part0034

The Distress Tolerance Skills taught as part of DBT can enable you to survive stressful situations without harming yourself. They may not provide you with strategies to help you in the long run but can help you learn skills to manage yourself successfully when times get tough. Strategies you can apply to get through intense stress include:

Stress can cause you to get stuck in rumination and worry. Indulging your mind and body in a task that diverts your attention and prevents you from thinking about whatever is stressing you, at least for some time, can provide you with enough time to think about the stressor and ponder over how to get through it. Call a friend, work out, read your favorite book, or watch a funny movie to distract your mind from the stress.

Remember to be gentle and kind to yourself. It is common to be hard on yourself, especially during times of stress. You judge your abilities and feel like you are unable to handle your problems. Incorporating soothing activities in your everyday life can help you handle times of stress and tension. Listen to soothing music, bake cookies, watch a beautiful sunset, or eat your favorite food to soothe your body.

Following the distress tolerance module requires you to practice relaxation, for both the mind and the body. Try all the activities that will calm you. Take part in relaxation exercises or have a hot shower. Avoid performing multiple tasks at the same time, and try focusing on the current activity only. Form a soothing image in your mind.

Take a paper and pen and make two lists stating the advantages as well as the disadvantages of a stressful situation. Pen down how stress can damage you if you do not care about it. Think of all the ways in which stress will help you evolve and grow as a person. Once you are done, go through the lists once again to motivate yourself.

Observe your breathing pattern a little more closely. Try deep breathing or count your breaths to increase the focus of your mind. This can help you calm down and be more attentive.

These days, it is quite easy to fall into a rabbit hole and lose sight of the most important things in your life, all thanks to consistent stress. Keep in mind that in any moment of distress, you have control, even if this means letting go of things over which you have no influence. It may not be possible for you to solve every single problem in your life, but with DBT distress tolerance skills, you can definitely manage your frustrations much more confidently.

Do not let stress get the best of you!

There is no overnight solution to managing worry, but there is one that actually works: DBT. The troubling thoughts might linger for a very long time, but you can easily develop a Teflon mind. It only requires a bit of effort.

Recognize that the thoughts that are worrying you are nothing but thoughts. It may take time to develop this skill, but it is possible to adopt it relatively quickly. It is the negative emotions that are trickier to handle. These two may gang up on you; thoughts that are negative leading to emotions that are negative and vice versa; trapping you in an awful loop.

When you lose yourself in worrying thoughts, you have a tendency to forget your body. Try to recognize the physical sensations that follow your emotions such as sweating, shallow breaths and muscle tightening.

Get a paper and a pen and start making a list. Recall every little thought that crosses your mind when you are worried. Note down any physical manifestation that comes by during a stressful event. This is what you call finding the canaries in the coal mine. Notice what actions you take when you are worried (such as procrastination, drinking alcohol, etc.). Familiarize yourself with these actions, so that the next time worry strikes, you know what you are dealing with.

Why should you avoid avoiding? Because you should prove your worries wrong. If you keep avoiding triggers, it is just going to keep the anxieties alive in you. Worrying and then realizing that your concern was silly produces a phenomenon called “extinction,” and the worry eventually stops.

On the other hand, persistently avoiding what you feel makes you believe these things are real and that fearing them is the right thing to do. This is what you call “reinforcement” and it only strengthens the worry.

Whenever your mind signals you to avoid a certain situation, recall that this is wrong. Allow yourself to appreciate the moment by considering it a chance to fight your fear and get away from your worries. Move your focus from the disturbing thoughts to the real world.

Do you at times look back at a moment of worry and think, “wow that really freaked me out?”

This is because you failed to realize this at the moment it occurred. Worries tend to sneak up on a person, and as you undergo cognitive fusion, the worries overtake you. This urges you to go and make bad decisions. The best way to bypass this problem and all the fuss it creates is by identifying the increasing anxiety before it is too late.

By now, you will have made your own canaries list. Great. Now what you should do is begin identifying these things as soon as they happen. The sooner you identify these thoughts, the action impulses, and the accompanying physical manifestations, the quicker you will be able to quell them.

Have you ever found yourself swamped by troubling thoughts about a certain problem and a bigger trouble strikes you? This newly emerged problem forces you to forget about your past tensions and use whatever energy you have left in worrying about it. Notice how you are able to shift your attention. Doing it on purpose is, however, the tricky part.

The aim of this skill is to help you develop a connection with your feelings and experiences. It will help you learn how to remain in the current moment and establish a better connection with your life instead of wasting your energy on troubling thoughts. So, whenever you get stuck in a stressful or worrying situation, remember to focus only on the problem at hand while avoiding any worrying thoughts which may distract you.

Channel all your attention to living the current experience. If the worry is making you distracted, remember this point, and think only about the actual problem and make efforts to deal with it only.

The first thing to do to tend to your emotions is to learn how to identify worry. Once you have recognized that you are stuck in troubling circumstances, observe your body closely. Look for any signs related to your heightened emotions. You may notice your heart pounding, your muscles tensing up, or your stomach sinking. Whatever you feel, pay close attention to it.

It is possible for your mind to divert its attention to any other topic. You may also feel like drowning in the pool of worries, which diverts your attention far from the actual problem. As soon as you find yourself in this situation, get yourself together. Try diverting all of your attention back to the body and focusing on the actual problem. Do not get involved in thoughts which are troublesome. You only need to notice them and keep returning your mind back to the body over and over again. Label your emotions, whether they are fear, anxiety, irritation, sadness, or shame. Remind yourself it is normal to feel how you are feeling right now, and your emotions are not going to kill you.

In short, examine, admit, and mark. The worrisome feelings will eventually dissipate. It is a skill, and it takes some time. But it definitely works. When you get good at it, it will be your superpower against worry.

This may seem like advanced Kung Fu, so take it slow. In the end, this skill is what’s going to take you from being a chronically worried individual to being a person who seldom worries. It is a mild form of “exposure therapy” and revolves around the concept of “facing your fears.”

Opposite action helps your brain figure out which people and places are not dangerous, hence, do not need to be avoided. Once your brain is able to establish this connection, your fears start diminishing. You stop avoiding people or things and gain the freedom in life to do whatever you want and go wherever you like.

Take a moment to answer the following questions:

Do you worry about things that do not pose a real or immediate threat?

Do you worry so much that it becomes difficult to enjoy things?

Are you more likely to be unhappy than happy?

Are you unwilling to take reasonable risks?

Does worry interfere with your day-to-day activities?

If you answer no to the questions above, you are likely a healthy person. So, keep doing whatever you are doing because you are only sensitive to real threats. You will take every reasonable step to live a happy life.

However, if the answer to most of the above questions is no, you are suffering from worry. It is necessary to take the steps mentioned above to take the unnecessary burden off your shoulders and start living.

Unfortunately, there is no magic pill that is going to relieve you or your worries overnight. Following DBT in a stepwise approach, as mentioned above can, however, significantly impact your life and make it easier for you.

DBT is a powerful method of thought control, which teaches you the necessary skills to deal with unpleasant thoughts and situations that lead to suffering. Through acceptance and change strategies, people suffering from PTSD can learn how to:

Keep themselves aware of the triggers that cause negative reactivity

Practice self-soothing activities to calm their body and soul

Learn intolerance skills to deal with uncomforting feelings, situations, and thoughts

The DBT distress tolerance acronym ACCEPTS can help you manage PTSD. This skill stands for Activities, Contributing, Comparisons, Emotions, Push away, Thoughts, and Sensations. These techniques have been specially designed to manage your emotions and get over your past.

Engage in an activity. This can be any activity as long as it is healthy. Read a book, go for a walk, make some jam, or do the dishes. Anything that keeps you busy and your mind off the negative emotions associated with the past will help. When you are done, pick up a new activity. In this way, you can have a highly productive day without bringing back any haunting memories of the past.

Do something kind for another person. Offering help can relieve you of your emotional stress in a lot of ways. An act of service is also a type of activity which will keep you distracted and take your mind off the problem. In addition to this, contributing will help you feel good about yourself. You are not always required to do something big. Help someone cook dinner, bake cookies for a relative, or offer to mow your neighbor’s lawn. Each of these activities will keep you from remembering your misery.

It is time to put your life in perspective. Was there ever a time when you faced more difficult challenges than you are facing now? Maybe not. Maybe this is actually the most intense situation and emotion that you have ever experienced. In this case, compare yourself to another person. Has that person suffered more than you? Are you at home, comfortably lying in your bed after having a delicious dinner while in another part of the world someone is searching for leftover food in the trash and a place to sleep after suffering a natural disaster?

The purpose of this exercise is not to increase distress or the emotional pain of your current condition. Instead, use it to add a new perspective to what you are currently experiencing.

You have the ability to invoke the opposite emotion of what you are feeling right now. Meditating for 15 minutes can help your anxiousness too. If a past trauma is making you depressed, watch a comedy movie. Adding a bit of the opposite emotion can help reduce the intensity of PTSD.

If you feel like you are unable to deal with your past just yet, it is okay to push it away. Throw the problem out of your mind for a short duration. But how is this possible? By distracting yourself with other thoughts, activities, or mindfulness. You can set a time to come back and address your problems. Assure yourself that it will be addressed and stay calm in the interim.

Replace your anxious, negative thoughts with activities that occupy most of your mind, for example, reciting the alphabet backward or enjoying a Sudoku puzzle. These distractions will help prevent self-destructive behaviors and reliving the traumatic events until you achieve emotional stability.

Make use of your five senses to soothe yourself during times of stress. A self-soothing activity can be anything such as taking a warm bath with relaxing music and a lavender bath bomb, eating your favorite food, or tuning in to a good TV show. Anything appealing to your senses can help you cope with PTSD for the time being.

These Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills can help you tolerate PTSD until you are able to resolve the problem once and for all. They can control the symptoms of PTSD and allow you to focus more on the present with no fragments of your traumatic past. While the ACCEPTS skills will enable you to focus on your current life, other modules of DBT, such as group therapy and interpersonal effectiveness, will motivate you to enjoy life at a basic level.