Distress Tolerance Flashcards
Sources: https://www.verywellmind.com/distress-tolerance-2797294#:~:text=Distress%20tolerance%20is%20a%20person's,incident%20without%20making%20it%20worse.
What is Distress Tolerance
Distress tolerance is a person’s ability to manage actual or perceived emotional distress.
What are the types of Distress Tolerance techniques?
Distress Tolerance techniques include: Distraction Improving the Moment Pros and Cons Radical Acceptance Self Soothing Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
What is Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and how is it related to Distress Tolerance?
Dialectical behavior therapy can provide you with skills that are directly focused on increasing distress tolerance.
It is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) that incorporates mindfulness meditation, interpersonal effectiveness, emotional regulation, and distress tolerance skills
What are some of the skills that improve Distress Tolerance?
Getting Active - going for a walk, bike ride, basketball
Contributing - Go outside of yourself by focusing your attention on helping others
Comparing - Think of a time when you were even more emotionally distressed than you are now. Give yourself praise and credit for getting through that crisis—and for doing all you can to get through this one.
Triggering opposite emotions - Ask yourself, “What’s the opposite feeling to the distress I’m feeling now?” Then do something to make you feel that opposite way.
Putting your body in charge - where your body leads, your emotions will follow. So get going! Run up and downstairs. If you’re inside, go outside. If you’re outside, go inside.
What is the impact of poor Distress Tolerance?
People who have low distress tolerance tend to become overwhelmed by stressful situations and may sometimes turn to unhealthy or even destructive ways of coping with these difficult emotions.
What constitutes a healthy Distress Tolerance?
With a healthy level of DT, you can:
- Prepare in advance to cope with intense emotions
- Enjoy a more positive long-term outlook for coping with them
- Reduce unhealthy coping strategies and impulsive behavior
What are some of the challenges of DT?
Biological Influences and distress intolerant beliefs can make it challenging to develop a healthy level of DT.
How do Biological Influences influence DT?
Biological Influences such as brain chemistry can make it more difficult for some to develop and maintain healthy DT.
What are Distress Intolerant Beliefs?
Holding distress intolerant beliefs can make it more difficult to cope with emotionally upsetting events. (ex. “I hate this feeling”, “This feeling will never go away”, “This is bad”)
This can result in distress escape behaviors such as withdrawal, avoidance, and sometimes self-harm.
What are effective methods of the Distraction method?
Go for a walk Shave/Trim Beard Clean Say the alphabet skipping every other letter Call someone (Justin, Spill) Watch a funny video on Youtube Read a book
What is the Distraction technique?
The distraction technique involves temporarily doing something that takes your mind off of your feelings of distress.
It is important that you return to the situation and feelings around that situation when emotions are as strong. Journaling can be helpful with this.
What is the Improving the Moment technique?
The Improving the Moment technique involves using a variety of strategies to help make the stressful situation more tolerable. (ex. looking for the silver lining, taking a break to do something pleasant, visualizing a relaxing scene)
What is the Pros and Cons technique?
The Pros and Cons technique is thinking about the potential pros and cons of either tolerating the distress or not tolerating it.
What is Radical Acceptance?
Radical Acceptance is just accepting things as they are and letting go of feelings of regret, anger, or bitterness.
What is the Self Soothing technique?
Self Soothing is finding ways to calm yourself and keep negative emotions in check is an important part of building distress tolerance. Different sensory experiences that involve sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch can all be used to self-soothe during difficult moments.
