Self-regulation is the ability to manage our thoughts, emotions and behavior.
We all have an emotional temperature. We tend to like comfortable emotions: joy, surprised, excited, happy, and prefer to stay in our comfort zone. When we begin to feel sad, afraid, frustrated, or angry our emotional temperature goes up and we feel less comfortable. Therefore, we want to do something to return to our comfort zone, aka self-regulate. The things we do to regulate our emotions can be healthy or unhealthy, determined by the long-term impact they have on our health and well-being.
Wellness rooms teach healthy coping skills to regulate our emotions, calm our nervous system (bring our emotional temperature down) thereby allowing us to choose how to respond rather than react.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power
to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”- Viktor Frankl
Empowered By Emotion-Regulation
Identifying our triggers is an important step in learning what increases our emotional temperature.
When we recognize how we feel in response to things happening around us, we gain self-awareness about what we need & when to use coping skills to self-regulate. Recognizing what we need and
giving ourselves permission to follow through, is a great act of Self-care. Self-care has been defined as anything we do to nurture our well-being.