Emotional regulation is the ability to understand managing our emotions in order to direct our behavior, complete tasks, and achieve goals. Emotions are defined as multifaceted subjective experiences felt as conscious or subconscious reactions (such as anger or fear) within our body through both physiological reactions and facial expressions. Feelings are our interpretation of our emotions and tend to last over time. Understanding the components of emotional regulation allows us to have empathy, greater connectedness, better self-care, informs survival, and develops cognition. Students that understand their emotions are better care for themselves and others.

Calming and coping tools are strategies that we use to help our nervous system calm down and cope with stressful situations. We need tools for dealing with stress. Many of the tools on this list have both physiological components that help to calm the sensory and nervous system as well as cognitive components that act to quiet the mind.  The goal of using a tool is to help us regulate our emotional responses so we do not automatically go into a stress response or “flight, fight, freeze” reaction when encountering moments of frustration – both real and imagined! Developing calming and coping strategies using practical and easy-to-implement tools is key to the development of emotional regulation.