Category: For Emotion Regulation
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Why Experiencing Negative Feelings During Mindfulness Can Be Good For Distress Tolerance
My experience teaching mindfulness as a clinician As a mental health clinician, I often provide mindfulness training as part of a larger treatment protocol. Mindfulness is beneficial in a variety of mental health challenges, including anxiety, depression, emotion regulation, among others. My patients usually enjoy mindfulness practices quite a bit. They find the experience to…
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Goal-Based Assertive Communication Using Emotion Regulation Skills
Different communication styles How might you define communicating effectively? Some people might define effective communication as ensuring that you convey your desires to the other person (i.e., getting what you want). However, aggressive communication, which focuses on your own needs rather than the other person, may affect your relationship with others. What if you were…
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Three Components Of The Emotional Response And Skills To Regulate Them
A primer on Emotion Regulation Emotion regulation is our ability to change the trajectory of an emotional response based on our behaviours. Simply put, it’s our ability to change how we feel using strategies we have in our emotion regulation toolkit to make us feel better quicker. For example, being able to bring ourselves back…
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Ways To Increase Distress Tolerance In Emotion Regulation
What is distress tolerance and why is it important? Distress tolerance is referred to as “the perceived capacity to withstand negative emotional and/or other aversive states, such as physical discomfort” (Leyro et al., 2010). Simply put, distress tolerance is our ability to handle negative experiences in a way that is consistent with our goals. Distress…
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Seven Ways To Get Into Wise Mind
Introduction In dialectal behaviour therapy, ‘Wise Mind’ refers to a state of mind that honours both what our emotions (Emotion Mind) and what our logic (Reasonable Mind) is telling us. Through wise mind, we reduce the risk of neglecting important components of ourselves and invalidating our feelings. Moreover, wise mind allows us to move towards…
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The Importance of Self-Validation in Emotion Regulation
Introduction With others, we are often best friends, cheerleaders, and confidantes. With ourselves, we are often our own worst enemies. “I hate myself for feeling this way”, “I’m not being a good partner/friend”, “I don’t know why I am acting like this – I feel so selfish”. There are common thoughts that I’m sure most…
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The ‘What’ And ‘How’ of Mindfulness In Emotion Regulation
Introduction Mindfulness is being intentionally aware of the present moment and its experience, in a non-judgmental manner. When I was initially introduced to the concept of mindfulness, I could read this sentence over and over again and still not really grasp the meaning. I still kind of don’t. It’s hard for words to adequately describe…
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Distraction As An Emotion Regulation Skill
When Distraction Can Be Helpful For Emotion Regulation Distraction can sometimes get a bit of a bad rep because it sounds like you are avoiding something rather than figuring out a solution to a problem. However, what about situations where there is no immediate solution? In this case, distraction and self-soothing skills can be a…
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Emotion Regulation Strategies For When You Are in Crisis
The Emotional Thermometer Different problems require different solutions. On the emotional thermometer (let’s say – from 0 to 100), where we are on this thermometer affects the strategies that we might employ to bring the emotions down to a manageable level. Sometimes we are just at a 10 and we’re doing just fine; we don’t…
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Using The PLEASE Skill To Reduce Emotional Vulnerability
Emotional Vulnerability and Stress There are a number of techniques we can use to effectively manage our emotional response when tensions run high: mindfulness strategies, distraction, breathing exercises, among others. What these ‘in-the-moment’ strategies all have in common is that they all involve you having been in a strong emotional state in the first place.…
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