You now know that regulating an emotion means choosing how you respond to it.

But have you ever thought about what happens in your brain when you try to calm down, think clearly, or simply breathe?

Emotions don’t come “from the heart”, even if you often feel them there.

They start in your brain, which reacts to what you’re experiencing and then sends messages to your body.

Emotional regulation is a constant dialogue between the emotional brain (the limbic system) and the thinking brain (the prefrontal cortex).

Effective regulation depends on this interaction: when the emotional brain takes over the thinking brain, it becomes much harder to reason.