Understanding our Emotions

As part of the IE Mental Health Awareness Month, this practical and interactive session invites students to better understand their emotional world and develop tools to relate to their emotions in a healthier way.

In a fast-paced environment where we move from one stimulus to another, emotions often remain unprocessed. This workshop will focus on building emotional awareness as a first step towards emotional regulation.

The session will cover:

• Emotional identification as the basis for regulation (“name it to tame it”)

• The role and function of pleasant and unpleasant emotions

• Emotional validation (for ourselves and for others) as a key pillar of emotional regulation

• An introduction to self-compassion

• Practical regulation techniques, with a focus on distress tolerance, including:

  • Managing anxiety (grounding and exposure)

  • Radical acceptance for situations that cannot be changed

  • Working with demotivation through task breakdown, values clarification, and self-reward

This workshop is designed to be practical, reflective, and accessible, offering students concrete tools they can apply in their daily academic and personal lives.