📅 7 days
🕒 10 minutes a day
🔀 From reaction to response
When emotions surge, the body’s stress response can hijack your choices.
This module trains quick, practical tools to pause, steady your system, and choose your next move.
This week, you’ll learn how to:
- Pause and steady yourself before emotions take control
- Ground and reframe stressful moments so they lose their power
- Build a personal toolkit of quick, reliable regulation strategies
Why bother?
Because unregulated emotions can:
- control your decisions
- damage relationships
- drain your wellbeing
Learning to regulate them means you can stay calm even when life feels chaotic.
Instead of being swept away by stress, you’ll become the anchor — steady, grounded, and free to choose your best response.
Check out the content for each day:
🔍 Day 1: Spot Your Triggers
🎯 Today’s win:
Notice what sets you off before it overwhelms you.
📘 Learn the basics:
Triggers are cues (situations, thoughts, tones of voice) that predict emotional spikes.
Naming them reduces their power.
✏️ Simple exercise:
Keep a tiny log. When you feel tension rise, jot:
- What happened?
- What I felt in my body?
- What I wanted to do?
🌟 Benefits:
Early detection = faster recovery; less ‘out of the blue’ overwhelm.
💡 Tip for beginners:
Keep it messy and brief bullet points beat perfect paragraphs.
⏸️ Day 2: The Pause Button
🎯 Today’s win:
Create a tiny gap between impulse and action.
📘 Learn the basics:
A deliberate pause interrupts automatic reactions and re-engages your thinking brain.
✏️ Simple exercise:
Try the 3-Breath Reset:
- inhale exhale x 3
- On breath 3, ask: ‘What matters most in the next minute?’
🌟 Benefits:
Fewer regrets, clearer responses.
💡 Tip for beginners:
Pair it with a cue (e.g., before hitting ‘send’ or opening your mouth in conflict).
🔎 Quick reflect:
Did I create even one pause today before reacting?
What difference did it make?”
🌱 Day 3: Ground in the Present
🎯 Today’s win:
Stabilise your body when your mind spins.
📘 Learn the basics:
Grounding shifts attention from racing thoughts to immediate sensations, calming the nervous system.
✏️ Simple exercise:
The 5-4-3-2-1 Exercise:
- Look around and name 5 things you can see (e.g., a window, a pen).
- Notice 4 things you can feel (your chair, your clothes, your feet on the floor…).
- Listen for 3 things you can hear (birds, typing, distant voices).
- Identify 2 things you can smell (coffee, soap, the room’s air).
- Focus on 1 thing you can taste (or simply notice the taste in your mouth).
🌟 Benefits:
- Rapid de-escalation
- better focus
💡 Tip for beginners:
If 5 steps feel long, do a ‘3-2-1’ mini version.
🔄 Day 4: Reframe the Story
🎯 Today’s win:
Change the meaning, change the emotion.
📘 Learn the basics:
Emotions track interpretations, not just events.
Flexible thinking reduces intensity.
✏️ Simple exercise:
- Write the hot thought: such as:
- ‘This is a disaster.’
- Then three alternatives: such as:
- ‘It’s hard, but solvable.’
- ‘I can ask for help.’
- ‘What’s the smallest next step?’
🌟 Benefits:
More options, less doom-loop.
🔎 Quick reflect:
- What stressful thought did I reframe today?
- How did my feelings shift afterwards?”
🏃 Day 5: Release Physical Tension
🎯 Today’s win:
Let the body help the mind.
📘 Learn the basics:
Emotions are embodied. Gentle movement discharges stress chemistry.
✏️ Simple exercise:
Do a tension circuit, such as:
- clench fists 5s release
- roll shoulders
- stretch jaw
- stand and shake out arms/legs
- brisk 1 minute walk
🌟 Benefits:
Lower arousal; fewer stress ‘echoes.’
💡 Tip for beginners:
If space is limited, do it seated micro-movements still count.
🔎 Quick reflect:
- What physical signs of tension did I notice today?
- How did releasing them affect my mood?
🗣️ Day 6: Language That Calms
🎯 Today’s win:
Use words to regulate your state.
📘 Learn the basics:
Self-talk guides your attention.
Saying “I can’t handle this” spikes cortisol (your body’s main stress hormone, which makes you feel tense and on edge).
Saying “I can handle the next step” steadies you and lowers that stress response.
✏️ Simple exercise:
Write a short calming script of 3–5 sentences that you can repeat in tough moments. Keep it practical and reassuring — for example:
“Breathe. One step now; the rest later.”
If you find it helpful, you can expand it into a longer version (up to 10–12 sentences), but focus on clarity and ease of recall.
Repeat your script whenever stress rises, until it becomes second nature.
🌟 Benefits:
Faster re-centering; kinder inner tone.
💡 Tip for beginners:
Put the script on your phone lock screen for a week.
🔎 Quick reflect:
Which words or phrases today lifted me up or dragged me down?
🧰 Day 7: Your Personal Regulation Plan
🎯 Today’s win:
Build a pocket toolkit you’ll actually use.
📘 Learn the basics:
A pre-chosen plan outperforms willpower in the heat of the moment.
✏️ Simple exercise:
Pick your top 3 tools from this week (e.g., 3 Breath Reset, 321 grounding, Reframe).
Write when/where you’ll use each.
🌟 Benefits:
Consistency leads to confidence under pressure.
💡 Tip for beginners:
Keep the list on a sticky note or notes app titled ‘In Case of Emotional Weather.’
🛠️ Look at what you’ve built:
- A reliable pause between emotion and action
- Grounding methods you can deploy anywhere
- Healthier inner language and flexible thinking
- A personalised regulation plan you can revisit
🔎 Your final reflection:
- Did you notice triggers earlier than before?
- Did you use at least one tool in the moment this week?
- Which tool felt most natural?
- Which needs more practice?
Well done! You’ve proven you can calm chaos and choose your response — that’s a huge step forward. Now it’s time to take the next leap: transforming that calm into self-kindness in Module 3.