Navigating Emotional Regulation & Anger Management
Calm the emotional brain to let the thinking brain work
The teenage years are a time of growth, excitement, and challenge. With changes in school, friendships, and responsibilities, teens often experience intense emotions. Learning how to manage these feelings is crucial to problem solving and maintaining healthy relationships.
Why did I do that?
You don’t need to be a neuroscientist to understand that our brains are wired to feel strong emotions before we have time to recognize or process them. In fact, these intense emotions can make it difficult to think clearly. They can also distort our memories, causing us to remember events differently from how they actually happened.
We’ve all had that moment where we look back and think “Why in the world did I do that?” This can be due to your amygdala taking over. The amygdala is the part of the brain involved in monitoring for danger and processing emotions, so when it takes over, you aren't able to think — you just react.
Amygdala hijack may happen when strong emotions, such as anger, fear, or even extreme excitement, make it difficult or impossible to think straight. It can happen to anyone, but people who have past trauma or neurodevelopmental differences like ADHD are more at risk. This hijack can cause you to act in ways you later regret.
When emotions run high, the blood and oxygen flow to the amygdala rather than the thinking part of our brain, which reduces our ability to think and solve problems.
While this process is helpful in an actual life-and-death situation, an amygdala hijack may also occur when someone else wins a game or you’re overwhelmed with a school project or test. Having all of the blood run from the thinking part of your brain won’t help the situation and may cause you to act in ways you later regret.
Once you’ve calmed down and you can use the thinking part of your brain again, you might process the information and realize your reaction was over the top. Once we can process it, we may feel shame, embarrassment, or guilt.
Emotional Regulation: Understanding Your Emotions
Emotions are natural and a part of everyone’s life. However, knowing how to handle emotions—especially the difficult ones like frustration, anxiety, or sadness—takes practice. Emotional regulation is the ability to manage these emotions in healthy ways, preventing them from overwhelming you or controlling your actions.
Learning to recognize when your amygdala is taking over is helpful in gaining control again. Rapid heartrate, tense muscles, sweating, and other physical symptoms are often the first clues.
Tips for Emotional Regulation:
There are many techniques we can use to calm our amygdala, but it takes practice to recognize when we need them.
When we’re in the grip of intense emotions, the thinking part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, essentially shuts down, making it difficult to think rationally or remember our coping strategies in the moment. This is why it’s so important to practice these techniques regularly.
The more we rehearse calming methods when we’re not stressed, the better we become at regaining control during emotional situations. Over time, we can train ourselves to recognize the signs of emotional overload and apply these calming strategies more effectively.
Pause and Breathe: When emotions run high, take a moment to pause and focus on your breathing. This gives your brain time to calm down before responding.
Label Your Emotions: Identifying what you’re feeling can make a big difference. Are you angry, embarrassed, or stressed? Understanding the specific emotion helps you decide how to deal with it.
Stay Active: Physical activity helps release pent-up energy and stress. Going for a walk or engaging in sports can help you manage strong emotions.
Nutrition: Eating a well-balanced diet helps to make the neurotransmitters that are used in emotional regulation.
Sleep: Sleep is essential for emotional regulation. Make sleep a priority. If you’re struggling, see my Sleep Tricks post.
Journaling: Writing down your feelings is an effective way to process them. It helps you reflect on what triggered your emotions and find ways to cope in the future.
Mindfulness or Meditation: Practicing mindfulness can help you stay grounded. By focusing on the present moment, you avoid getting lost in the cycle of negative thoughts.
Does your teen need help regulating emotions?
Navigating emotions can be tough, but with the right tools and support, we can learn to manage our emotions and control our anger.
Teens can work through how to do this in my “Anger on the Set” workshop. In this workshop, participants learn about the neuroscience of our emotions and tools that can be used in various settings.
Class participants work through different scenarios of emotionally triggering situations during the workshop. They then work on skills at home with the help of course worksheets. A moderated private discussion forum for class participants is there for everyone to ask questions and offer support.
Emotional regulation, anger management, and building resilience are skills that will not only help you through your teen years, but also support your growth into adulthood. Remember, you don’t have to handle everything alone — reaching out for help is a sign of strength, not weakness.
While challenges may arise, you have the power within yourself to face them with confidence and strength.
You’ve got this!