Welcome to our Self-Regulation series, where we will be covering the ins and outs of self-regulation, the ways it can benefit students and address a range of challenging situations, and how we can begin to teach some self-regulation skills and practices to our students. We are starting by looking at the concept of self-regulation itself, because our idea of what self-regulation looks like can be shaped by our goals and desired outcomes for students learning to practice it. 

We hope to establish frameworks for self-regulation that are first and foremost considering the needs of and benefits to the students practicing it. 

Students who can see the way the process of self-regulation benefits them in their own lives, rather than as a mere compliance tool, will have much more reason to revisit those skills in crucial situations later in life.

So let’s get on the same page about what self-regulation isn’t and what it is.

Calming down can be a major component of many self-regulation processes. But while being able to calm down may be hugely valuable in certain situations, it can miss the point of what we are hoping to achieve. 

Calming down is sometimes a byproduct of finding a way to process the thing that is bothering us, but we often cannot simply choose to calm down otherwise we already would be! 

So even though calming down might be a goal associated with self-regulation, the much more important point of focus is finding sources of dysregulation and strategies for navigating them safely and with minimal discomfort. 

Insisting students calm down without a roadmap for doing so is like asking them to make a three-pointer without explaining how to shoot a basketball!

At its core, self-regulation is a tool we use because high-emotion or sensory situations can feel deeply distressing and uncomfortable and can be hugely distracting from what we are trying to accomplish. 

We deploy self-regulation tools because the more we can address sources of distraction and discomfort in a way that brings us relief the sooner we can focus on the things that are really important to us. 

Self-regulation can take lots of different forms from directly addressing the source of discomfort to having items or techniques that help to cope with it, but a shared theme is identifying situations where one might feel dysregulated and seeking ways to mitigate that problem.

Because self-regulation can be one way of proactively addressing harmful or challenging behavior, it can be all too easy to think of self-regulated behavior and good behavior as synonymous. 

While it is always wonderful when students do feel able to address some of those challenging behaviors via self-regulation, it is also a mistake to treat behavior as the measure of whether self-regulation is successful! 

It does a disservice to students who are able to avoid “disruptive” or harmful behavior but still struggle with self-regulation, because their challenges become framed in a way that reflects the inconvenience to the teacher as opposed to the effect on the student’s well-being. 

Likewise, self-regulation is a valuable tool to learn even if it doesn’t fully address particular behaviors. So while it’s great to celebrate improvement with behavior, remember that self-regulation is first and foremost about the ways students feel they can use those skills to improve their lives and wellbeing.

The reason we need self-regulation is that we sometimes find ourselves in environments or situations where our body feels dysregulated. 

Whether we are overwhelmed by a specific sensory input or in a highly emotion situation, self-regulation can help make the tension or pain of those situations more manageable so we can continue to focus on the things we need to focus on. 

While we cannot always fully achieve our goal of a totally healthy and/or productive headspace in every situation, every step we can take toward those goals in a tough situation can help prevent outcomes like meltdowns or burnout. 

When we are considering the ways we want to prioritize learning self-regulation skills, a great place to start is focusing on those things that emphasize a healthy mental space first and foremost and the ability to be productive in whatever you want to work on if possible.

We hope these broad examples offer a sense of the most helpful mindset for approaching teaching and building on self-regulation skills. 

These tools are that much harder to use and internalize when we focus on some of the inconvenient ways that lack of self-regulation might manifest rather than the root causes of dysregulation and ways we can mitigate those. 

The more we can focus on self-regulation as a means of addressing discomfort and loss of focus that serves each of us as individuals in whatever way we find most valuable, the more we can convey that we are working together for our students’ benefit and work on this challenge as a team.

We hope to see you in Part 2 where we will discuss examples of self-regulation in education, and until then if you want us to cover a particular component of self-regulation or share you experience teaching or learning about it then we would love to hear from you! Just drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com and we will see you next Monday!