Cooling Down Your Emotions: Emotion Regulation or Distress Tolerance

Sometimes it can be confusing whether a situation calls for emotion regulation skills, or distress tolerance skills. This video helps us decide when to use emotion regulation and when to use distress tolerance to cool down our emotions.

Cooling Down Our Emotions

Emotion Regulation vs Distress Tolerance in DBT

I want to make a quick video about a couple of related concepts in dialectical behavior therapy: emotion regulation and distress tolerance. And if you’re not familiar with these and would like to learn more about them, I have a number of videos about emotion regulation and distress tolerance that I link to in the pinned comment and description, so please check those out.

Emotion regulation refers to our ability to influence our emotions and how we feel, and distress tolerance involves learning to tolerate painful events, urges, and emotions when we can’t make things better right away. And so both emotion regulation and distress tolerance teach us how to respond to and manage our emotions. With emotion regulation, we’re opening ourselves up to our emotions and allowing ourselves to feel them, and as we give them some attention, they tend to subside and become less intense. Whereas with distress tolerance, we’re doing things to temporarily avoid direct contact with our emotions by putting some distance between ourselves and any distressing emotions that we feel until things have a chance to cool down.

And so when something happens and we have a strong emotional reaction, how do we decide if we should respond to how we’re feeling with emotion regulation skills and open ourselves up to our emotions and how we’re feeling, or distress tolerance skills and put some distance between ourselves and our emotions? It’s important that we allow ourselves to experience our emotions and that we don’t just ignore them, suppress them, or try to run away from them because they’re too uncomfortable or painful to deal with. But at the same time, sometimes our emotions are so strong that it’s best not to deal with them right away because if we open ourselves up to our emotions when they’re at their peak and feeling most intense, they can start to cause us a lot of distress, and so we need to give them a chance to cool down.

When trying to determine whether to apply emotion regulation skills or distress tolerance skills to a situation in which we’re feeling strong, uncomfortable, or painful emotions, I find it helpful to think of our emotions as a pot cooking over an open flame, and we want to make sure that this pot of emotions has cooled down enough before we touch it so that we don’t burn ourselves.

So if we can think of the intensity of our emotions on a scale from one to ten, where from about one to three this pot of emotions is cool to the touch and it’s fine to handle it, and from four to six the pot’s still warm and maybe a little uncomfortable to touch but it might still be okay, and then at seven or above that pot of emotions is so hot that if we touch it we’re gonna burn ourselves.

If the intensity of our emotions feels like it’s between one and three, we can feel comfortable using some emotion regulation skills to help us connect with our emotions and how we’re feeling. And if the intensity of our emotions is at a seven or above, we need to apply some distress tolerance skills until things have had a chance to cool down or we’re going to burn ourselves, and that burn is going to cause us even more distress.

And if the intensity of our emotions falls in the 4 to 6 range, then it’s a bit of a judgment call and you might want to apply some distress tolerance skills first to make sure your emotions have cooled down enough before you attend to them with emotion regulation so you don’t burn yourself because they’re still too hot to touch. Or you could try applying some emotion regulation skills and see how it goes, and if your emotions start to cool down then continue with the emotion regulation, but if things start to heat up then it’s time to switch to distress tolerance skills for a while until things have a chance to cool down.

Now one of the challenges with responding to our emotions when they’re in the seven to ten range is that when our emotions are this intense, we’re operating out of emotional mind, and things like rating the intensity of an emotion and deciding whether to use distress tolerance or emotion regulation requires reasonable mind. And so this is hard to do when we’re operating out of emotional mind. And if you’re not sure what emotional mind and reasonable mind refer to, you can check out the video that I link to in the description and pin comment.

And so one thing that can help when we’re feeling an intense emotion is to employ the STOP skill right away. STOP is an acronym that stands for Stop what you’re doing, Take a step back from the situation, Observe what’s going on (and in this case we’re observing what’s going on with our emotions and assessing how intense they are on a scale from one to ten), and then the P stands for Proceed. And so depending on how intense our emotions are, we either proceed by using some emotion regulation skills or we proceed with some distress tolerance skills.

Now it’s important that when we do opt for distress tolerance and we take a step back from difficult situations or feelings and emotions that we don’t use this as a way of avoiding dealing with these situations and emotions altogether, and that once that pot of emotions is cool to the touch, we go back to it, take it off the fire, and put it away and stamp out any remaining embers by resolving any outstanding conflicts and processing whatever emotions or feelings remain. Because otherwise these things are just going to keep simmering under the surface, growing warmer and warmer until eventually they boil over hotter than ever, burning us in the process and leaving us with a big hot mess to clean up.

And please hit the like button and subscribe to my channel so you don’t miss out on my other DBT videos when they come out, and please check out the playlist with all of my DBT videos from the links in the description and pin comment.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them on the YouTube video page.