Knowledge of our brain and emotions allows us to face adversities and strengthen our skills as teachers.

Have you noticed a low mood in your students? Have you felt emotionally drained in your performance as a teacher? Have you seen a low academic performance in your students? In this article, essaycompany.org will tell you more information about academic performance.

The knowledge of our brain and our emotions allows us to face adversities and strengthen our skills as teachers.

Today's society lives an accelerated and individualized life with high levels of stress caused by work, economic problems, and social problems experienced daily.

Suppose we add to this the effects of confinement that have accentuated the problem and have impacted the personal, family, work, and even in the educational field. In that case, it ends up causing alterations, affectations, or damage to health and emotional well-being.

Although the pandemic has worsened the conditions in which we carry out our teaching, today, we have the opportunity to prepare ourselves and strengthen our neurological system with daily actions to take care of our integrity and to support our students.

Isolation, work overload, and fear of contagion should not be causes of emotional exhaustion. It is essential to approach these issues from a scientifically based perspective to take advantage of the individual's impact and development.

Knowledge about self-esteem, the brain, emotional management, and sustainable human development are the basis for building an emotionally intelligent and emotionally intelligent personality with balance. 

Emotional intelligence helps to understand how it can influence emotional states, which represents an advantage and an indispensable necessity in the educational field.

Emotional intelligence has reached such a level of development that it can be applied in an assertive and resilient manner in teachers' daily work to avoid failures in student learning due to a lack of self-esteem and self-efficacy.

That is why, in these times we live in, it is essential that the agents of education, especially teachers, have a training program that supports them to efficiently manage their emotions and those of their students in favor of learning.

Build a healthy self-esteem

The intelligent construction of emotions is based on: self-esteem, multiple intelligences, and emotional intelligence. These are three critical factors in understanding how the brain works and its impact on social relationships. 

Self-esteem comprises three dimensions and is directly related to the theory of multiple intelligences, particularly emotional intelligence, as a basis for recognizing one's cognitive abilities and the components of the self-efficacy model.

The three dimensions of self-esteem

In its most straightforward meaning, healthy self-esteem is the one that favors good psychological functioning and is a desirable attitude towards oneself with its three dimensions. 

Cognitive, emotional, and behavioral, i.e., people must learn to recognize what they think, feel, and do. 

Multiple intelligences

The multiple intelligences are: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. 

There is room for a ninth intelligence, existential intelligence since it is a unique characteristic of human beings and refers to the ability to ask interesting questions, "existential questions." This intelligence deals with the intangible, unlike the rest of the intellect.

Emotional intelligence

There are countless ways to understand emotional intelligence. Still, we can start from the ability to discern the information coming from emotions and their relationship with the environment, and based on this, to reason and solve problems efficiently. 

The self-efficacy model

The "social learning" perspective, which analyzes human behavior within the theoretical framework of triadic reciprocity, consists of personal, biological, and cognitive factors; behavior; and environmental influences. 

Thanks to the functioning of this triadic model, as human beings, we can develop various capacities:

• The capacity to symbolize.
• The ability to foresee.
• The vicarious power.
• The self-reflective capacity.
• The self-regulatory capacity.

Education, seen as a social act, is not exempt from these emotional factors. Therefore, teachers' adequate knowledge and management of emotions are indispensable to transfer emotional intelligence and sustainable human development in students.

An in-depth analysis and effective application strategies to build healthy self-esteem in the teaching practice can be found in the course's first unit, "Intelligent construction of emotions."

The emotional brain

The brain has a general structure and specific functioning to produce, translate and integrate emotions with different substances involved. 

Some basic emotions are fear, anger, sadness, happiness, and empathy; they occur at anatomical, physiological, and neurochemical levels. Thus, it is possible to say that it is possible to safeguard the emotional health of the brain.

How to control anger?

In emotions related to anger, which appear when we feel cheated, attacked, rejected, accused, humiliated, or frustrated, the hypothalamus realizes that something is not right, it manages to do so in just 300 milliseconds and then change the hormonal organization and determine at that moment whether to face the problematic situation or to prepare to flee. 

An increase in dopamine, noradrenaline, and vasopressin can be observed in this process. When we achieve a mature expression of these emotions, it can give a good result, as it makes us more competitive, more adaptive, and drives us to search for creative solutions. 

On the contrary, an immature expression of anger can lead us to manipulation to get what we want or desire. 

The recurrent presence of anger without knowing how to manage it can diminish work performance and reduce feelings in different areas. In areas as necessary as the family or a social group. 

In the same way, it can encourage intolerance to failure and show that our self-esteem is not entirely healthy. 

In another sense, the manifestation of anger can occur through aggressive or violent behavior. It is necessary to consider that losing one's temper has a time window between 25 and 30 minutes, a time in which the emotional modules are left without any control. 

In short periods, Worry and anger have positive results, making us more competitive. On the contrary, in periods longer than 90 minutes, hormonal systems are activated that can be detrimental to the brain.

How do I stay motivated?

Motivation is essential to manage our lives and to improve them. What we experience when we feel it ranges from feeling encouraged to start some new activity to the disappearance of that emotion in a short time due to the decrease of dopamine in our brains. 

Looking for motivations is a process that helps to keep us functional; all the reasons we experience activate brain regions related to attention and happiness because if we achieve what our cause proposes, we feel pleased about it. 

On the contrary, if we do not achieve what we planned, we feel sad or even angry, and let's remember that anger and happiness are practically the same neural networks that work. 

So motivation and frustration share anatomical and neural brain structures. 

By fulfilling our resolutions, we turn the brain into a habit so that neurons connect, making new pathways and establishing a new process that we cannot forget. It takes 28 to 30 days to create a new habit in our brain.

The application of knowledge about the brain and emotional management helps achieve internal balance and well-being at a social level.

The emotions of the teacher

Within positive psychology, personal strengths and positive emotions contribute to emotional well-being and serve as tools for personal life transformation. It results in practical advice for implementation in the educational environment.

Human virtues and personal strengths

With the birth of Positive Psychology, the occupation of psychology took a 180-degree turn, leaving the emphasis on affliction and suffering and making way for the promotion of well-being and human flourishing.

They give way to the scientific study of positive individual traits that can increase human happiness.

They started with a vast construct of six virtues. Still, They realized that there were shared traits among them, so they continued to deepen this research until they found more specific subdivisions of those traits that all people possess: personal strengths.

Positive emotions

The model of amplification and construction of positive emotions and its three sequential effects:

• Amplification: positive emotions amplify thinking and action tendencies.
• Construction: due to the amplification, the structure of personal resources to face difficult or problematic situations is favored.
• Transformation: this construction produces that the person becomes more creative, shows a more profound knowledge of situations, is more resistant to difficulties, and behaves better socially, thus reaching an "upward spiral," which means a personal transformation.

Every positive emotion will contribute to our well-being. And therefore, this positivity in feelings develops new knowledge, skills, relationships, and behaviors.

These changes do not happen immediately, for there will be a change in our conduct or behavior. It will be necessary to practice these emotions. This practice is called "action impulse."

Ten positive emotions are identified: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest in the world, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, wonder, and love.

Positive emotions are not simply the opposite of negative ones, but they achieve a cognitive change in our brain to learn to be more receptive, more resilient, more creative, more patient, etc. 

Therefore, we must learn to identify and experience them. In the third unit of the course, "Intelligent construction of emotions," you will learn in-depth about positive emotions. 

Sustainable human development

One purpose of human development is to balance the inner world and the outer world. For this purpose, emotional ecology has been defined, its principles and its relation to the educational system, and the sustainability of such development. 

Principles of emotional ecology

Emotional ecology promotes a model of a sustainable and balanced person about their emotions. That is to say, a person who takes responsibility for managing their exciting world to build authentic happiness. 

It is about managing our emotional energy creatively and lovingly so that it serves to improve us as people, increase the quality of all our relationships, and respect and care for our world. 

We must understand this proposal as a worldview or philosophy of life that allows us to properly manage our emotions to take care of ourselves individually and collectively, both in our inner and outer worlds.

Triple bottom line

An international standardization says that to speak of sustainability. Three conditions must be met in the decisions taken: economically viable, socially just, and environmentally correct.

It is known as the Triple Bottom Line or triple bottom line. Any action must comply with this tripod: economically viable, socially fair, and environmentally correct to be called sustainable.

Conclusion

To the extent that, as individuals and especially as education professionals, we assimilate the proposal of an intelligent construction of emotions. It will be possible to strengthen the teacher's integrity and teaching process.

Thus, we will impact improving the academic performance of students and encourage them to adopt emotional intelligence for the benefit of their integral formation, essential to face the adversity that the pandemic has brought.

In idea, you can find the course "Intelligent construction of emotions." It offers a series of clear and simple strategies to put them into practice immediately and thus improve in all areas of the person. 

These strategies seek to reduce the severe effects of the current social reality through actions based on scientific foundations on the brain's functioning.