If you feel like you are running hot, 65 or higher, and are experiencing a crisis situation remember your DBT Skills. Remember that these crisis survival skills are not meant to solve your problems. The are designed to help you control your emotions so that you can prevent yourself from acting impulsively and making the situation worse.
ACCEPTS Skills:
Activities: Distract yourself with another activity
Contributing: Distract your attention by refocusing attention from yourself to others
Comparisons: Distract yourself by refocusing attention from your current self and recasting yourself in a more positive light.
Emotions: Distract your attention by generating opposite emotions t changs the current painful emotion
Pushing Away: Distract your attention by leaving the situation or blocking it from your mind
Thoughts: Distract your attention by filling your mind with other thoughts, so that negative or upsetting thoughts cannot get in.
Sensations: Distract your attention using physical sensation (ie. holding ice, listening to loud music, taking a cold/ht shower, squeezing a ball)
Self-Soothe Skills:
Vision: Soothe yourself by finding something pleasant to focus your sights on.
Hearing: Find something soothing to listen to.
Smell: Soothe yourself by focusing on pleasant smells
Taste: Imagine what it would be like to taste your favorite food. Think about how it would feel in your mouth. Then mindfully eat.
Touch: Touch things that you find soothing. Pet your dog/cat, rub your lucky rabbit's foot, apply lotion to your hands
Movement: Turn on some loud music and dance, rock in a hammock, go for a walk, exercise, do yoga, clean the house.
Improve Skills:
Imagery: Imagine yourself being effective, Imagine yourself being in a safe place, Imagine the painful emotions draining out of you like water out of a pipe.
Meaning: Try to find or create meaning in your experiences. (Find the silver lining; make lemonade out of lemons) Although you may be experiencing a difficult situation there may be good that will come out of it in the end. Find that thing and hold onto it.
Prayer: This skill is about asking for strength and wisdom to tolerate the pain of the moment , rather than praying for the pain to go away. A person does not have to be religious or beleive in a higher power to use this skill.
Relaxation: Find activities that relax you. This can be different for everyone.
One Thing in the Moment: We may have multiple problems occuring in the past and/or in the future, but the key to tolerating them is to remember that we only have to survive this one moment.
Vacation: Take a brief “vacation”. Close your eyes for 5 minutes, crawl into bed and pull the covers over your head for 10 minutes, sit on a local beach for an hour or two. Find an activity that will allow you to separate yourself from your regular life for a short time.
Encouragement: Be your own cheerleader! This skill involves talking to yourself the way you would talk to someone you care about who is in a crisis. You can do it!
T.I.P. Skills for managing extreme emotions:
Temperature Control: Tip the temperature of your face with cold water or an ice pack to calm down fast.
Intense Exercise: Engage in intense aerobic exercise, if only for a short period. Use up your body's stored-up physical energy by running, waking fast, jumping rope, or doing jumping jacks.
Paced Breathing: Slow the pace of your breathing way down. Breathe Deeply from the abdomen. Breathe out more slowly then you breath in (e.g. inhale for 4 seconds, exhale for 6 seconds). Do this for 1 to 2 minutes.