Why Teachers Need to Practice Personal Emotional Regulation and How to Do It
Staying well-hydrated is an important part of a healthy lifestyle and a physically healthy body. How much you drink depends on whether you are working out, your body weight, and other environmental issues, like sun exposure and outdoor temperature. But have you ever thought about how emotional hydration can affect your functioning?
Staying emotionally hydrated is just as important to our functioning in the classroom. Think of it this way: staying emotionally regulated is a bit of a workout. The intensity of that workout is affected by the mood and behavior of others, the general environment, as well as how regulated you were before you started an activity. When it comes to teachers and administrators, I know you are experiencing deeply intense emotional workouts.
Why Emotional Regulation is Such a Workout
So why is a mental and emotional process such a workout for our bodies? Emotional regulation affects us so much because it involves active attempts to maintain or change emotions. It is a critical life skill children need to learn that will help them deal with stress throughout their lives. Being able to emotionally regulate yourself leads to more positive outcomes in adulthood.
Like physical hydration, emotional hydration requires regular doses in order for our performance to be more positively and dramatically affected.
The Research Behind Emotional Hydration
Research suggests that deliberately changing the way we think about an emotionally evocative situation (reappraisal) is an effective strategy for regulation. Unfortunately, it does require the use of the area in our brain responsible for higher-level functioning, the cortex, which is often not accessible when we feel threatened. When we experience fight, flight, or freeze behavior, we are operating lower in our brains.
Dr. Bruce Perry, a leading neuroscientist, suggests that regulation should start with the lower parts of our brain. This can then move us higher to the smartest part of our brain, the cortex. Once the brainstem and lower regions of the brain are regulated, we can begin reappraising our situation.
What Emotional Hydration Entails
Emotional hydration is, in essence, regulating the lower regions of our brain. Regulation is affected by our exposure to emotionally challenging situations, something that is quite constant in classrooms.
This fact isn’t surprising when you think about how the cortical regions of the brain are not fully developed until age 25. Classrooms are essentially full of students who do not have very well-developed emotional regulation.
In order to help your students learn in the classroom, it will require adults to be the regulating presence in the room to help students be optimized to learn.
How do we keep ourselves, the adults in the room, regulated? We need to take small sips of regulation all day to combat dysregulating experiences. It’s easy for adults to get emotionally dehydrated during the school day. Remember, it’s important to lean on co-workers. Let them know when you are feeling emotionally dehydrated.
Consider the below activities to help you and your students regulate throughout the day.
Brainstem and Midbrain:
- Drink water
- Have a rocking chair available for rhythmic motion
- Go for a walk
- Practice mindful breathing
Limbic Regulation:
- Name emotions we are currently experiencing
- Verbalize emotions to another person
- Communicate with a safe person in your life
- Take a break in the teacher’s lounge
Lesson Plan Integration:
- When students do individual work, take 5 minutes to do some breathing
- Plan lessons that you find entertaining and gratifying
- Put movement into your lessons
Building Community for Emotional Regulation
Even more important is building community by having discussions about this topic. Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable during these discussions. The more honest you are, the better the outcome will be for everyone. You might also consider creating a faculty lounge that provides resources for deeper regulation breaks.
Remember, your emotional hydration is key to student learning, so make your own emotional hydration a priority!
