About This Handout

This handout is about self-regulation in general, and can be applied for all children, youth and adults.

For specific information about sensory processing disorders and self-regulation, please see our accompanying handout on “Sensory Processing Disorders: Guide for Families”, available from https://www.drcheng.ca.

What is Self-Regulation?

Self-regulation is:

· The ability to attain, maintain and change our alertness appropriately for a task or situation

· It involves many neurological connections in the brain, including all the sensory systems

As Goldilocks showed, we don’t want too much, nor too little stimulation. We want ‘just enough’ stimulation, so we can be ‘just right’.

Self-regulation can also apply to getting just enough internal or emotional stimuli as well, and hence, in the psychotherapy literature, it has also been defined as:

The process of consciously managing different internal states by:

1. experiencing them as they come up,

2. expressing what you are experiencing,

3. consciously postponing dealing with traumatic material or overwhelming aspects of feelings, and

4. retrieving part of what you have contained when you are better able to manage it.