Distress happens. There’s no getting around it. Everyone has positive emotions and everyone has negative emotions. It’s just part of life. Feeling these emotions so strongly and lacking the skills to tolerate the pain can make you want to avoid these emotions. Avoidance, however, makes the suffering last longer. Instead, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) gives you the skills to get through distress more smoothly.

Improving your tolerance to distress can radically change your life for the better. Oftentimes, people use techniques that are ineffective and possibly destructive to tolerate painful emotions, such as self-injurious behaviors. These behaviors become habitual and detrimental to your quality of life. DBT provides more effective methods for coping to use in place of those other behaviors. Over time, you can learn to let go of those negative skills and live a better life as a result.

Out of the following skills, you will probably want to try most everything, and then pick some that especially work for you. It’s important to practice these skills when you are not in distress so that you can really get a good handle on how to use them. Then you will be ready to deploy them during times of distress.