03/12/2025
🧠 Understanding Your Child’s Brain Through Guided Visualisation 🧠
One of the most powerful ways to help children understand their emotions is through imagery and guided visualisation. A simple analogy is to imagine the brain as a house with two important floors connected by stairs.🏠
✨ The Upstairs Brain
This is the calm, thoughtful part of the mind.
It helps children make good choices, solve problems, think things through, and show kindness. 🧠
🔥 The Downstairs Brain
This part reacts quickly.
It handles big feelings like fear, anger, frustration, and stress — and it does so in an instant, before thinking can catch up. 💥
Sometimes a child’s emotions become so strong that the downstairs brain takes over, and the stairs between the two levels stop working.
This is like “the lid flipping” — when the thinking part of the brain goes offline for a moment.
When that happens, children aren’t able to:
• stay calm
• make good decisions
• explain what they feel
• control their behaviour
• access empathy or reasoning
It’s not that they won’t… it’s that in that moment, they can’t.
🌈 How guided visualisation helps
Guided visualisation gives children a gentle, imaginative way to:
• understand what’s happening inside their brain
• reconnect the “stairs” between the emotional and thinking parts
• learn how to calm themselves
• practise noticing their feelings instead of being overwhelmed by them
• build a sense of control and confidence
When a child imagines soothing scenes, calming breaths, or safe places in their mind, the body responds. 🌊🌴🪐🌙
Their breathing slows.
Their muscles relax.
Their thinking brain becomes reachable again.
Visualisation helps bring the upstairs brain back online so children can feel clearer, steadier, and more able to make choices.✅
🌟 Why this matters
Helping children understand their inner world gives them the tools to manage overwhelming feelings.
It empowers them to recognise when their “lid might flip” and gives them practical, comforting methods to bring themselves back into balance.
✨ Want to explore simple tools that support your child’s emotional regulation?
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Have a look at our range of 5 Star rated guided audio sessions and visual printables—quick, calming, 10-minute tools designed to help children understand their feelings, steady their bodies, and reconnect with their upstairs brain.
Www.PositiveVibeTribeUK.com
Perfect for home, school, bedtime, or whenever those big emotions appear. 🫶🏼
Positive Vibe Tribe UK offers creative mindfulness tools and guided visualisations for children and families. Discover guided meditation audios, and printable activities that nurture emotional wellbeing and connection.
