Regulating your emotions as a student 101
At times students can feel stressed and not really know how to manage it.
On the second floor in the AC Hub on Jan. 23 at one of the space’s tables, an event called Adulting 101: Emotional Regulation offered tools to help with this issue.
During the event, all eight to ten attendees were given an emotional log and a mood score chart. These can be used as tools to help identify emotions in terms of being able to regulate and control them.
Hosted by Elizabeth Pena Fernandez, the college’s health promotion and education coordinator, Christina Latifi, with counselling services, and Raivyn Halcro, an events programmer, the event covered ways to regulate your emotions and how to do so.
“Emotions give us information, and we need them for safety it’s important to be aware of these,” said Latifi.
The hosts explained that emotions are temporary, but an emotion that persists for days is a mood.
Sadness is an emotion; depression is a mood disorder. Your emotions and thoughts affect you and your behaviour, which is why it is so important to regulate them.
Latifi and Fernandez explained that we can simply do that by trying to name that emotion, and asking ourselves, “why am I feeling this way?”
Self-reflect. Be mindful and aware of how intense is this emotion. Is the emotion valid? Regulate the emotions and correspond to the situation.
“Your thoughts are strongly connected to your emotions,” said Fernandez.
During the event, one of the greatest tips for regulating your emotions participants learned about was is to experience them as waves.
Neither emotion nor waves are constant, they come and go. We should recognize what we feel, experience it, and know it is only temporary, explained the hosts.
Understanding that can be very self-perpetuating, overthinking can be when your thoughts and worries are in an endless loop, which can then make you feel overwhelmed by fear, and set you up for a vicious cycle that is hard to break.
“Emotions aren’t in the driving seat, we are taking control,” said Latifi.
