Focus on Your Compass, Part 2 – Regulating Emotions
Overview
- This unit’s mindfulness moment asks you to complete a kinesthetic activity to explore another way to pay attention to the present moment.
- This unit prompts you to take the first steps to make your own mindfulness activity that you’ll script for your small group.
- The unit introduces the ABC technique for increasing wanted emotions in your life.
Unit 6 continues the discussions from Unit 5 about your emotions — or the Captain’s compass using our metaphor — especially how to manage them and how to increase the emotions you want to experience. As a compass provides directional information, our emotions provide us with information about ourselves and others around us.
Bridge Exercises
Why This Matters: Many emotions and actions are set off by our thoughts and interpretations of events, not by the events themselves. Our emotions can also have a big effect on our thoughts about events. Examining our thoughts and checking the facts can help us manage our emotions.
Learn more about this strategy by watching the video. Then answer some questions you will find embedded on the corresponding unit 6 slide and post about your overall experience with trying out this strategy.
Why This Matters: For the next four units, you and your classmates will script a mindfulness practice, post it on the discussion board, and then follow each other’s scripts.
Think about the various mindfulness moments you have participated in during earlier units. You can also check out the following resource:
- Example mindfulness exercises from Positive Psychology
Now, write a script for a brief mindfulness moment that you can post for your classmates to try. Your script should take 1-2 minutes to complete.
Why This Matters: Rating emotional intensity is one of the techniques discussed in this unit for managing your emotions. This activity provides you with an opportunity to practice this technique.
In this program, you’ve learned about the wise mind framework of thinking, which prompts you to consider emotional and reasonable approaches to situations. You can use this framework to take another step in developing tools for emotional regulation.
When you feel a strong emotion, it may be worth pausing and assessing that emotion before deciding to react to it. One easy assessment is to simply ask yourself, “How intense is this emotion?” You might rate your emotion on a basic scale of mild, moderate, or severe, or you might assign it a number on a scale of 1–10.
Although it only takes a second, the information you gather when rating your emotions has a lot of power. Realizing that you’re having a severe emotional response to a situation is the first step to applying your reasonable mind. You might ask yourself, “Do the emotions I’m feeling fit the situation?” “Should I be feeling more or less intense about this?” Answering these questions can help you react in a way you think is right.
Think about two situations where you have had relatively strong emotions lately – these can be positive or negative. Think through how you would rate your emotions when you were experiencing them. As you look back, did the emotion you felt fit the situation? If yes, why do you think so? If no, why do you not think so? You may post about this in the discussion board if you choose to do so.
Session 6 Survey
Answer the following questions about your experience with Session 6.
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