All right, we will go ahead and get started. I want to say hello to everyone and thank you for taking the time to participate in today's webinar on effective strategies for regulating emotions in uncertain times. I'm Nikki Elbertson, the director of content communications at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. My role in today's webinar is to introduce our speaker and to manage the Q&A and chat functions throughout the presentation. I can assist you with technical issues or any questions you have in the Q&A or the chat. And with that I have the pleasure of introducing you to Dr. Marc Brackett, the director of our Center at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. Marc? Thank You Nikki, and good afternoon everyone. Super excited to be with all of you this afternoon to talk to you about what I'm calling now "The Big Seven Evidence-based Strategies for Regulating Emotions in Uncertain Times." So I know many of you are at home, or I think all of you are at home right now. Maybe you can just get settled in your seats and bring yourselves kind of into this space. So maybe that means getting better posture, maybe it means doing a few neck rolls, maybe it means taking a breath and exhaling. Just whatever you need to kind of bring yourself into you know this present moment. And as you're getting settled and as we get started, I just want to make you aware of some information. So if you're interested in social media and you want to let people know about the positive things that you're going to be learning, please use our social media on Twitter or on Instagram, and if you want to get more information about our research, about free resources, please go to either my website or the rulerapproach.org website. So on that note we're going to jump right in to our training today, and what I'd like to do is just as I tend to do in all of our trainings, and that is just check in with how you're feeling. So I'm going to ask everyone here to just take another inhale in and exhale. And for those of who are familiar with RULER, you know the Mood Meter. For those of you who aren't, gonna give a quick review. So we've got pleasantness and energy. All of you are feeling some degree of pleasantness, -5 you're feeling the most unpleasant you've ever felt, +5 you're feeling the absolute most pleasant you've ever felt. And then you've got your energy, it's what's happening in your body and in your mind in terms of your physical kind of energy and your mental energy. -5 you just feel like you're gonna fall asleep, +5 you've got more energy than you can contain. Where are you, what color are you in today? Yellow, red, blue, or green. Yellow is the high energy feeling state, you know, I'm feeling optimistic and hopeful and excited or happy. The green, calm, content, tranquil, peaceful, the blue down, disappointed, a little sad, lonely despair, and the red, irritated, angry, furious, a little uneasy or worried or anxious. Just take a moment and think about how you're feeling and get our day rolling or the end of our day rolling, I should say. Just take a moment and use your chat box and just if you're comfortable, just type in the word. What is the feeling word that you would ascribe to your feeling right now? And I'm gonna be looking in the chat box. Okay we've got red, so I'm gonna ask you to go from red to the color- some of you were reminding me, a superintendent once came up to me he goes, "Marc, your Mood Meter is gonna decrease our test scores, everybody's just talking in color" and I would say the goal is to go from color to word, so let's get those words out there. So I've got alert and motivated, a little tired, calm, little anxious, stressed, so it's clear to me that I've got the full range of feelings here today. And so think about that as all of you as educators right you are now, you know, doing distance learning, you're having your feelings throughout the day, your students are having their feelings throughout the day, and the question is what do we do with these feelings to help support our health, our well-being, and also learning during these difficult times. So thank you all for sharing your words and you know, I see a lot of, you know, red right now and of course, you know, makes total sense, and what I wanted to share with you are some data. Many of you have you've seen me speak before. You know, about three years ago we did a national study on teachers' feelings and what we found was that's the number one emotion that our teachers were feeling back then was frustrated, overwhelmed, and then stressed. It just so happens last week I had the opportunity to do a webinar like this one for CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic Social Emotional Learning, I'm on their board, and to do our webinar for them what we did was we launched a survey and we asked 5,000 people across the United States of America the simple question, you know, give us three words to describe how you're feeling right now, and here is what we found. March 23rd and March 24th, so about two weeks ago, the number one word among educators in the United States was anxiety, and I think what that means is that we need to really think through this anxiety. What are we going to do to support people in dealing, you know, with that very strong and sometimes intense emotion? We ask teachers to tell us, so you know, what is the cause of your anxiety? And I'm sure many of you on the webinar today can relate. People were getting nervous about getting sick themselves or having a loved one get ill, having to work from home. I love this quote from someone, "Online school started today. My vision of finally having someone else to take care of kids I think even virtually was smashed to smithereens. This requires 100%, actually 200% because the girls were in different grades." So you can imagine the stress associated with that. A lot of educators are concerned about the quality education, the, you know , the equity gap that we had and may have in even greater ways right now. Some people are just anxious about being cooped up, feeling isolated, lonely. Obviously the economy and finances and just access to food and resources, I mean even till this week I went shopping last night near my home in New Haven, Connecticut, and there was no toilet paper or paper towels. So there's anxiety around that makes total sense. As we go back to the Mood Meter what I want to mention here is that we know clearly from our national study that a lot of people are in that red and some people in that blue place. I think oftentimes we have feelings about these feelings. We feel bad, you know, that we're feeling anxious or overwhelmed or exhausted. And so the first thing that I want to do for all of you today is try to help alleviate that concern, right. I want to ask you to just give yourself the permission to have all of your feelings, you know, no one should be telling you and you should not be telling yourself you know that you should not feel this anxiety or stress that you're experiencing- it's real, it is what it is. The question that I want to ask you is how can you manage that anxiety in a way that is helpful to your well-being, and to your relationships and to your goal setting? And so, well my vision here is not to try to get you to switch over to the yellow and green. What I am going to ask you to think about in addition is you know what might you do to just get a little bit more of that green and yellow in your life? Not get rid of the red and blue and only feel yellow, because I don't know about you but if someone were to tell me today like, "Marc, you got to be happy, like you're you're a professor or you're successful," I would be offended by that, right? I'm in a very privileged position; imagine telling that to someone who is struggling, you know, with resources, you know, in terms of having, you know, if they're losing their job or having to take care of three or four kids. So we want to move away from like, the goal is to be happy, to figuring how to have greater balance, and I think greater well-being now one of the challenges is that when we asked our educators last week you know, how are you regulating? We found out that many of them are not doing so well. Let me ask you, do any of these strategies look familiar to you? Has anybody lost it and screamed at someone in the last week? Has anyone consumed way too much social media? Anyone eaten slightly more sugars in the last week or two? Anyone having trouble getting out of bed or falling asleep? Anybody watching trash TV or just ruminating and ruminating? Somebody's saying, "Every single one of them!" What are your responses to these strategies? They look familiar? I like this one: every single one. So what we know about these strategies is they have something in common. Think about it. Firstly they're learned early in their lives, mostly by our parents who didn't have an emotional intelligence education themselves, they require a little effort, they happen outside of our awareness, they even provide- but you know think about it- they even do provide immediate relief. The not-so-good aspect of this is that they tend to have a negative impact, right? They can be harmful to ourselves and others, they don't solve the problems, they negatively impact our relationships. I don't know about you but I have never been home as much as I've been home in the last month. I'm used to being at my office and used to traveling a lot and doing presentations, etc. And now all of a sudden dinner together every single night, you know walking in the hallways, and I sometimes wonder do I like, do I say hello this time, or do I, you know, look down, what are we gonna talk about tonight, anyone relate to that? Just like, being with people all day long that you're not used to necessarily being with them and it can be challenging, you know, a lot of us are used to having autonomy and independence, at least when we go to work. Now there's a way to reappraise that, right, as someone is saying, you know, is that you could say to yourself, this is an opportunity to get to know my spouse, my partner better. So there are ways of strategizing to tell yourself a different story, and we'll get to that in a little bit. So jumping into, you know, the work that I hope to share with you today and that will help benefit you I hope, is the vision of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence is to use the power of emotions to create a healthier and more equitable, innovative, and compassionate society. And the reason why we have this Center is because we know from decades of research that how we feel matters, and it matters a great deal for our attentional capacity, right? Think about it. I don't know about you, but when all of this came about I was having a lot of trouble focusing. My brain was telling myself crazy stories, you know, think about it. The university closed down, the schools closed down people are in the hospital, there's no ventilators, the stock market is crashing, people are losing their jobs I mean like it was really overwhelming, and you know I was sitting downstairs in my home in the kitchen table watching TV you next to the refrigerator, and, you know, my emotions totally got the best of me. It was very difficult to focus. I'm not sure if I'm the only one now, am Ii or do you, can you relate to that?It was affecting my decisions, right, around food and exercise, it was affecting my relationships, I was, my fuse was a little bit shorter than typical, I felt a little bit kind of lethargic and you know overwhelmed and certainly my performance was affected by this, and even my ability to think creatively and do creative things. So importantly, emotions can either enhance these things or they can kind of interfere with these things, and what I want to share with you is that on the opposite end, when we are experiencing certain emotions we have better attention, we can make more informed decisions, we can build and maintain positive relationships, we can achieve greater well-being, and we can perform at our best. And that's what I want to try to help with today as we jump into this. I have a question for you though, yeah, honestly, how open are you to feelings? And if you've read my book or you know the Center's work, you know, we talked about it as "are you an emotion scientist or are you an emotion judge?" The emotion scientist is someone who accepts all emotions who sees emotions as temporary or ephemeral, opening curious learner mode, wants to get granular specific with the words, has a growth mindset So for example, like many of you and our teachers who I surveyed a few weeks ago, I have failed at dealing with my feelings and since I'm a professor of emotional intelligence and you know, running a Center on the same topic, you know, if I have I try to have a growth mindset it's like, "Marc, you really messed up tonight but tomorrow you get the opportunity to start over," and then I started over and then I fail again and I keep on telling myself to start over. But the point is that I'm trying my best, right, to have that growth mindset that I can like get. There are these skills and I can learn them. It's a little bit different than the emotion judge who vies emotions as kind of error, you know, sees emotions as being permanent, like, this is never gonna go away, like my anxiety is like a terrible toothache, I'm very critical of emotions, you know, why are you so angry, you know, don't be so anxious." It's a knower mode, right, they tell you how you're feeling, it's either good or bad, and has you know, what we call a fixed mindset, which is you know what, I stink at regulating my feeling, this is who I am, get used to it, get over it. So let me ask all of you to take a moment and pause and be honest with yourself. Are you the emotion scientists, are you the emotion judge? Some of you are saying, "My spouse is the judge but I'm the scientist." Be careful there, I'm gonna interview your spouse. Some of us, what's interesting, some people tell me that, "You know, I'm the emotion scientist with people I know the least, and I'm the judge people I love the most." Today's primary focus is going to be on healthy emotion regulation. So the question is, you know, what is emotion regulation? We define emotion regulation as the thoughts and the actions that we use to reduce unwanted emotions, to initiate emotions that want to experience, to maintain the ones that we see as helpful, or to enhance ones. And importantly, emotion regulation is always in the service of having greater well-being, building positive relationships, making good decisions and attaining goals. There are many forms of emotion regulation. There is self-regulation, which is what we're gonna primarily focus on tonight, like what can I do as a parent, as a teacher to manage my own emotions, to achieve goals. Of course there are constructs like co-regulation, which is the back and forth between two people like a mom and her baby having a conversation and the mom is trying to soothe the baby and the baby is giving feedback, and there's that continuous back and forth. Also there's what we call interpersonal regulation. This is when you know, what's gonna help someone and you offer them that strategy, "Hey honey, let's go for that walk" or "You know what, try to think about it this way." All the things that I'm going to be sharing with you today can be applied to co- and interpersonal regulation, but we're gonna really focus on you. There's a few things before we jump into the actual strategies. The first is all of us, all of these strategies that I'm going to be doing with you are specific to the emotion. What I mean by that is that for me, because I was born with the anxiety gene, you know, I have oftentimes greater difficulty kind of dealing with being overwhelmed or stressed, you know, when I'm disappointed I can handle it well, you know, when I'm angry, you know, I can say, "Marc, you got bigger fish to fry in your life, let it go," so anger doesn't seem to be as difficult for me as fear and anxiety. It's to the person. So everyone on this webinar has a different personality, has a different background, and that will influence the strategies that you use. I'm more introverted than most people perceive me to be. They'll say, "Hey Mar, let's go ahead and do this to help you feel less stressed!" What I realized is that more when I do social things, that often I need more quiet time. And so it's specific to the situation or the relationship. Ask yourself, do you regulate better at work than at home? Is it easier with some friends than others? And then importantly, you know, as educators are we allowing our children to use the strategies, you know, that will be helpful to them. The last thing about this is that unlike other academic content, for example math where there's a correct answer, when minus four is gonna be three and five times five is gonna be 25, there's no correctness when it comes to strategies. Why I tell you this is that we come at emotion regulation often from our own perspective. So for example, I like to get on a bicycle and work out. Somebody else might be riding the bicycle or walking. And we want to tell people that our strategies are the right strategies, and there is no right strategy. The goal of emotion regulation is to become a scientist and to learn about what works for you to help you deal with the emotion and achieve your well-being and goals, and when you're doing this with others the goal is to coach and support people in find those strategies for themselves. So let's jump into it. Unfortunately as we saw from the data and many of you, the top emotions are anxiety and stress right now. The definition of chronic stress and anxiety is that we feel like things are unpredictable, uncontrollable, and that they're not going to go away. So currently as I say here, you know, we have that dangerous trio and that makes us, you know, have that danger kind of alarm going off you know most of the day, in combination with resource depletion, meaning that we're not eating healthy as best we could, probably not getting exercise, etc., that pushes us to live in ways that we could regret: spraying people, gargling with Clorox, panic buying of toilet paper, saying mean or hurtful things, catastrophic thinking. The best example I have of that in my own life, I do a lot of flying. Whenever there is turbulence I get very anxious, and I would say things like, "This is gonna be it, this is when the plane's gonna crash," and then I asked my cousin who was a pilot, and he said, "Didn't you know Marc, there's never been a plane crash because of turbulence?" and I said "Really?" And he goes, "Yes, so like, what are you worrying about?" And I'm like, "Well Rich, yeah, you're kind of right." So I tell you that because once you have information, think about that, once you have the information, then the story that you tell yourself is very different. Without the information that there's never been a plane crash around turbulence, my brain is making it up based on my own fears and anxieties. Once you have the information it's hard to lie to yourself, right, you have to say, "Marc, guess what. There's never been a crash because of turbulence," oh okay, and then that can help you manage your emotions more effectively. So what are the strategies, what you've all been waiting for. I call these "The Big Seven". The first is physiological regulation, that when we are experiencing strong emotions and even when we're not, mindful breathing is a strategy to help us deactivate and just calm our systems down. Self-care, you know, especially during these difficult times. We need to take care of our immune system, weight, sleep, nutrition, exercise, healthy relationships. We all, every one of us, come to this world with the need to feel safe, the need to be heard, and the need to connect. We also need to be able to manage our thoughts, right? Having that positive self-talk, maybe being grateful, maybe engaging and reappraisal, now three more have to do with how we manage our lives. We're gonna talk about that in a little bit. How many of you are doing things that are meaningful to you? I can tell you here in New Haven Connecticut where I live literally five minutes from the ocean, there's a beautiful park in New Haven called Lighthouse Park, you ever been there before? And on this journey of coronavirus we learned about it and have gone there now I think three or four times a week, you know, respecting social distance but just taking that half hour at the end of the day to just walk, breathe, and experience nature. Cannot tell you how that has helped me. Now I need honesty here, how many of you have messed up in terms of dealing with your feelings when it comes to your friends, family, partners, kids, anyone willing to admit it? Everyone's saying yes, yeah, of course. And so the question is, can you have some self compassion? Can you give yourself the permission to fail and even forgive? I was joking the other day that I was thinking my new strategy is I'm gonna teach my family about the value of forgiveness. So let's jump into these strategies now. First one is going to be mindful breathing. Now as we jump into mindful breathing, I have to just get through some misconceptions about this. The first is that often times people confuse mindfulness in mindful breathing with a religious practice. I wanted to share with you that all of us were born breathing, and people in every culture on every continent breathe, so please don't think of this as a religious practice. It's just breathing. Some people think that mindful breathing is used only to regulate our difficult emotions or to prolong pleasant ones. No. The idea of mindfulness is to help us cultivate a deeper awareness of all of our experiences. And another misconception is that when we do mindful breathing, we have to have our hands a certain way, we have to breathe in for a certain number of seconds. The truth is we just breathe naturally. So let me ask you know a question before we jump into the exercise. Be honest with me again. How many of you have really just intentionally taken some time to pause? Seriously. Take a breath. Or how many of you have said like, "Oh I could really use a little bit more of this." I'm seeing "More so lately." But, I think for a lot of us, you know, somebody said, "Mindful Monday!" Well guess what, every moment should be mindful Monday, not just Monday. It's like schools that do you know, they say they do emotional intelligence, they have "Feelings Friday's." No, every day is feelings. What I want to do with all of you today is take you through a few exercises. Now here's the deal. I have a hunch that this is gonna be the time in my webinar when you're gonna say, "I can check my email" or "I can go see what's on TV tonight" or "I can check in with my kids or my partner." I'm gonna ask you to spend three minutes with me just breathing. So here we go. Let me ask all of you to get good posture in your seats. You can close your eyes, you can just look down, it's up to you. And I'm just gonna ask you to breathe naturally. Notice your breath. If it's comfortable, try to breathe strictly through your nose. Just inhale through the nose, exhale through the nose. Just observe what's going on in your brain. What's the story your brain is telling you right now? There are a lot of different strategies here. You can count your breaths, it''s a way to stay focused is count. Inhale one, exhale one, inhale two, exhale two. It's a way to bring your mind into a gentle focus. So if you're finding yourself really overwhelmed and having a lot of chatter, you might just do that counting breath. Some of us like to focus on an image, so there's a beautiful lighthouse over in this Lighthouse Park, and I just find it to be lovely, the way it's off on this peninsula, and sometimes when I'm stressed out I just think about the water in that cute little lighthouse, and I just breathe and I visualize that lighthouse and it just helps me to deactivate. The one that I'm going to practice with you today is one that is my personal favorite for when I'm feeling overwhelmed and I can't-- I don't have trouble sleeping, what I do have trouble with is getting to bed, because when I get into bed my brain starts going crazy and I start ruminating and thinking about lots of things. This particular exercise is where we repeat a phrase, and as you can see here, in, out. Let's inhale in, exhale out, and then we do the same with deep, slow, calm, ease. Let me put a little smile on our face, and then we say release. So let me get everyone to get again comfortable in your seats, and we're going to try this together. On the inhale we're going to say "in" and on the exhale we say "out," and that's going to be in our heads, we're not going to say it, I'm just saying it to guide you. Let's try that again. In...and out. Second breath, deep... and exhale, slow. Inhale calm... exhale ease, in. Please put a gentle smile on your face, smile and exhale, release. Let's do it one more time through, on your own. I will count or I say the phrase on the in-breath in...and out... And deep...and slow...and calm...and ease... and smile...and release. Okay, now I want your feedback be honest with us. How did it make you feel, how did it feel it take literally just three minutes to breathe? Sleepy, nice, calm, good, relaxing, selfish, be careful the stories you tell yourself. Relaxed, calming, there you go. So you know, if you notice your brain racing and you notice your heart racing and you can't get focused, give yourself the permission to breathe, breathe, breathe. I'm thinking of the ocean again. So why does this work? Because we know that breathing occurs mostly automatically without our attention, right, otherwise we'd go crazy thinking about our breath 24/7. But when we engage in voluntary control, like doing these mindfulness exercises, the area in our brain shifts to the brain stem, from the brain stem I should say, to the motor cortex, and by doing that it helps us to activate what's called the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps us to decrease the neural chemicals that cortisol and other properties, so that we can be at a more calm state, and now there's great research to show that our immune functioning, greater focus and attention less brain chatter, and less anxiety and greater well-being. The next three we're going to breeze because these are things that you have to make commitments to. The first is nutrition, so research shows you've got to stay hydrated. When you are dehydrated it causes fatigue and you get headaches and it increases your chances of having a more negative mood or being irritable. You also need to limit caffeine and alcohol intake, especially when you're stressed. You want to try to avoid processed foods if possible, because when we're stressed we tend to turn to high-fat high-sugar foods. Take some vitamins. And I think importantly, you want to avoid getting angry, right, so what we know is that glucose is the primary fuel for our brain, and when we don't get enough supply of it, right, what happens is that we lose energy, we lose focus, we can even get kind of mean and cruel which happens, you know, to me. And so the question is, can you get some carbs in your life every couple of hours to support you, you know, in getting that glucose? The second is sleep. I don't know about you, but when this all started sleep was really difficult for me. I was going to bed way too late and I was kind of, I don't know what was happening with in the mornings. And we know that poor sleep equals poor restoration, poor functioning. Some ideas: I have been trying this and had not been successful at it, so you know the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence is failing at making goals around better sleep, because I've been telling myself to keep my phone in my closet or my bathroom and not by my bed, and yet my addiction is winning. And so I'm making another goal tonight to put my phone someplace else because it just, you know, between the beeps, in between getting up in the middle of the night and checking email and getting reprogrammed, it's having a toll on me. another thing before you go to bed is it's helpful to do some light stretching or even take a warm shower. And the reason why we care about our sleep is multifold. One, inadequate or excessive sleep increases anxious symptoms and depressive symptom. People with unhealthy sleep patterns are more hostile and tense. You gotta restore your, you got to restore, you got to replenish your resources. And if someone is unable to use their full cognitive capacity, right, it really becomes difficult to use these evidence-based strategies. Exercise, raise your hand or let me just ask you to share, has anyone here been struggling getting in enough fitness, movement? Some of you are saying you're getting more because you have more time, that's excellent. Some of you are saying you're making excuses all the time, the struggle is real. Some of you have pets that you're walking, some of you are using apps or games, that's great. One of the challenges that we have in our society is obesity, and 40% of adults, you know, have obesity, and what we know from research is that physical exercise has been directly associated with less anxiety, less stress, less depression, increased self-esteem, increased concentration. So there are physiological benefits to exercise, which importantly help cognitively. Think about when you've got that runner's high, when you've got those endorphins, you're less likely to have negative thoughts and that's what the research shows that I'm sharing on the bottom there. Okay, next we're gonna move to healthy relationships. Let me ask you right now to take a moment and think about all of the relationships that you're in right now, whether it be your Zoom relationships, your students, or your significant others, your children, your students. How are they going? What color on the Mood Meter would you put your partner, your child? And the reason why I bring this up is that, you know, as I said we all have a basic need to be seen and heard and met, and I was doing a talk similar to this yesterday with a group of business professionals and they were saying to me, one guy said to me, "You know Marc, I have become the custodian in my house, I had become the cafeteria worker in my house, I become the tech repair person, I become the teacher, I'm still a parent I'd become x, I've become y, I've become z," and he goes, "I can't take it. I just can't take it. I just can't be in all these different roles, and it's driving me crazy and it's affecting my relationships." And so I said to him, "Well, could you think about it a little differently? Could you say to yourself something like, wow I'm a master of all." And we need strategies to help us build those relationships, and the reason why I say that is that what research shows is that only about one-third of our nation's youth believe they have strong relationships with their teachers, and we know also from research is that the mere presence of a caring adult reduces the effects of stress. So importantly, you know, that father who is "I'm this and I'm this" he was a little anxious and probably showing it on his face and body, he's sending signals, right, he's sending signals out, "Stay away from me, I'm overwhelmed, I can't deal with it," which is gonna affect the anxiety in the family. And what I want to share with you is something important from the research, which is that perceived support is critically important. What that means is that what's critical is for a child to know that you are there for them. So just take a moment and think about that. They have to believe in their heart that you are there for them. You may never have to actually do anything to help them out, but they have to feel like you would if they needed it. So the question I have for you is, what is it going to take to make sure that your own children and then all the children that you teach have that perception of you? And I want to also emphasize that we're so used to what we call "traditional empathy", you know, "My goodness, I understand that you're feeling anxious, oh my goodness you're feeling this way," and that's important, don't get me wrong, but there is something called positive empathy. That is the ability to share, celebrate, enjoy others positive experiences. So think about that. How often over the last couple of weeks, given your stress levels, have you noticed the positive things and just given that little positive remark about it? Here's what's really interesting, is that positive empathy, more so than traditional empathy, is related to social closeness and well-being. What does that mean? It means that when we rank our loved ones, we tend to feel more connected to the people who are the ones who intentionally say things that make us feel positive. Here's the big one: managing our thoughts. We all have self-talk, right, about 40% of our well-being has to do with our outlook on life. That 40%, by the way, is completely controlled by the strategies that you learn. I don't know if you're like me, but my negatives, my negative talk started very early in life, often by others. So when I was a chubby kid and I would get made fun of because of my weight, when I was a teenager my nose was bigger than my whole body, I had a big nose, I was too feminine, I wasn't masculine enough, I was too short, the list goes on, and you know, think about how that starts defining our reality as we get older. And I don't know about you, but no one ever asked me when I was very young to like, change the conversation I was having with myself, and it's uncomfortable now as an adult to really start thinking positively ,and you can't just tell someone you know, "Stop thinking that way, just be positive." It's work. It takes unlearning and then relearning sometimes. A couple of key strategies: the first, positive self-talk, saying encouraging words about yourself or the world around you. One of the tricks that research has shown is that it's often, you know, we used to be told to say things like "I think I can, I think I can" and what research actually shows is that referring to yourself in the third person can be helpful, because when you're experiencing a strong feeling, what happens is that you get lost in your own emotions, and if you can say something like, "Hey Marc" meaning me, "take the high road,"all of a sudden you can decrease your activation levels and be able to have empathy for yourself. So here's my example, like I'm always saying, my phrase is "I want to lose it" and then I'm like, "Wait a minute, Marc, you're the feelings master, you can get through this!" And I really like this quote about you can't cope in the future, right, you can cope with the present moment. Secondly is positive reappraisal. Trying to be creative about the way you look at the situation. So when all of the news was coming out around wearing masks and Purell and wiping, I mean I was going nuts, I was like, "There's no way this is possible." I was working myself up into a storm, "Oh wait Marc, you're doing it, you're practicing it, you're practicing social distancing, you're taking every precaution. Oh yeah, you're right Marc, you are okay." Or, being at home is not something I'm used to, "I'm never gonna make it being at home for so long," and you're like, "Wait a minute Marc, maybe this is an opportunity to learn and grow closer." Everyone take a moment. How do these strategies resonate with you? When you're feeling anxious and overwhelmed and stressed, is your automatic go-to positive self-talk and positive reappraisal, or might it be being a self-saboteur or that negative self-talk? I think a lot of us tend to get addicted to negative self-talk because it's easier: "You're a loser, you're never gonna make it, it's over and there's no hope." It's hard to sometimes just take that breath and step back and say, "You know what Marc, you've worked really hard, right, you can get through this." Think about how we model these helpful or unhelpful strategies, you know, for our children. So we're gonna try it, and there's another strategy that can be very helpful. I want you to imagine you're struggling with being cooped up at home, maybe you are feeling that way, you're feeling really lonely and sad. What are some of the unhelpful or helpful things you might say to yourself? Think about it for a minute. You're struggling with being cooped up, feeling really lonely and sad, what are your kids saying to themselves? "This is never gonna be over, I can't take it, get a grip on it," that's what my father would have said to me: "Get a grip on it, son!" What research shows is that oftentimes you know, it's really hard to do this for yourself, and one way to get really skilled at dealing with your own feelings is to not think about yourself actually, but rather think about someone else. So now instead of thinking about what you might do, imagine I came up to you as your son, as your best friend, as your colleague, and said "You know, I'm really struggling, I can't take it anymore, I'm losing it, I can't be at home anymore, I feel all cooped up." What would you say to me, the person that you really care about? Hoping that's the case, by the way. Say that, why don't we take a walk, what would you say to the person that you really love and care for when they're telling you they're struggling? Let's talk, I love you, we're gonna get through this together, thank you. Let's bake something. And so here's a strategy that you can use with yourself, here's a strategy that you can use with your children when they're really stuck with their feelings. Try to distance it from them and bring it to someone else. I was really happy to hear, a mom reached out to me once who read my book and she said, "You know Marc, I used one of the strategies," and I'm like, tell me more, she's like "Well, I'm in the car with my son, and he was really anxious because we were going to the dentist, and I said hey honey, you know, what would you tell your best friend if he was feeling really anxious about going to the dentist?" and the kid said, "Well Mommy, I would tell him it's gonna be okay and I'd tell him like, look at your teeth, they're gonna be whiter and cleaner and your teeth are this," and made up all these examples, and then the mom said "Well honey, might you be able to tell yourself those things?" and then the kid thought about it for a minute then he looked at his mom in the rearview mirror and he said, "Mom you're a genius." So, right, we don't have to be the adults who know everything, sometimes we have to be the adults who are the compassionate caregivers who just offer ideas" "Honey, think about what you might say to someone else or to ourselves, think about what can you say to your closest friend," and those are strategies that can really help you. So a few last things before we bring our webinar to a close. You gotta manage your life smartly, you gotta have routines especially during these uncertain times. I can tell you, as I said earlier when all this first started happening, and you know, our university was closed and all of our team was working from home, I was sitting at home I had CNN on, I was doing this, I was a complete I was on a basket case to be honest with you. I just get so overwhelmed by everything with "The Center is gonna close and schools are gonna stop doing our work," and you know, "The world's coming to an end" and I really needed to get myself on a routine, and I don't normally work from home but I had a little room, like a guest room, and I just carved out a space in it, a little fake desk where I'm at right now, just giving myself a little space. Try to get up on time, do my exercise in the morning, have a routine, taking that time to have family time at the end of the day makes a huge difference because then my brain wasn't preoccupied with all the chaos all day long, and it was more focused on achieving goals. And when we have too much time, our brains make up stories. How about you? How are your routines going? Are you sticking to a routine, or are you a little more all over the place trying to have routines? So one of your homework assignments is to really review your last couple weeks and think, "How can I get myself really on a on a routine that's going to help me have more predictability?" incorporating sleep, incorporating the healthy eating, incorporating the exercise, incorporating building those positive relationship. I want to share also that we have to try to be preventionists not interventionists. Think about that. we take actions that make it more likely we'll end up in a situation that might give rise to anxiety. What does that mean? Don't surround yourself with people who make you anxious. So I have an aunt who is you know, she's a she's what I call, she's a winner. "Marc, they don't know what's gonna happen, are you sure the University" and so every time I speak to my aunt I'm like, "Oh my god like I've never ever survive," and I realized, "All right Marc, kind of monitor the amount of time you talk to your aunt." So try to surround yourself with people who are calming as opposed to surrounding yourself with people who make you anxious all the time, right? Don't check social media or watch the news all day, yeah stay informed, but try to limit it. Get the information that you need but not too much information. The news cycle by the way, it goes like every eight minutes on TV, so you can imagine over the course of an hour what is that, seven times you're gonna hear the same thing, that's gonna just blow up your brain. Here's another technique =: consider being your best self each morning. Can you wake up and take a breath and just think about how you want to be seen, how do you want to be talked about, how you want to be experienced? Let me ask you to do that right now. Think about your authentic best self right now. Well, what are the words that you would use to describe your best self? How you would like to be seen by your partner, by your child, by your students? And I'd like you all to just participate here. Let's hear the words. What are the words that you would use to describe your best self? Loving, positive, calm, patient. So think about it. Can you enter into your day through this lens, or when your notice yourself kind of getting activated or triggered by someone that you care about, whether it be anyone in your family or work, can you pause and activate that adjective and be that funny, caring, loving, reliable self? What our research shows is that will make a difference. It's another form of self-talk. The last thing I want to share with you is the following: you got to do things you enjoy. You just gotta, right, we don't give ourselves permission to have fun and we think we have to work all the time. My students used to say to me, "Sorry but I got to stay up all night, I got to pull an all-nighter and write my paper and get an idea,"and I'd say them, "How about I give you a ticket to go for a half hour walk or take a yoga class or just whatever, like give yourself freedom." And they've been lying to themselves their whole lives, thinking that, putting themselves under pressure. I actually give them the space to be creative, and what research shows it is that it's the opposite, right? Sometimes I, don't know about you, but I'm taking a shower or on a walk on the beach where I'm in a yoga class, and all of a sudden I'm like, "Wow I just figured it out!" The area of our brain called the default mode network is the area of our brain that helps creativity prosper, and it's not activated when we're under a lot of pressure. It becomes activated when we're at ease. So I'm gonna encourage all of you, here's a list that we've created. There are millions of things you can do, what can you do to just give yourself the permission to have fun, to be free, can you be creative? Start a new photo album. One of our colleagues shakes up her routine by playing a new song while making her bed in the morning. Can you write to someone, maybe the person who was your hero in life, the person who helped you become the leader you are today? Can you write them a note and just express your gratitude? A few last things as we bring our time together to a close. When you're working with people, you have to recognize that strategies are developmental, right? That's why teenagers have to get a permit before they get a license, they have to be learned, and they have to be permitted. I always joked with all the therapy I've had in my life, I learned a lot about my mother but I never learned like the real strategies of positive self-talk or reappraisal. It's a lot of work. We've got to practice them over and over again because we will fail, and the strategies have to be evaluated in a refined. And finally, you gotta have Plan B and Plan C. Best example, I decided I was gonna be creative, I did my creative exercise, I'm gonna cook for the week and I cooked dinners for nine days in a row. By day ten I was like "If I cook one more freakin' meal I'm gonna lose it." Maybe you can relate. And I was like, "Okay, what's my next plan?" so you've got to have other strategies, you can't just have one strategy, you need a big tool bag. So as we wrap up our time together, I want to ask you to do a few things. One, think about all the strategies that we talked about today. Which ones resonate with you? Is it the breathing? Are you gonna set goals around self-care and relationships? Need to work more on self-talk, setting routines, having more fun and doing things you enjoy? Can I ask all of you to just set a goal right now? Think about which strategies you can commit to using now, today, this week. Take a moment and do that please. People working their self-talk, improving their routines, having some fun, better self-care, great. Thank you for writing these out. Having more quality time with my son. Ask yourself now, what's gonna be different for you when you use this strategy? What will be different? Visualize. What do you notice, what do you see as a result of using these breathing exercises, taking better care of yourself? More calm. What do you notice? Better relationships, less stress, nice. So I need you also to thinking about the things that are gonna get in the way. So for those of you who said mindful breathing, what might get in the way? Maybe having phone call after phone call after phone call after phone call. For those of you who say exercise, is it that you're not going to bed early enough so you can get up with the energy? For those of you who want to take care of your eating and nutrition better, is it buying junk food? What are the barriers? Not enough sleep. So part of getting more skilled at dealing with your emotions is to take the time to visualize the benefits, but also notice, you know, what are the things that are going to be your barriers, and try to create the plan, you know, to deal with that barrier. And what I want to say as we bring our time to a close, and I will stay on for an extra five or so minutes to get questions if anyone has them, is that you owe it to yourself and your loved ones to use healthy emotion regulation strategies. So let me ask a lot of you to take a nice long inhale and an exhale. And let me wrap up by summarizing what we've did today, what we've done. One, I'm asking you all to give yourselves and others the permission to feel all emotions. I want you to remind yourself that emotion regulation isn't about not feeling, right, it's about accepting all emotions and using them wisely. We talked about being that emotion scientist and not the emotion judge. Please remember that physical distance, which is critically important, does not mean psychological distance, right? Be that Uncle Marvin. I call it "be your Uncle Marvin" because that was the person who was my hero in life, as I mentioned, the person who I felt safe and comfortable to talk to about my issues. Appreciate that developing the skills takes time and it's really hard work, just accept it, don't get lost in "it's too difficult," just acknowledge the complexity and be okay with it. Try the best you can to be that role model for your family and friend, right? If you fail, be open to apologizing, forgiving, and repairing. And if you need other extra help, don't judge that either. We've all needed more help in our lives, and as I've said, please don't give up on this. You know your health and your children's health depend on it. So I want to thank you all for coming out on this Thursday afternoon to listen to and hear about emotion regulation. I want to end with one of my favorite quotes: "Between stimulus and response there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom." So may all of you fill that space with these helpful strategies so that you can achieve your goal, you can have greater well-being, you can be the best possible teacher, parent, partner. And information is on the left here so if you're interested in getting a free blog called "The Emotion Scientist" that comes out of really core information about my book, or free articles, please go to my website, and if you are using RULER we have created a bunch of resources for all of you that are free and available on rulerapproach.org, and if you want more information about how to do this work in your schools please reach out to us. And Michelle is my assistant if you need anything from me specifically. Thank you all so much. I'm gonna stop here, I'm gonna breathe and I'm going to turn it over to Nikki who is gonna maybe, we will spend maybe five minutes just getting any questions you might have or any additional supports that we as a Center can provide for you. Okay thanks so much Marc for sharing your insights on all of this, and we actually don't have any specific questions. I'll wait for those but I do want to just tell people we did have a couple questions about the recording. We will share a a link to the recording to everyone via email and, we also if you go to our rulerapproach.org site there's a banner at the top that links to all of our resources that are specific to these times with the COVID closings and distance learning and teaching SEL at home and supporting educators in teaching their students, so if you go to ruler approach dot org you'll get access to that. We update that page every few days with recordings of webinars, you'll see the recording of this webinar there and there were other questions around sharing, and of course you can share any of these resources with anyone. Yeah, I mean one thing that I love about emotion regulation strategies is that everything that I taught today is free, right, free meaning that we're giving it away in terms of the knowledge for free, but also you don't need to have money to manage your thinking, to make sure you go to bed right, you don't need to go to a fancy gym. Think about that. It's all available to you, you just have to put the effort in to use it. That's great. There's another question here about how you suggest taking the ideas you discuss in your book about charters and using them with students now during distance learning, and I'll let you answer that Marc, but let me just say that we have a webinar just about creating family charters coming up later in the month, and again that schedule is on the RULER Approach website. Yeah thanks Nikki, and please if you have some ideas too share. So you know school climate, or classroom climate can be virtual or it can be face-to-face. And so I think you know, let's use the word "respect." You know probably logging in on time, do you know if you're doing virtual learning is important, you know, feeling connected which is you know, setting up your computers in ways where you can really see each other, so I think that it's very possible to apply the principles of the classroom charter to the virtual environment, and you don't have to be the knower. Just ask the students. So if we all want to feel respected at home, you know, what does that look like? And let them come up with the ideas and then you can share yours too. If they want to feel valued, if you want to feel whatever the emotions are, it really is just asking and then summarizing. Nikki do you see- there's people asking about family resource, so there are a number of those coming up. Right, as you mentioned, yep same place on RULER Approach dot org website, we have the listing on our website, but we will be updating that Monday with some new offerings specifically for families and each of the webinars we have coming up. So there's one on the Charter, there's one on the Mood Meter. They also come with some accompanying resources that you can send to families or if families attend webinars they'll get those resources as well, tips and tools and things. Alright everyone, well I always say it's an honor and a privilege to have the opportunity to share what our Center's work is with all of you. Thank you Nikki for helping and supporting the webinar, and thank you to our friends at CEA and AFT for promoting this webinar, and as Nikki said we are going to share this, it was recorded and it will be archived, and these webinars can be emailed to people to watch, so may this be a helpful resource to you and others in your schools and communities. And then on that note I just want to say thank you again, and have a great Thursday evening. Bye everyone.