horses are not strong enough to get away, so they stop trying. When the horse is grown, he is, in fact, strong enough to break the rope, but he doesn’t know it. Simply because of what he learned as a child, he continues to carry this “truth” about the world into adulthood.

Working with Students as Emotion Scientists

When working with our children and students, we can:

Agree on norms or guidelines for safe conversations. Have students brainstorm about what they each can do so that everyone feels safe to express themselves and communicate bravely. Write or type out these guidelines so that everyone can view them, know what’s expected, and refer back to them if one or more is violated. For instance, students may agree to listen with the goal of understanding, keep conversations confidential, only speak one at a time, etc.
Let students be our guides. Sometimes we can respond best to the needs of others when we let them guide the conversations. Allow space for students to ask questions about their needs, to be curious about something they don’t understand. Create calm spaces for students to reflect and discuss the range of their emotions. When supporting students in healthy emotion regulation, encourage them to discover their own strategies and to evaluate their effectiveness.
Honor all feelings. Consider asking students to journal about, draw, or paint their different emotions. Alternatively, they could write a poem or story to explore what those emotions might be telling them about themselves, their unique backgrounds, and their experiences. Exploring and understanding feelings on a deeper level can be both empowering and lead to positive action.
Discuss challenging topics. When we have conversations about difficult subjects, young people learn that they can come to us and begin to develop the skills needed to navigate adversity. They see that we are comfortable discussing uncomfortable topics. Exploring challenging subjects can also help them better understand other people’s life experiences.
Encourage students to work and play in diverse groups. When students of diverse backgrounds are working toward a common goal, are treated as equals, and are pushed by the teacher to cooperate with positive and noncompetitive interactions, the students themselves are more likely to overcome their biases.
Model being a culturally responsive emotion scientist. As the adults in their lives, we can view every interaction with our children and students as an opportunity to teach. In our conversations with them about emotions, differences, and actions, we can model courage, curiosity, openness, perspective-taking, and compassion.

Introduction: Reflection

Take a moment to get comfortable. Do a quick scan of your body to see where you’re holding tension. Are you feeling pleasant or unpleasant? Take a few deep breaths and see if you can release any tension you might have. Now, how are you feeling? What word or words best describe how you are feeling? Are you relaxed and focused, or do you need a strategy to up your game? Perhaps you need to refocus or grab a glass of water, or complete something else before resuming this course? Take a minute now before moving on to get into the right head space. Now, take a moment to think about your students. How do you think they are feeling right now? Which of your students do you think are mostly on the right side of the Mood Meter, feeling pleasant in the yellow or green quadrants? Who seems to be on the left side of the Mood Meter, feeling unpleasant in the red or blue quadrants? Make a note of who might need an extra check-in. How exactly will you check in with the student or students?

Identifying Others' Feelings

Why is it important to develop the skills to identify and understand others feelings, especially our students? Put simply, accurately identifying other people’s emotions helps us to enhance our relationships, build greater trust, and have better communication.

Identifying Emotions in Children and Adolescents

You know from working with children and adolescents that students bring all their emotions to school. There’s no such thing as leaving your emotions at the door. That’s true for us as an adults and for kids. In fact the younger they are, the less students hide them. And when puberty begins to change young teens brains, they become more emotional–especially about certain topics.

Still, we do our best to educate them amidst this river–sometimes tsunami–of feelings. Traditional education presumed that students should set aside their feelings to pay attention to the math and science that we present to them. In fact, if students couldn’t set aside their feelings, punishment usually followed.

Now we know that acknowledging and accepting that the feelings are there, and dealing with them skillfully–even embracing them–can raise everyone’s chances of success. The research is clear, emotions drive attention which drives learning, decision making and behavior. Being aware of everyone’s emotions can help to create psychologically safer, warmer and closer schools and classrooms where both adults and students can become more comfortable with themselves and others.

We have a special responsibility to engage constructively with students emotions because their brains and minds are still developing. Their immaturity means they don’t yet know strategies, intellectual OR emotional, until they stumble upon them or we teach them! And because of the way the brain and nervous system develop, the experiences they have now will carry a greater impact than if they were older.It’s our responsibility, then, to scaffold their emotional experiences and strategies to the best of our ability.

Becoming More Accurate at Identifying Emotions

This section focuses on how to become more accurate at identifying and understanding other people’s emotions, especially our students feelings. The section after this one will focus on how we can help others to manage their emotions.

Some of our most important needs are to be seen, heard, and understood,in other words, to have our feelings recognized. And though that’s not realistic all of the time, we each have to have enough of the experience of feeling seen by another person to know that we are secure and to believe in our self-worth.

Understanding Other’s Feelings

When students have strong relationships with caring adults, they are more likely to feel engaged and motivated to succeed in school. Research has shown, unfortunately, that a majority of students don’t believe there is any adult in their school who is there for them or whom they can count on. As we have learned, we all have blind spots and hot buttons, and sometimes there just isn’t enough time, so we fail to notice some of our students. Moreover, many older students are quite practiced at covering up their feelings, which can make building strong relationships difficult despite our best efforts.

We shouldn’t expect perfection. Instead, it’s about adopting a willing mindset to keep trying and learning.

What are the implications of misreading others’ emotions? There are many, but the first is that reading emotions is a lot harder than we think. Imagine how many times we might have misread a student or a colleague. Think about the implications. There are some common barriers to accurately perceiving and understanding other people’s emotions. One of the biggest barriers is ourselves.

Sometimes, when we are preoccupied with our own thoughts and feelings, we may simply fail to notice or bring our attention to another person in a meaningful way. Alternatively, we might want to control the other person’s feelings. For example, we might need our students to be calm so that we can begin the lesson. When they aren’t calm, we cast them as being difficult or become impatient or angry. As an authority figure in the school, we may feel the need to stay in control, and when students appear to disobey us, it threatens our authority.

Yet, if we rewind that scene and play it back, we can often see that we have skipped over the step of taking responsibility to help our students feel calm. As adults, we are the more powerful person in the relationship. Sometimes, when talking to someone else, our thoughts default to how we felt in a similar situation, and we inadvertently fill up the space with ourselves, taking our attention off the other person.

Other times, we might simply like some students better than others, even if we don’t want to admit it. Perhaps we’re more comfortable with certain emotions from some students, but those same emotions feel unacceptable when expressed by others. We also tend to be more comfortable with some feelings than others. For instance, we might easily feel sympathy for a sad or lonely student, but when a student is angry, our impulse may be to respond to their anger with even greater anger.

Sometimes, what is happening accidentally triggers an early memory of our own, such as anger in the household we grew up in. When that happens, we may mentally drop out of the present moment and into the “child space” within ourselves. If we haven’t resolved our own difficult childhood issues, we might respond to the student in front of us from an unresolved, hurt, or angry place that they don’t deserve.

If we haven’t grown up experiencing comfort, we’re more likely to respond to someone else’s distress by becoming distressed ourselves. Psychologists call this sympathetic distress—when our students’ feelings become our feelings. However, if we can act with compassion toward another person while maintaining our emotional balance, everyone benefits.

Is there one particular student you haven’t had time for? Take a moment to pause. Open up the space between you and this student in your imagination. Ask yourself: Is there any reason preventing me from leaning into their story? Is there anything I could do differently to connect with this student?

Research shows that we’re better at reading the emotions of people we have spent more time with. This means that the more people we get to know from different backgrounds, the more nuanced our understanding of individual differences becomes, and the more accurate we can be at interpreting others’ emotions. When we encounter people with whom we feel less familiar, we are more likely to default to running those people through our brain’s threat detection software. We ask ourselves: Is this someone similar to me whom I can approach, or someone different from me whom I might need to avoid?

The more different people are from us, the more mental effort we need to exert to pause, because feelings travel faster than thoughts. It is critical to interrupt the automatic emotional reaction and recruit the more advanced, logical prefrontal cortex region of our brain. Only then can we access our ability to take another person’s perspective.

What Differences are Harder to Bridge?

Overcoming automatic responses requires self-awareness and practice. Let’s start with the self-awareness part. What are some of the differences that can be especially hard to bridge?

Students show their feelings differently at different ages. Take chronic fear, for example. Young children often regress when they’re afraid; over time, their language skills might deteriorate, or they may even stop talking. They might have more tantrums. In elementary school, fear might manifest through bodily complaints like headaches, stomach aches, or body aches. This is not to suggest that illnesses are purely psychological, but repeated symptoms could be a sign.

Some children who are afraid might act out more and become aggressive, while others may withdraw further into themselves. Chronic fear can also appear as learning problems or excessive talking and questioning.

Fearfulness in middle school and high school might be expressed through self-destructive and reckless behavior, excessive shame and guilt, fantasies of revenge, or sudden changes in relationships. Since students’ fears are often expressed very differently from our own, we may not recognize that what we’re seeing is fear rather than just bad behavior. Any unusual behavior should instead be a cause for concern.

Temperamental and personality differences:- It’s easy to gravitate toward students who are like us in personality. Introverts tend to understand introverts better, and sensitive people connect more easily with others who are sensitive. However, it’s important for us to stretch ourselves and make an effort to get to know students with different personalities, even when — and sometimes especially when — they annoy us.
We should also recognize that some of the students we label as most difficult are often the most sensitive.
Gender,Culture and Power:-
Gender, culture, and power all work together in seamless ways to socialize our emotions. These forces might be adaptive in some circumstances, but in the long run, they can create barriers to understanding the emotions of those around us.
For example, white middle-class boys and girls in many Western countries are already less emotionally expressive by the time they reach preschool. Even the types of emotions they are allowed to express differ: boys are permitted to show anger, contempt, and disgust more freely.
Studies show that within their own families, African American parents often foster a strong social-emotional orientation. However, outside their families, they socialize their children to exhibit greater self-control and limit emotional disclosures compared to white parents. This behavior is rooted in a history of oppression. It is often not as safe for Black children to express anger or strong emotions during a conflict. Current research and events indicate that they are disproportionately punished for expressing these emotions.

How To Get Better at Reading Other’s Feelings

None of us are mind readers, and we can’t always know how another person is feeling. But nature has given us a head start. We have neural circuitry in our brain that helps us take another person’s perspective and see the world through their eyes. And we have the neuro chemicals like dopamine and oxytocin that make us want to care for other people, especially if we’ve had positive experiences of being cared for ourselves.

If we felt seen and understood when we were children, then we’re better at offering the same gift to someone else. But we also need to develop the skills to get better at understanding other people’s feelings.

Reading Feelings as an Emotion Scientist

Students often don’t express their emotions directly, we have to become like curious detectives hunting for clues (in other words, an emotion scientist). It helps if we can practice–if we can gradually train ourselves to watch, learn, and wonder about what’s going on inside of students. Next, few ways that you can learn more about how your students may be feeling.

Observe Where They Are on the Mood Meter

Observe for Repeated Patterns and Themes

Learn Their Stories

Ways to Inquire About Feelings

Eventually, the only way to really confirm your hypothesis about what someone else is feeling is to engage in a conversation. Here are some ways to inquire about their feelings, as well as some things to avoid.

Behavior Doesn't Equal Emotion

As we’ve learned, a student’s behavior alone doesn’t provide an adult with enough information about how to best support them. Instead, a student’s behavior can serve as a cue for the adult to pause, get curious, and consider what might be going on beneath the surface. This can take time. Let’s take a look at how inside feelings differ from outside behavior, using stress as an example.

Inside feelings of stress can manifest in many different ways on the outside. Remember, stress interferes with brain functioning. On the outside, a student under stress might appear to have academic problems. They may have trouble focusing, fail to remember new material, or forget assignments. Their curiosity may shut down, and they might not explore freely. Sometimes, they can even become physically sick, experiencing stomach aches or headaches.

However, on the inside, stress may be dampening the higher-order thinking processes in the prefrontal cortex. Attention, thinking, memory, and reasoning usually suffer when this happens. On the mood meter, their energy might be quite high or, conversely, quite low. They could be inhibited, suffering from a freeze response.

On the outside, stress might also show up as emotional dysregulation. Students may run hot and cold, appearing reactive or withdrawn. But on the inside, they may feel overwhelmed, trying to manage emotions like chronic fear or grief. They may struggle to maintain a steady emotional state. People experiencing emotional dysregulation often have difficulty with relationships because they are volatile, on a hair-trigger, or perceived as overly sensitive. Conversely, at the other extreme, they may freeze, appearing numb, withdrawn, rigid, and unresponsive.

The worst situation for a student is when they lack a reliably safe and supportive adult in their life. Students are wired to assess their security and safety through their connection to a steady adult figure. When this connection is absent—such as in cases of abuse, neglect, or chaotic environments—students may not only feel afraid but may also develop negative self-perceptions.

On the outside, this can manifest as a refusal to participate in class, or, on the other hand, as perfectionism. They might overcompensate for low self-esteem by bragging or bullying others. On the inside, they may experience a range of emotions, including guilt, shame, or helplessness.

When we observe behavior that seems problematic or represents a change from a student’s typical behavior, it’s not a cue to ask, What’s wrong with this student? Instead, it’s a cue to ask, What happened to this student? What is this behavior trying to tell us?

This aligns with the quote by Russell A. Barkley:
“The kids who need the most love will ask for it in the most unloving of ways.”

To develop this skill, it’s important to remember our role as emotion scientists. As we discussed previously, because students often don’t express their emotions directly, we can become like curious detectives, hunting for clues. It helps if we practice. By gradually training ourselves to watch, learn, and wonder about what’s going on inside our students, we can better support them.

Practice Learning About Other’s Feelings

It takes practice to step outside ourselves and learn what someone else feels. But there are routines and activities that can be regularized, or built into the day to lift up everyone’s strengths and emotions.

Ask students to share with each other how they want to feel in the classroom or at school, and then they can name the specific actions that will create those feelings.
Incorporate emotion language throughout the day. Consider all the kinds of communication throughout the school day and try naming the feelings, especially in subjects like language arts, history, current events, social studies, advisories, but other subjects too.
Consider providing a more specific answer when asked how you are. Can you take an extra few seconds to express a more authentic answer? This models for students using words to identify and label our emotions.
Build in supportive routines to the school day. Have regular mood, emotion, and mental health check-ins to hear how others are feeling. Post conversation starters around the physical or virtual room that help students practice learning how other people feel. Incorporate or create some fun games that help with emotion recognition.
Consider forming an adult reflection group where all adults in the school can drop in to share and reflect on difficult feelings they’re facing with their students or elsewhere. Consider enlisting the help of a school or community psychologist.

Notice other people. Take note of how they talk to each other. Notice their pleasantness, their energy. Consider their perspectives. Try to step into their shoes.
Practice active listening with a partner. Listen to understand feelings; don’t get stuck on the facts. Try not to interrupt the conversation or inject your opinion about what the person is sharing. Rather, help move the conversation about their feelings forward by asking them to tell you more. Let a few people know that you’re trying to get better at understanding other people’s feelings and ask if they mind if you ask them how they’re feeling.

Emotion Co-Regulation

Emotion self-regulation is the process of managing our own emotions. Emotion co-regulation is different. It refers to the ongoing process between two people, where one person’s emotions are continuously influenced by the actions and emotional reactions of the other person. In classrooms, this can be seen as a back-and-forth between the teacher and student with the goal of supporting the child’s emotions. It also works between adults. Imagine that you and your colleague both hear upsetting news from your school or district leader. You both are feeling anxious. You walk up to your colleague who appears to be more stressed than you are. You smile and offer a warm greeting. In response, her face lights up, `her breathing relaxes and she smiles back. In return, you feel calmer. You say, “don’t worry, we’ll figure this out.” In this example, co-regulation is about establishing a more positive state of mind between you and the other person. How does this work? In the case of co-regulating with a child, just the presence of a caring adult can actually lower the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the child.

For this reason, a child can handle stress much better if they’re with a person that makes them feel safe and secure. This person might be a parent, a teacher, a coach, and mentor, or another relative. When adults support each other or an adult supports a child, the stress hormone cortisol can decline during that moment of co-regulation. Also, the soothing hormone oxytocin and feel-good neurotransmitter, dopamine can increase, all promoting feelings of well-being throughout the brain and body. Our well-being depends a lot on our relationships, and the feelings that we’re not alone that are burdens are seen and shared, improve our ability to cope. Co-regulation doesn’t only apply to interactions between two people. Whole groups of people can be influenced too. For example, a principal might try to shift the feelings of her entire staff to be more enthusiastic and motivated about going back to school.

or a teacher may influence the emotions of students in her class because she wants to transition them from the high-energy of recess to a lower energy required to focus on math. Some adults try to command students to settle down, but that’s really not co-regulation. A teacher who co-regulates with her students actually helps them to settle.For example, by speaking in friendly but slightly softer and slower tones, acknowledging their feelings and energy, and moving to a brief mindfulness exercise or checking in with their feelings before turning to the subject. Why is it important to know about co-regulation? Humans are social creatures. We are always influencing each other’s feelings, whether we realize it or not. To be able to do that with conscious awareness, intention, and skill is to wake up to a positive power, as well as to our responsibility to help others, especially those we love and care for.

Supporting Students in Moments of Activation

Now, you’ll be guided through a series of five steps designed to support you in a moment of a student’s high stress or activation.

The sequence is meant to provide a general framework, a process to have in your mind to guide your actions. We know that real life is always messier than a “framework.” There are pressures outside of your control, as well as situations that are beyond you and require outside help. It’s even logistically challenging–where is there the time and space to have a few extra minutes with a single student or a few students alone? This takes some advance planning. You can ask yourself now:

Where can I physically have this conversation? In another room? In another virtual room?
How will the other students be managed while this happens in private?
Regardless, in many situations, we can really be more helpful than we might have thought. The framework here is a well-established clinical sequence. With practice, it will become a good reference guide, and you’ll become more comfortable with it the more you make it your own.

A Five-Step Guide to Managing Stressful Moments

Before we explore each step in-depth, take a moment to read a brief overview of each step below.

Manage your own emotions. When we notice a student’s behavior catching our eye, our first step should be to regulate ourselves. We cannot help someone else if we, ourselves, are dysregulated.
Help the student with their emotions. We help them to settle their physical activation. Then we help them explore their feelings by reviewing with them the story of what happened. We listen and reflect without judging. Our goal is to understand their perspective and help them put their feelings into words.
Brainstorm and strategize. Think together about: what problem is to be solved here, and what next steps might be helpful.
Close the conversation. Bring the conversation to a close for now. Try to end with a positive focus.
Follow up. Important issues are rarely “solved” on the first try, so check back later to see how things are going and if more support is needed.Let’s go through each step in more detail on the following pages

Step 1: Managing Your Emotions

The first step to managing stressful moments is managing your own emotions. Think about that moment when you notice an upset student in your classroom, whether it’s in person or virtually.At the very same time that you notice their emotions, you’re also experiencing your own emotions. This is where we can pause and check in with ourselves first. This is an emotional crossroads for identifying and regulating our own emotions which will make the difference between a wise or an impulsive course of action.Here’s why regulating our own emotions first is important; it keeps our own stress levels low, away from our own fight, flight or freeze response. It signals to our students that were safe and available, it keeps our brains access to our prefrontal cortex; higher, better, clearer thinking available to us. Our self-regulation in the heat of the moment is an important role modeling opportunity for everyone. Consider the different strategies you discover throughout this course that might work for you to feel at ease and calm. Perhaps you’re using positive self-talk and saying to yourself something like,”I’ve got this, ” ”I’m a calming force here, ” ”It’s going to be okay,” ”I’ve been here before.” Can you think of one or two self calming phrases that might work for you? Or may be shifting your perspective would be helpful. As we’ve learned previously, instead of thinking what’s wrong with this student, you may reframe to, what’s happened to the student? Or what are they going through? Or what is the student’s behavior trying to tell me? Remember that you do always think of a few self-calming phrases that help you reframe the situation and approach it from the ideal state of mind.

Step 2: Helping the Student with Their Emotions

Step 2 is helping the student with their emotions. After managing our own emotions, we then can turn our attention to supporting our students to help them manage their own emotions. But students don’t always know how to talk about their feelings right away, so we can think of this step as having two parts. First, settling the activation in their body and brain so they can move out of fight, flight, or freeze. And second, connecting with their feelings. Let’s look at each of these. The first part of this step is settling the high energy or activation level. None of us can think or act wisely in the heat of the moment, especially children. That means for most children, nothing we do or say will take hold until the child’s activation is lowered. Here are some ideas that you might find helpful to assist them in calming the jolt in their bodies or soothing their flood of tears. And since you know your students best, you may have other ideas too– these are just some general suggestions. Sometimes it’s enough to just sit next to them or be present in a virtual room and wait quietly. Be patient. If you feel your impatience rising, focus on your own breathing. You may imagine every exhale sending positive energy. Offer a walk, a cool glass of water, or a reminder to breathe. These physical movements help calm the stress response by clearing the cortisone, but we understand that you might not always be in-person in these times.

Depending on the situation, consider some helpful phrases like “You’re safe here.” “Take your time.” “I’m here for you.” “Some things really got to you, huh?” “We’ll figure this out.” If they’re very stressed, ensuring their sense of safety and security is critical, and further processing can come at a later time.

The second part is to explore the story and the feelings behind that story. Remember, our mindsets as emotion scientists mean that we are non-

judgmental, curious, and open-minded. Our voice and body language can reflect this. Remember, the goal here is to understand their perspective and

help give voice to their feelings. Since some students have trouble naming their feelings, again, we can start with the story. Gently unspool their version of the events. Prompts like “I noticed, you don’t seem like yourself,” “Can you tell me what happened? I’d like to know,” And then what happened?” can help. Once you understand your student’s story around the feeling, gently shift the focus to help them name the feelings. Sometimes identifying feelings happens simultaneously with getting the story, or it may go back and forth. Remember, we can’t always gauge from a child’s behavior how they feel on the inside. Give them permission to have their feelings and let them know that anything they feel is okay. Having all feelings is okay. Deciding which ones to act upon comes later. It’s always important to strive for accuracy of feeling words. Helping students build their emotional vocabulary is a great gift that you can give them. Not only does it support their ability to communicate, but it also makes it more likely that their real needs will be seen, heard, and met. Remember to check in with your assumptions about how the child may be feeling. Try to suspend your own ideas. Listen to understand their feelings and what may be causing them.

Step 3: Brainstorm and Strategize

Step 3 is brainstorming and strategizing. Here you don’t need to provide an answer, but you can act as a supportive coach. Our students are brilliant and creative. Given a little time, space and confidence, they often come up with solutions we wouldn’t have thought of. It’s important to listen to their ideas first and help them along. Sometimes next steps are small, like thinking about the situation from a different perspective. Sometimes next steps are big, like initiating a difficult conversation with a friend or a coach. Sometimes, as in the case of grief, it’s helpful to be with other people to talk about it.When a student has lost a loved one, they simply need your quiet permission to sit with their grief. Here’s some prompts to help get the problem-solving calling. Remember to include strategies for dealing with the emotion as well as with the situation itself. You might ask, “What are some ideas that you have about how you can deal with this?” “I wonder what you could do next?” “I know how thoughtful and creative you are, and I wonder what you think is best?” “What would you advise your best friend to do in this situation if she was feeling how you feel?” Of course, you may have some suggestions too. Asking the student if they would like your suggestion conveys that you trust their judgment. For example, “Can I help you think about what your next step might be?” “I like all of your ideas. Would you like to brainstorm some more together, then you can choose?” “Is there anything I can do?” “Would you like me to offer some ideas?” These conversations aren’t necessarily linear. Sometimes the student just needs to be heard and seen, and isn’t ready or interested in next steps. Sometimes the conversation weaves back and forth between self-regulation,naming feelings, and next steps, until we finally land on a direction that feels right.

Step 4: Close the Conversation

Step 4 is closing the conversation. Closing the conversation well leaves the student in a manageable and hopeful place. Try to end on a positive or constructive note. Maybe you identify what’s enough for now and what you’ll revisit later. You can share your trust in their ability and remind them that no feeling is final or forever. There will be other feelings too. It can help to reiterate the next step that you and the student landed on. Let them know that you’ll follow up with them later. For example, “Thanks for sharing your story and for allowing me to help you strategize. I’m really glad we had time together”. “Trust your judgment about this. You made a clear decision.” “It’s okay if you’re next step isn’t perfect. You can learn from that too”. “I’ll be there for you. Just let me know when you want to talk again”.

Step 5: Follow Up

The final step, step 5, is following up. Adults and students alike are sensitive to what follows a critical conversation. And few problems are solved in one conversation. There may be others, layer after layer that emerge as time passes. So be sure to discretely check back in at a later time. You might say things like, “How did it go? How are you feeling? What’s your next step?” Reinforce their strengths and their growth mindset when you follow up.

Let them know that sometimes the strategies they’ve chosen won’t work. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t helpful at other times. Offer a reminder of your availability to support them. The important thing, besides the student’s feelings, is their belief that they have a grown-up who cares in their life. Co-regulation is not a linear process. You may go back and forth between managing your own feelings, and helping the student become more skilled at identifying and managing their own. Some feelings are resolved quickly; others must be endured and put in perspective. But again, as we mentioned earlier, humans are social creatures and your compassionate support will go a long way toward helping. To conclude this section, let’s consider this quote, “Helping one person may not change the world,but it could change the world for one person.”

Applying the Five Steps to Your Life

Now, you’ll have the opportunity to apply these steps to a situation in your life.Please sit comfortably and take a few deep breaths. We have been talking about co-regulation–the process between you and someone else, in which you are influencing someone’s emotions with your vocal tones, facial expression, posture, and the emotional energy you exude. You have probably co-regulated with students many times through the years, whether you called it that or not. Think about a time you smiled at a student as you moved towards him when he was upset. In this situation, you were co-regulating. Think about a time when you sat quietly next to or in a virtual space with a child who was crying over the loss of a family member or pet, or the loss of being with friends or classmates during the pandemic. Again, you were co-regulating.But, it doesn’t always go perfectly…or even as you planned. Try to call to mind a time when you were triggered by a student, and you responded in a way that wasn’t ideal, a time when maybe things didn’t go so well. What was the situation and what was the outcome? In the activity on the next page, you’ll revisit the situation through the five steps and see if you find any ideas for improvement.

Other Kinds of Co-Regulation

So far, we’ve explored one form of co-regulation: when a student is distressed. However, there are many other situations when intentionally co-regulating can be helpful.

Research has shown that when teachers want their students to engage in specific tasks, students produce better work when teachers first create a supportive mood. A skillful teacher takes a moment to transition students into the mood that is helpful for the outcome.

We often think of regulating emotions in terms of down-regulating difficult feelings. But we can help others up-regulate too, to help create more pleasant feelings–of joy, engagement, curiosity, delight, or awe.

In these times of great uncertainty and stress, we may want to be intentional more often throughout the day to help bring positive emotions into balance even in small ways. It’s harder to feel stressed when you’re engaged. It’s harder to feel annoyed when you’re curious. One invitation here is to help the student sustain positive feelings just a little bit longer—for even just 30 seconds, to really wire them in. Some helpful phrases to extend feelings might be: Wow, what just lit you up? What do you see there? What’s interesting to you?

Focusing on What We Can Change

Can we change the history of inequity and structural and systemic racism?

While we can’t change the past, we can take responsibility to create a better future. We can acknowledge that prejudice, a lack of equity, and racism are real. And we can check our biases in our own everyday interactions and strive to make all of our school environments anti racist, equitable, safe, and accepting. We must ensure that we teach history accurately, talk about equity with students, and do something when we see anyone treated unfairly in our school communities.

What We Can Change

It can be daunting to think about all of the changes that need to be made in our schools. However, there are always small steps that we can take to move toward a more positive school climate.

Putting It All Together

You have spent the majority of this course learning about strategies from the field of social and emotional learning that you can apply to your life and your work. Next, we focused on turning inward, to better understand our emotions and manage them more effectively by shifting our actions and thoughts. We explored how we can become better emotion scientists by increasing our awareness of our biases and getting to know the stories of others. And finally, we discussed strategies for working with others– especially identifying and helping them to manage their emotions.

In this final section of the course, we want you to consider:

How have your feelings, thoughts, attitudes, or behavior changed since you began the course?
In what ways has this course validated or reaffirmed actions you were already taking in your life or in your classroom?
What new strategies are you using to support you in healthy emotion regulation? And what strategies are you helping others use, including your students? Have you noticed any changes in your life already–based on new knowledge or skills you’ve learned?
What more would you like to commit to doing based on the concepts covered in this course?

What’s Your Plan?

No matter what shifts you’d like to make to your routines, habits, and other aspects of your life, research shows that having a plan helps to ensure that they actually happen. This is also true if your plan is to maintain a routine or habit that you’ve already established.

As you think through strategies or behaviors you’d like to implement, consider the following:

What specifically would you like to change? What are you hoping to achieve with that change–an improvement in a relationship, difficult situation, a reaction, a long-held attitude or understanding? What would success look like for you?
How can you break larger goals up into smaller steps so that you can gauge success along the way?
What barriers or challenges may prevent you from achieving your goals? Are there time constraints, a lack of access to resources, a lack of motivation or support, or anything else standing in your way? What can you do to remove or challenge these barriers?
What opportunities or supports do you have in place that can help you to be successful? For instance, when do you have the most time or motivation? Is there a friend or colleague who you can partner with?
What if things don’t go as well as you expected? What’s your backup plan?

Systemic Social and Emotional Learning

This course covered specific strategies from the field of social and emotional learning (SEL). However, the personal and professional gains you’ve made by engaging with this course, while a great beginning, are not a substitute for a whole-school approach to SEL. SEL is most powerful and effective when it is systemic. This means that SEL is embedded throughout the school environment and across the whole day, in classroom curricula and instruction, school-wide practices and policies, and family and community partnerships. A successful systemic approach requires the involvement of everyone in a school community.

The RULER Approach

RULER is the name of systemic approach to SEL, and it also is an acronym for the five skills of emotional intelligence:

Recognizing emotions in oneself and others.
Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions.
Labeling emotions with a nuanced vocabulary.
Expressing emotions in accordance with cultural norms and social context.
Regulating emotions with helpful strategies.

In Closing… It’s Time for an Emotion Revolution!

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