Happy Monday and welcome to your mental health mini. This week you have me for a solo and we are learning 5 DBT skills in 5 minutes. Today we are going to do. A little bit of a crash course to DBT. So if you were in a position where you're like I. Know I'm struggling for my mental health but I don't know. What steps to take or what skills to?
Implement this episode. Is for you the first skill that I want to teach you is one of the most iconic skills of DBT that's called the tip skill tip stands for temperature, intense exercise, paste breathing, and paired muscle relaxation. It is a skill that you are using when you are really overwhelmed. You are feeling really high level of intensity of emotion. The first part of the tip skill is temperature. And what you're going to do for this is you need a bowl of ice
water. You're going to take a deep breath and submerge your face in the ice water until you need to take another breath. And you're going to continue to do this until your heart rate decreases, your breathing rate decreases, and you feel a little bit more calm. With intense exercise. When you go on a run or you're doing sprints, your body increases its heart rate.
As soon as you stop exercising, your body really quickly decreases your heart rate and it decreases your breathing rate because it can't sustain that level of output for a long period of time. So when we have anxiety or heart rate increases, our breathing rate increases.
So if you are having a panic attack and you do some sprints, your body will work to decrease its heart rate from that physical output and it'll bring it past that threshold that it was at with the anxiety or anger or whatever emotion it is you're experiencing. The first P and tip is paste breathe. So what you're going to do is you're going to inhale for two counts, you're going to hold for one count, exhale for three counts, hold for one count.
And the idea is to make your exhale slightly longer than your inhale. You're going to do this for a couple of minutes. And the final P and tip is progressive muscle relaxation. So you're going to pair this with your pace breathing. And as you inhale, you're going to clench your muscles further. You're going to hold for a minute and then you're going to exhale and release the tension in your muscles and you are then releasing that tension below
what it? What was that when you were anxious, angry, stressed, etcetera. The next goal I'm going to teach you is the STOP skill. You are using this when you are extremely emotionally distressed. Your actions and decisions are entirely being controlled by your emotions. Stop is another acronym. We're going to stop. We're going to take a step back. We're going to observe and proceed mindfully. The first thing you're doing is you're physically and mentally stopping.
You are physically stopping in whatever situation you are in and you are mentally stopping. The thought that you're having, you're going to take a step back. Ideally this is physical. If you are in a situation where you're having a panic attack, maybe you step out and go to the bathroom. If you are in an argument, you are leaving the argument. Next step is to observe after we are out of the situation that's bringing up this intense
emotion. Hopefully our distress goes down a bit and then we can kind of reflect on what's happening, what is going on in this argument, what is effective, what's not effective? If you're anxious, what was making me anxious? What is the actual threat here? And based on that analysis, we're going to proceed mindfully. We're going to make a decision that makes sense. That's the stop skill.
And if you were ever in a crisis, that's the skill I want you to remember because it's like the first step you take the next skill. As I was reflecting on the scale, I was like, this is what literally helped me become undepressed. And that is opposite action. So with opposite action, we are looking at what our emotions are telling us to do and we're doing the opposite so we can be as
effective as possible. Because if we ran away from every single thing that we were scared of, we would never be able to do anything in life. So to give you some examples of opposite actions for emotions that you we want to do the opposite of, we'll start with depression. Depression tells us to isolate. It tells us to withdraw. It tells us to lay in bed to avoid our responsibilities.
And what's funny is that if we do the opposite of that, if we'd go and engage with people, if we get out and about, if we'd fulfill our responsibilities, we feel better. Another common one is anxiety. Anxiety tells us to avoid because there's a threat, but anxiety doesn't always accurately interpret those threats. We blow them out of proportion. So we'll do the opposite and that long term will make that anxiety go away and decrease the
emotional intensity. The next skill we're going to learn is he check the fact skill. It's really simple, it's really effective, and any high stakes decision or emotional situation, you got to pull the skill out of your pocket and implement. What we are doing here is we are checking the level of emotional intensity. The caveat here is all emotions are valid, but the emotional intensity isn't always justified.
Even if you're having an insanely disproportionate response, the emotions are still valid. We still have to validate those. But then after we validated and said, OK, this makes sense that this is what's coming up for me, we say, is it effective and justified and proportionate for me to be this anxious about this or this, angry about this or this sad about this? And then that's where we're working to shift the emotion. We're accepting the emotions and then we're working to change them.
The last skill is cope ahead. So coping ahead is you are mentally walking through your worst case scenario and you are being intentional and planning every single coping skill that you would use to get through the situation. You're almost doing a mini exposure therapy. So if you are scared of flying, you are mentally like, OK, I'm pulling up to the curb at the airport. My heart rate is increasing. What am I going to do? I'm going to do some deep breathing.
I'm walking towards security now. It's kind of feeling hard to breathe. What am I going to do? I'm going to put a headphone in. I'm going to listen to some music you go through. The. Entire airport experience, you talk about what skills you would use at each point.
All of these skills that you are going to use, you're going to play on it. And then when you actually go through the situation, you actually get on your flight, you know exactly how you're going to cope with that worst case scenario, most intense emotional reaction possible. If you enjoyed this weeks mental health mini you can listen to the full episode. It is episode #1. 132 with yours
truly a link. To the full episode is in the show notes and as always, make sure to leave a review, subscribe, share with a friend or family member and follow at. At She Persisted podcast. Thanks for listening.