Distress Tolerance Strategies
Urge Surfing is a technique for managing your unwanted behaviors. Rather than giving in to an urge, you will ride it out, like a surfer riding a wave. After a short time, the urge will pass on its own. This technique can be used to stop or reduce drug and alcohol use, emotional reactions such as “blowing up” when angry, impulsive spending, gambling, sexual risk-taking, and other unwanted behaviors (TherapistAid.com, 2021).
ACCEPTS outlines strategies for distracting oneself from distressing emotions, giving them time to lessen in intensity, or fade away. Using ACCEPTS, clients will learn a variety of distraction techniques, including focusing on others, creating new competing emotions, and participating in distracting activities.
dbt-accepts_distress_tolerence_worksheet.pdf
When an individual’s emotions feel out-of-control—TIPP Skills—can help bring down that intensity (Greene, 2020). T—changing temperature can quickly decrease the intensity of an emotion. I—engaging in intense cardio/aerobic exercise helps the physical body de-escalate intense emotions. P—paced breathing, slowing down inbreath and outbreath to a combined 10 to 12 seconds should help slow down emotions. P—paired muscle relaxation, combining slow deep breaths with tensing and relaxing of muscles will also aid in decreasing the intensity of emotions, so that an individual can go back to making use of typically effective coping mechanisms (Green, 2020).
distress-tolerance-TIP_skils.pdf
