Mind-Body Skills for Self-Regulation: An Introduction

Not too long ago, I announced my newest training – Brains on Stress Can’t Learn: Mind-Body Skills to Destress Your Students (and Yourself!).

In the next several posts here on the blog (and over on my YouTube channel), I am going to dive a little deeper into the different categories of mind-body skills and share some great resources.

First of all, what are mind-body skills? In a nutshell, they are strategies that can be used to help us de-escalate or cope with big emotions. We can explicitly teach them to kids as part of a daily mindfulness practice so that they can learn the strategies while their brains and bodies are calm. Then, when their brains and bodies AREN’T calm, they know how to use them to reach a more regulated state.

Why are these strategies important for kids to know? Well, if you are teacher, you might have noticed a shift in our students over the past several years. Many of them have parents who are external regulators, meaning THEY are regulating their child’s emotional state in negative ways. Parents are doing this by giving in to tantrums and demands, working overtime to soothe kids and doing everything they can to ensure their kids DON’T fail or encounter any sort of difficult situation. They are sheltering their children from challenges and solving their problems for them. The result is a generation of kids who are struggling to problem solve, effectively communicate with others, self-regulate and more.

Not only do we need to take a good, hard look at the social-emotional skills we are instilling in our kids, we also need to begin providing a more solid foundation for them to become their own regulators. We do that by teaching kids how to recognize, identify and label their emotions and giving them the tools to manage those emotions themselves.

That’s where mind-body skills come in.

Mind-body skills can be categorized into 7 groups:

1. Breathing
2. Movement
3. Mindfulness
4. Visualization
5. Expressive Art
6. Music
7. Writing & Journaling

Over the next several posts, I am going to break each of these categories down even further and provide specific strategies and resources that can be used to explicitly teach that strategy to kids. Whether you are a teacher, a parent or just someone who cares about kids, I hope you’ll join me for this series!