We spend years learning about math, reading, science, and history. But why are we not taught about our emotions? After all, emotions affect us each and every day. And contrary to what you might think (because we don’t hear about it), there are things to know that can profoundly help our emotional health and teach us a path to easing and healing anxiety and depression.

Furthermore, with all the current talk on the importance of regulating our nervous system, why would we not be taught early on how to accept, validate, and work with our emotions? These skills and teachings go hand-in-hand with nervous system regulation.

What Is a Dysregulated Nervous System?

A dysregulated nervous system emerges your body’s alarm system is stuck in high alert or shutdown, making it harder to feel calm, think clearly, or respond flexibly to what’s happening around you. For example, someone may receive a mildly critical email from their boss and immediately feel their heart race, stomach tighten, and mind go blank, as if they are in danger, even though they are actually safe.

Blocked, buried, and avoided emotions are a prime way the nervous system becomes dysregulated. We can reverse this process by finally validating and moving through emotions that have previously been out of touch.

Most of us grow up knowing very little about how emotions actually work in the mind and body. We may know that we feel angry, anxious, sad, or ashamed. However, we aren’t taught what those feelings are trying to tell us, how to recognize them in our bodies, or what to do with them, or we feel guilty and ashamed for having feelings in the first place.

Emotions, contrary to what our emotion-phobic society would have us believe, are not problems to get rid of. They are information to understand.

Emotions Education

Emotions education teaches us how emotions work, how to recognize and name what we’re feeling, and how to understand and work with our emotional experiences. For example, did you know that we all have the same set of core emotions? These inborn survival responses cannot be stopped with just “mind over matter” because they arise without conscious control. The core emotions we are most likely to bury are anger, sadness, fear, disgust, joy, excitement, and sexual excitement. We bury them as a result of familial and societal messages that make us feel unsafe to experience them. And we aren’t “weak” for having these emotions. We are just normal humans.

We hear a lot about regulating our emotions and regulating our nervous system. But before we can regulate effectively, we need to understand what is happening inside us. To regulate the nervous system, we need to name and work with each of these emotions in special ways that include the body. To process core emotions, we must work with the physical sensations that they create. To do this, we must demystify what emotions feel like in the body and teach skills like deep belly breathing, which help us process them up and out of the body.

You can’t simply tell yourself to “calm down” when you don’t understand why you’re activated in the first place.

The Change Triangle

Adapted from the academic literature and AEDP psychotherapy, the Change Triangle is an emotional roadmap that helps us become curious about what is happening inside us.

If we have been educated in emotions, when something triggers us, we will know to pause, ask, and answer these questions about what is happening in the moment:

• What am I feeling?
• How am I attempting to avoid it?
• Where do I feel it in my body?
• Is there another feeling underneath?
• How can I move through this feeling back to a calmer state?

This simple practice can help create a little space between feeling and reacting. Reacting is how most of us try to rid ourselves of a bad feeling. But knee-jerk reactions often have negative consequences, like reaching for a drink to numb a hard feeling or fighting with others when we are upset.

We can learn to listen to our emotions without being controlled by them, and as a result, we can build space between noticing a feeling and reacting to it. That space provides the opportunity to process emotions arising in the moment. That’s a skill worth building!

Did you know…

• We can feel anger without automatically acting on it?
• We can feel anxiety without letting it run our lives?
• We can feel sadness without shutting down?

Emotions Education Is a Necessary Part of Learning How to Regulate

Emotional regulation, then, isn’t about controlling or suppressing our feelings. It’s about learning how to be with our feelings so they can move through us.

When we learn to notice our emotions with curiosity rather than judgment, we become better able to stay present with what we feel instead of automatically reacting, avoiding, or shutting down. And when we allow our core emotions to be felt and processed, our nervous system has an opportunity to settle. The more we understand our emotional lives, the more choices we have in how we respond to ourselves, to other people, and to whatever life brings our way. That is a kind of education we all deserve.