The Horse & Rider: A helpful metaphor for emotional regulation

Being able to regulate your emotions is a learned skill, just like being able to multiply or decode multi-syllabic words. Helping students develop this skill of emotional regulation is just as important as literacy and math instruction. And one helpful part of teaching students this skill is helping them understand what's going on in the brain.

Now because I teach elementary-aged students and because I am no brain expert myself, I rely on metaphors to help me understand and communicate that understanding to my students.

What follows are three ways of thinking about what's happening in the brain when we're emotionally regulated that I have found extremely helpful. I've labeled them as good, better and best.

Good: "The Lid"

Image taken from https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zJqH_Ogxle0/maxresdefault.jpg on 6/28/2022

When I first learned about emotional regulation during a Conscious Discipline training, I learned about the hand model of the brain. Watch Dr. Becky Bailey from Conscious Discipline explain this hand model.

With this model, the thumb represents your limbic system, which is the emotional part of the brain. Your prefrontal cortex, which is represented by your middle and ring fingers, is the thinking part of the brain. When you're in your thinking state, your prefrontal cortex regulates your limbic system and in the hand model of the brain, your middle and ring fingers physically cover up your thumb. To show emotional dysregulation, your fingers come up and we say, "you've flipped your lid." When we're in this state, we are driven by our emotions.

Better: "The Balance"

Image taken from https://pxhere.com/en/photo/1585031 on 6/28/2022.

In fourth grade at my school, we teach students a different metaphor using the social-emotional learning curriculum called Second Step. In the unit called "Emotional Management" we teach the students about the balanced brain. Just like with Conscious Discipline, the students learn about these two states of the brain, but the Second Step curriculum uses the language of "logic center" and "emotion center".

A further difference is that rather than talk about one system regulating or taking over the other, we talk about how both the logic and emotion centers of our brain need to be in balance. These parts of our brain need to work together so that we can make good decisions. We shouldn't ignore either part of the brain.

I prefer thinking of keeping these parts of our brains balanced, instead of one system taking over or regulating the other one, but Second Step doesn't provide a helpful visual metaphor to easily talk about or communicate this idea to kids. That is why I prefer this last way of thinking about the brain and emotional regulation.

Best: "The Horse and Rider"

Image take from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2006-07-28_-_United_States_-_Wyoming_-_Cody_-_Rodeo_-_Cowboy.jpg on 6/28/2022

My best friend Brenda, a mother and nurse practitioner, shared a way of thinking about the thinking and logic centers of the brain in a way that I have used in my classroom ever since. Just like how the fingers rest on top of the thumb in the hand model of the brain described above, we can think about the logic center as being the rider on top of a horse, which represents the emotion center. Both horse and rider need to work together to be successful.

The horse needs the rider to help know where to go and the rider needs the horse to get places quicker. When the horse bucks off the rider, it runs wild and won't be very successful until the rider gets back on. When this happens, we're emotionally dysregulated and we can't get regulated until the horse slows down. This is a key aspect to this metaphor and it is why I LOVE it so much. We can not think or communicate logically when we're dysregulated - when our rider is off the horse. So our first order of business when this happens is to breathe, slow our horse down and get the rider back on so that we can get back into balance.

These three metaphors that I have learned along the way help me think about balanced and regulated brains. What are ways you have learned that you use in your practice?