The boy ran through the crowded Brussels airport terminal faster than the late O.J. Simpson on the football field and in his Hertz commercials. Shortly after the boy passed by my husband and me, he must have tripped.

We heard him land hard on the shiny airport floor. He let out a loud, heart-wrenching howl, drawing glances from my husband and me and other nearby travelers. We saw a woman – probably his mother — rush to his side and comfort him.

Even though the boy’s booming sobs continued, the situation seemed under control. So my husband and I kept walking toward the long security lines to begin our journey home.

While passing a mother and a young daughter, I overheard the mother tell the daughter in English, “You can tell he hasn’t yet learned to regulate his emotions.”

Yes, the mother was using this incident as a teachable moment to explain the benefits of emotional self-regulation. Wow, I thought, we’ve come a long way! More of us are embracing that we humans are emotional beings, which also entails dealing with the implications. This is so much healthier for us humans than trying to suppress our emotions and feelings, which was de rigueur for decades, maybe centuries.

Considering we needed to go through airport security,  I couldn’t linger to hear the mother’s lesson. Who knows if she’s a teacher as well as a parent familiar with the social-emotional learning (SEL) movement growing in many U.S. schools. (For more about this, check out my Forbes Coaches Council article Want to see emotional intelligence at work? Students can lead the way.) Or maybe she was exposed to the value of emotional intelligence in another setting. At any rate, she seemed prepared to reinforce two key lessons on this topic:

1) be self-aware about your emotions and feelings and

2) intentionally take charge of your thoughts, emotions, and actions, that is, practice emotional self-management.

As for my husband and me, we quickly discovered we had multiple opportunities to use our own emotional self-regulation techniques.  It took us more than two hours to go through security and then the much longer immigration control line. 

In the spirit of using teachable moments, here’s the five proven techniques for emotional self-regulation we used:  

• Reach inside yourself to breathe and move. Pausing frequently to take deep breaths helped quiet my nervous system. Considering we were in a tight space and needed to stay there, I didn’t have any opportunities to walk away, sit, or exercise (other than flexing my muscles and walking in place), which are also effective practices. Nor could I create a space, either figuratively or literally, between what I was experiencing and deciding what action to take next. We were stuck in this situation. Yet, taking intentional deep breaths is an effective way to calm yourself.

• Label. I also could give this experience a name  – a yucky end to an amazing vacation. The value of labeling, that is, naming what’s happening, is that it gives you a small sense of feeling in charge. That’s because labeling puts a brake on your brain’s thoughts of impending danger and disaster. Note that labeling is easier for adults than children because we adults tend to know more words. (And no, I didn’t even try to challenge myself to label with a French word. That would have made me feel worse about my limited French vocabulary.)

• Reappraise. Shifting my focus to neutral and positive perspectives helped me reduce the intensity of my negative feelings about the long lines. To practice cognitive reappraisal, I first commended myself for not yet buying Belgian chocolates as I had planned. Why? Because they would have either melted in the heat of the line, or, I might have been tempted to eat them all and get a stomachache. And as the minutes continued to tick and the anxiety of some fellow passengers notably increased, my husband and I also congratulated ourselves for getting to the airport three-and-a-half hours early for our international flight to Dulles – the first time ever we had allowed this much time (and ended up using almost all of it as we arrived at our gate just minutes before boarding began). These thoughts elicited slight feelings of accomplishment and helped us periodically reappraise the negative feelings associated with the long line.

• Distract. After taking a number of baby steps with our fellow passengers through the passport line, many of us started chatting with each other. Commiserating about our miserable Saturday morning experience gave us a positive sense of belonging – even if it was being part of an unlucky group – and helped lessen the threat levels we were feeling. And when newcomers to the line tried to muscle their way to the front, we long-standers resisted using our voices, bodies, and luggage, which also gave us a sense of purpose. We were all in this together.

• Take advantage of the kindness of strangers. About 45 minutes into our wait on the passport line, an airport worker arrived to distribute a small bottle of water to each of us. He quickly moved through the line, which was helpful. I barely had time to register the oddity of seeing someone drinking from a water bottle past security but before any shopping opportunities until I had a bottle in my own hand. His act of kindness was refreshing in multiple ways.

We never learned what caused the long delays. Fortunately, once we cleared immigration, we enjoyed two uneventful flights home. That allowed us to avoid reaching into our depleted reserve of emotional self-regulation the rest of this long travel day. And what a good feeling to get home!

May your travels go smoother and may you practice sound emotional self-regulation in your settings too.