Starting with verbs for when you keep your emotions on the inside. If you bottle up your feelings, you keep them inside instead of talking about them. It's this idea of putting your feelings inside a bottle and closing the lid.

Neil, it's not good to bottle up your feelings. You should really try and open up and talk about it.

Open up. That means you share your feelings openly and talk about them.

Well, it's great to see you opening up a bit, sharing your feelings.

Yeah, it feels really good to open up.

Are you holding back tears?

If you hold something back, it means you hesitate to do or say something. You can hold back tears or hold back from saying something.

Don't hold back. Let it all out.

Oops, shouldn't have said that. Now let's look at verbs for when you lose control of your emotions. Breakdown means you lose control of your emotions and start crying. We usually use it to talk about someone else.

Georgie, Neil was just talking about his dead dog and he broke down and he cried. I don't know what to do.

Blow up means lose emotional control in an angry way. We use blow up for explosions.

So imagine someone exploding with anger.

Yeah, he was sad, but now he just found out his favourite football team lost and he just blew up. He was so angry.

Don't freak out. I'll come and help.

Freak out means lose emotional control, but it's more flexible. You can freak out because of excitement. For example, I freaked out when I saw my favourite pop star on the street or because you're nervous. I freaked out when I was doing a presentation on the stage.

Georgie, I'm freaking out. What should we do?

Calm down. It's going to be fine.

Now verbs about regaining emotional control. Calm down is when your emotions start up here and you bring them down to a neutral level.

One, calm down. Take a deep breath.

Chill out is similar to calm down. It means relax.

I think we just need a holiday so we can really chill out and stop worrying about everything.

Remember, don't freak out. Just come back to BBC Learning English and we'll work on more phrasal verbs and how to use them. See you next time.