4 Distresse Tolerance Skills Everyone Should Know

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this 10 minute ish quick start guide to distress tolerance. I AM your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. For those of you who are unfamiliar with distress tolerance, it means accepting that you can have a rich and meaningful life even with adversity. We are going to have problems in life, but that doesn't mean we can't have a rich and meaningful life. And anyway, you know, you can have setbacks and still have multiple other areas of your life going well. Distress tolerance also means shelving the issue temporarily to allow your stress response system or your HPA axis to calm down so you can think more clearly about your options when your HPA axis is activated. When you're in that fight or flee mode, you tend to have tunnel vision. It's more difficult to see all of your options because your body is focused on survival, fight or flee. So distress tolerance gives you time to kind of let some of that adrenaline bleed off, if you want to think about it that way, so you can have a clearer picture of what's going on and make more informed choices. And distress tolerance also means choosing to use your energy for things that you can control. You using your energy. Getting upset over things that you have no control over is not going to help you out. You want to figure out, okay, I only have so much energy. What is important for me to use that energy on, based on what is important to my values, to my goals, and to the people that I love in my life. The two analogies I use for distress tolerance are A, B and. And rain. Let's start with rain. Rain you can't control. I would love to be able to control it, but you can't. When it rains. Sometimes you are frustrated because you just washed your car, you're having a good hair day, or you can't go running. You know, those are my three biggies with the rain. But you can't control it. So being upset and poochy about the fact that it's raining is just draining your energy. There's nothing you can do about it. Distress tolerance would say, okay, let's do something different. Let's turn our attention to something else for the moment until we can think more clearly about either the positive aspects of rain or what we can do instead. And the bee is the other analogy I use, assuming that you are not deathly allergic to bees. If a bee lands on your arm, your initial reaction is probably to want to swat it off. You don't want it sitting on your arm. Unfortunately, if you do that, it's likely to sting you because it's going to feel threatened itself. With distress tolerance, it's like letting that bee sit on your arm and fly away when it is good and ready because eventually it's going to get bored and fly away and the bee is not threatened. You're not risking getting, getting stuck, stung. You know, it's a win win on all circumstances. If you tolerate that distress, you're less likely to get hurt and you're more able to use your energy for other things. Those are the two examples I give for distress tolerance. The question is, or the next question is why or what do you do about it? So let's talk about distress tolerance with some things that most people have experienced. Covid, for example, our lockdowns. There are a lot of people that are super stressed out. They're stressed out about the virus. Well, you can't control everything about the virus. You can control your exposure to it. You can control how you behave. There are certain things within this situation that you can control and others that you can't. Getting all riled up being because your governor does something that you don't like. You know, aside from sending letters or maybe if there's a protest, participating in that, you know, there's not much that you can do to change that situation. What can you do? Instead of focusing on the things that you can't do or you don't have control over, focus on the things that you do. Another example of how to use distress tolerance is after a job interview. If you go in and you're like, oh, I knocked that one out of the park. But then you have to wait for a week or two weeks or sometimes months in the case of universities to figure out if you actually got the job. There's that little voice in your head that you know, wants to know and is stressing over, did I get it? Didn't I get it? What's happening? That is not an effective use of energy. You are not going to be able to find out the answer any faster than those people are willing to give it to you. Same thing with medical tests. When you go into the doctor and you know something's wrong and they run a battery of tests, they rarely come back in 15 minutes or an hour. It's usually we'll let you know by the end of the week. So you may go home and be thinking about, you know, what are the tests going to say, what happens if? And you can get stuck in your own head in this world of what ifs and catastrophic thinking and really drain your energy and make yourself feel anxious and miserable. Distress tolerance skills and activities would help you move your focus to those things in life that you can control. Those things in life that make you happy instead of focusing on the unknown, which, you know, like I said, you can get stuck in catastrophic thinking. Which takes me to. If you have a teenager who has recently started driving, which I do, I've got two of them, yeah, they leave the house and I could sit around and stress incessantly about if they're going to get into a wreck or what's going to happen, or I can turn my attention to what I can control. Recognizing that they've had driver's ed, I've driven with them, yada, yada, yada, and I can't control what they do when they're driving. And eventually at some point along the way they are going to be independent drivers. So if the state says they can do it now, then I need to figure out a way to learn how to tolerate that anxiety when they are not, when they are, when they are out driving. So what do you do about it? And this is where that quick start, start stuff comes in, thought stopping. And this is as simple as just what a six year old does when they don't want to hear something that they don't want to hear. You know, you can put, you can do it actually. But as a grown up, we probably don't want to put our fingers in our ears and go, la la, la, la la la la. But that's basically what thought stopping is. You can, if you start thinking about something, you can tell yourself, no, I am not going to think about that and intentionally figure out something else to think about. You can't stop thinking about something and just have a void there and expect to be successful. So think about something else. You can start singing a song, counting your ABCs, doing your multiplication tables, or thinking about what to fix for dinner. I don't care what you think about, but tell yourself, no, I'm not going to think about that thing. Instead, instead I'm going to think about this thing over here. Activities are another thing that you can do to help you tolerate distress. Now remember, we are not suppressing this, whatever is causing you distress and ignoring it and pretending it doesn't exist forever. What we're doing is we're putting it on a shelf until we can get into what Linehan called our wise mind, until we don't have so much tunnel vision or adrenaline, or until we get to a point where we can find some resolution or do something about it like when those tests come back. So the second thing is activities. And you can do anything that makes you happy. If it's going on a run, watching a movie, reading a book, contributing is helpful. Sometimes getting out of your own head and offering to help somebody else with something can help you focus on them instead of all of the what ifs that are going through your mind. And you can do any sort of activity that promotes the opposite emotion. You want to do things that promote calm, happiness, curiosity. What are those things for you? It may require you do something active. When I'm stressed out, when I've got that HPA axis activated, it's hard for me to just sit still and calmly watch the birds and appreciate them. I need to do something activ active. But you know what is active and helpful to turn your attention for me may not be the same for you. Identify five things that you can do when you get stressed out that help you turn your attention. The third one is guided imagery. And you can use this as guided imagery for success. You can envision whatever the issue is resolving optimally. Or you can just use guided imagery to take a mental vacation. You know, go to that relaxing place that you dream of or you know, that cabin, for me it's a cabin in the woods. For some people it's a beach vacation or you know, a boat in the middle of the ocean. Whatever it is for you, close your eyes and use all of your senses to get as three dimensional as possible. What are five things that you see? What are four? Four things that you hear, what are three things that you smell, what are two things that you feel? And maybe what's one thing that you can taste but that really helps you get a three dimensional picture. So you're not, it's not just look like looking at a painting. It helps you immerse yourself in the experience. And if you're focused on identifying all those things, guess what? You're not thinking about whatever is stressing you out. You're not going to stay in this guided imagery place forever. But if you give your body 5 to 10 minutes to focus on that, that promotes the release of relaxation chemicals as well as stops feeding the stress areas of your brain. So you're starting to relax a little bit. When you come back from that mental vacation, you, you may have a clearer mind. I mean think about on a much smaller scale. If you've been trying to think of lyrics to a song or somebody's name, or you're doing a crossword puzzle and you know the you know the answer, but you can't think of it right. Then if you sit there and really try to focus on it and sort of bang your head into the wall trying to figure out what it is, it's not probably going to come to you. But if you move on, turn your attention to something else, a lot of times, a few minutes later, it'll poof, pop right into your brain. That is the benefit of, you know, altering, because when you're sitting there trying to figure it out and you can't, you start to get frustrated. That HPA axis or stress response system starts to activate, you get tunnel vision, which means you can't see all of the other options out there, and it's harder to come up with that answer. And finally, number four is focus on your strengths or successes. I like both of those. Ss. Focus on challenges that you have overcome in your past, recognizing that you've been through difficult times before and emerged stronger. Identify what strategies you've used during those difficult times and what resources that you currently have that you can use in order to deal with those distress. So those techniques you can think of with the mnemonic device tags, T is for thought stopping, A is for activities, G is for guided imagery, and S is for strengths and successes.