Transcript
Speaker: Have you ever found yourself so overwhelmed by situation that you run the risk of making things worse by doing literally anything? Like those times you find yourself ugly crying over a burrito while endlessly doom scrolling and simultaneously rapid firing a series of escalatingly risky texts?
Speaker: Just me? Cool. Today's episode is about why we do that and how not to. Welcome back to Friendless Sweet Peas.
Speaker: I'm your host, James Evermanko, and this is episode three of the DBT Micro Season. We are officially leaving mindfulness behind because as much as I love the what and the how skills, and I do, they are they have genuinely helped me.
Speaker: There are moments where mindfulness feels like a cruel joke. You know, it's it's it's those times where someone says, just observe your thoughts and you want to look them dead in the eye and say, my thoughts are currently dumpster fire and observing them is not the move right now.
Speaker: That is what distress tolerance is for. Distress tolerance is for when you're not calm, when you're not regulated. when your brain is it like ah eight or a nine out of 10 on the chaos scale and logic has just stepped out the building.
Speaker: Last episode skills are great when things are at like a four. This episode is for when they're, you know, in the chaos mode, eights, the nines.
Speaker: And in those moments, the only goal is don't make things worse. And it's really easy to say, and it sounds simple, but it's not. Because when you're in crisis mode, your whole nervous system is running the show.
Speaker: The thinking part of your brain, the reasonable, reflective part, it's gone. It's just, you know, it's outside in the parking lot, waiting for the situation to calm down before it can get side. And in the meantime, your nervous system is making all the decisions.
Speaker: And its first idea is almost always the Let's call it ineffective choice. So today we're going to be covering two skills that work specifically in that state. ah Two tools that operate sort of before your thinking brain can come back online.
Speaker: The first is the acronym STOP, which is your emergency break. And the second is the TIP skills, which is, and I say this with really deep affection, a, a
Speaker: a sort of a biological reset button. I'll explain what I mean by that when we get there. But first, story time. ah So to give you a very, very recent, very pertinent example of of distress silence, I tried recording this episode last week.
Speaker: I sat down at a desk, I hit what I thought was record button and talk for a good half hour, 45 minutes straight through whole episodes. I get to the end feeling really good about everything. And I look when I go to review the file and I noticed that I had it hit record.
Speaker: That all whole episode gone, you know, nothing saved, just me talking to the void, like an absolute clown and my body. kind of instinctually went into this crisis mode.
Speaker: It's this really, you know, it's this almost bizarre sensation where i I feel like my body both goes numb, but also suddenly is like doused in flames at the same time. You know, my face starts burning, my vision narrows like like like tunnel vision, but like, you know, everything Everything's just going dark.
Speaker: my My chest feels like it's going to cave in. It's getting so tight, you know, like it's like someone's sitting on my sternum and my thoughts, you know, this is the, this is the most fun part, obviously.
Speaker: My thoughts, they, they spiral into this catastrophe while also kind of losing any sense of any single coherent um threat you know it's like it's like 10 different insults are being hurled at me at once so they all just become this kind of maelstrom of negativity you know you're incompetent you'll never finish this why do you even bother everyone was right about you you know it's all at the same time all overlapping none of them landing clearly enough to actually argue with but all of them landing hard enough to her right and and you know the action urges right the action urges are
Speaker: Spectacular. You know, I want to, I want to, you know, internally, I want to, I want to throw my computer out the window, right? Genuinely considering it, you know, and I live on the fourth floor. It would be very, very satisfying for those like three seconds.
Speaker: But then, you know, obviously catastrophically expensive. You know, I wanted, I wanted to, I had thoughts of like, okay, this is it. This is the day I set fire to my apartment, which, you know, obviously terrible idea on multiple levels, but that, that, that goblin brain moment, it just, it doesn't care about logic.
Speaker: You know, had this impulse. This happens to me a lot when I go into chaos brain. I had this impulse to call up every single person who has ever doubted me, has ever insulted me, how has it ever made me feel less than. and i and i And I want to just scream that they were right.
Speaker: They were right all along, that I was a failure, that I couldn't even press a button correctly, that this this whole podcast idea is is a complete joke and I should have given up years ago.
Speaker: right
Speaker: But I caught myself.
Speaker: You know, maybe it was the muscle memory of practicing these skills. Maybe it was just kind of dumb luck. I don't know But I caught myself before I did any of those things. I took a deep breath.
Speaker: I stepped outside. went for a walk. Came back, you know, an hour later. And didn't retry again.
Speaker: I put it away. And I did something else. And I'm coming back to it now. And goddammit, I'm making it work this time. And as I say that, I'm going double check that yes, I have hit record. Okay.
Speaker: So this, this is what Distressed Tolerance is designed for. Not the wise, reflective version of me that's recording the podcast, but the the goblin that shows up during those emotional emergencies and suggests exclusively bad ideas.
Speaker: I often hear it described very commonly as sort of like goblin brain. Another version I really like is a real literary literary nerd reference. Edgar Allan Poe has a term called the imp of the perverse that I love.
Speaker: And it's, you know, the imp of the perverse is sort of that little whisper in the back of your voice that says, you know, what if we did step into traffic right now? You know, what if it did jump from that balcony?
Speaker: What would happen if I threw this brick at that car? You know, whatever it is, if that's the imp of the perverse. And I often often consider that's what I imagine is sort of like floating around in the back of my skull.
Speaker: um But coming back. What's actually happening in these moments, and they're perfectly healthy, perfectly normal. It's actually far more healthy to have those thoughts and then to recognize why they're dangerous and to not do them rather than, you know, suppress them and and not consider them at all.
Speaker: Because what's going on in in a sort of a, from a biological standpoint is that your amygdala the The part of your brain that detects threat, it's kind of taken over.
Speaker: Right. And it doesn't distinguish between physical threat or an emotional threat, you know, and and it's important to recognize that a perceived social rejection actually fires the exact same alarm as a genuine. Oh, my God, that's a bear charging at me type of danger.
Speaker: So your body is going to respond the same way it would is as if you were in real genuine danger. You know, it's that fight or flight, adrenaline kicks in, heart rate kicks up, breathing fast, you know, all the higher thinking, nuance, perspective, empathy, making sure you don't pee your pants, you know all that stuff is just offline.
Speaker: Right. And in that state, if you act on the first impulse without proper training, you almost always are going to make the situation worse.
Speaker: You know, you're going to send the defensive message. You're going to say the thing you can't take back. You're going to make the decision that you'll regret when the adrenaline clears. You know, you're going to say, yeah, I probably can fight that bear. you didn Spoiler alert, you can't, right?
Speaker: um So we need tools that work in that state. And that's where stop and tip come into play.
Speaker: So stop There's a lot of, what are they called? Acronyms. There are a lot of acronyms in DBT. Marsha Linehan loves her acronyms.
Speaker: And the first one we're going to introduce is SCOP. So, STOP. So this is your your emergency break. It tells you exactly what to do in the literal moment you feel yourself about to act on an impulse.
Speaker: You know, it's your thumb is hovering over send on your on your phone or when you can feel those words kind of rising in your throat, when your body is really just begging you to do something, you stop.
Speaker: So then we break it down. S, funny enough, is a repeat. S stands for stop. Again, so the full acronym is a stop. S also stands for stop.
Speaker: Literally freeze. Don't speak. Don't text. Don't send an email. Don't move. Don't do nothing. And the reason it is just reiterated is because this is the hardest thing to do in those moments.
Speaker: Because everything in your body is screaming, do something. Right? These types of emotions are engaging, motivating, moving type emotions.
Speaker: So the adrenaline wants action, right? The emotion wants to be expressed. It wants to move. And it can feel almost unbearable to just stop. But doing nothing is doing something.
Speaker: You hear that fence sitters? Stopping is a choice. And it's a choice that is going to keep all your other options open.
Speaker: We move to T, which is take a step back. This can be physical or it can be mental or it can be both. Physically, literally take a step, leave the room, put the phone face down on the table, go to the bathroom, literally create some kind of space between you and the situation.
Speaker: Mentally can be take a breath, count to 10. For one moment, you know, just ask yourself what is happening here? Go back to wise mind,
Speaker: You don't have to have an answer. You just have to create a pause. O moves into observe. So now that we've kind of put the brakes on, we're starting to try to get back into mindfulness territory, but it's still crisis mode. So you're asking, what emotion am I actually feeling right now?
Speaker: Not the label. I put it right. Not... Not the label that I put on top of it, the real one underneath. Am I afraid? Is it fear? Is it rage? Is it shame? Is panic? Is it grief? What are my thoughts doing?
Speaker: Are they spiraling? Catastrophizing? Are we planning revenge? Am I writing that defensive response in my head? What's happening in my body right now? Is my heart racing? Is my chest tight? Do I have shaky hands? Is my face hot?
Speaker: You're not trying to fix any of it. You are just naming it. That's all. And because naming it creates that little gap of space that we talked about in mindfulness episodes.
Speaker: That allows the space for you to go from being in the emotion to observing the emotion. It's just that little breath in between. Then you go into proceed mindfully because now you get to choose.
Speaker: And yeah, you look, maybe you choose to still send the text, but you write it differently. Maybe you call a friend instead and talk it through before doing anything at all.
Speaker: You know, maybe you go for a walk. It's big one I always choose. And and kind of give yourself sort of a 20 minute buffer before deciding what to do. Maybe you do nothing and you just wait.
Speaker: The whole point of stop is that you choose. The impulse didn't choose for you. Your nervous system didn't choose for you. You did.
Speaker: Now, what STOP is not is it's not about suppressing feelings. It's not about pretending you're not upset. It's not about being calm when you're not.
Speaker: It's just about interrupting the impulse to action pipeline. It's about creating that little stop gap just long enough to make a choice. And that's it.
Speaker: An example of of me putting putting this to work. couple weeks ago, I'm texting with my partner and the conversation
Speaker: starts to escalate in this really specific way where neither of us wanted it to go, but where we could both kind of feel it going. And it it just, you know, sometimes you get into those threads. Maybe this is an autistic thing. I don't know.
Speaker: But it's almost like you can see the train crash down the tracks, but you can't get off the tracks. You know, it's like you can see it coming, but neither of you can do anything about it or it feels like there's nothing you can do about it.
Speaker: And the initial sort of, you know, amygdala response is like, all right, give it all the juice you got, right? You know, just go full hog, full dysregulation, get into some real ornery needless fight about something that doesn't even actually matter and wouldn't even be remembered if you were to just brush it off right away.
Speaker: And even though initially it's feeling like, oh, this is where it's going, I caught myself. I saw what was happening and I used stop. Like literally, I wrote down STOP and I walked through them myself on my side. So I i stopped, I stopped typing, mid text, because it was sort of one of those like, this is the fulcrum if I say this, you know?
Speaker: So I just mid text, put my phone down. I took a step back, took a big breath. I kind of scrolled back over the text thread, not to like build my case, just to like actually see what was happening. Where was the miscommunication coming up?
Speaker: I observed. So, you know, after reading it, I put my phone face down on the coffee table. I took another big breath. I went for a little walk around my apartment, you know, kind of around the block just to kind of move breathing the whole time, really, really focusing on my breathing.
Speaker: And then I proceeded mindfully, which is when I came back and I responded. But this time i made sure to not respond defensively. i didn't respond in a way that was going to escalate things.
Speaker: I responded in a way that was, you know, open and curious towards what was being communicated from my partner while also remaining respectful of of what I was trying to say.
Speaker: And it was this. massive relief to sort of, you know, bring the heat down, right? The conversation shifted. You know, we stayed connected without spiraling into some pointless argument that we both would regret.
Speaker: And of course, you know, the little inner brat in me was a little disappointed that it didn't get to have a meltdown, but, but whatever. That's, that's that weird part of me that, that, you know, continues to thrive off of drama.
Speaker: You know, that that that piece that wants to be kind of righteous and upset and fully activated. and dread but
Speaker: And ah look, and it's important to acknowledge that too. i think I think, you know, that's a piece of me. And I love that piece of me. And there are times in my life where that part of me is very useful.
Speaker: And it was just one of those moments where that part of me wouldn't have been. So, you know, using stop doesn't mean that part of me was wrong or that that part of me just completely disappears.
Speaker: It just means I chose something different, something more effective for the context of the moment. And yeah, you know, in a way, as satisfying it was as it was, it also was kind of unsatisfying in the moment. But also, you know, we then didn't have a fight we didn't need to. And that is the entire point.
Speaker: So, the second acronym, TIP. Tip is for when stop isn't enough or when you are so far into the emotional spiral that stopping feels impossible.
Speaker: This is when your body is so activated, so flooded with adrenaline and cortisol and everything else that you literally cannot think straight. Tip is for that state.
Speaker: And it works differently than stop in that it works on your biology directly. These are not thinking skills. They are literally physical interventions. You are using your body to calm your body.
Speaker: And
Speaker: that's a really important thought that I think we should actually kind of sit with for a second. You're using your body to calm your body.
Speaker: For me, something that I continue to, the word doesn't struggle with, but something that I continue to catch myself doing is that I have spent a lot of time trying to think my way out of emotional crises, trying to logic myself down from whatever emotional state i'm in.
Speaker: And that mostly doesn't work because logic exists in the sort of prefrontal cortex. And when you're in fight or flight, that cortex, it's not running a thing.
Speaker: It's gone. So tip bypasses that and it goes straight into the nervous system to to help you out. So here's T. tea stands for temperature change.
Speaker: And more specifically than that, cold. Cold water on your face, an ice pack on your eyes or on your cheeks, literally even just running your wrists under cold water, a cold shower if you're at home.
Speaker: the the The initial recommendation is is a cold bowl of water and you hold your breath while you dip your face in it.
Speaker: What this does is it will activate something called the dive of reflex in your body. It's this kind of like mammalian physiological response that will literally immediately slow your heart rate.
Speaker: So your body interprets the cold on your face as submersion in water and it downshifts your nervous system to conserve energy to conserve oxygen. And, you know, I know that sounds intense and it is. It's a little intense, but it genuinely works.
Speaker: And it's not like you have to you you don't have to drown yourself. Right. It's just, you know, put your face in some cold water. But you also don't need to if you don't have a bowl big enough, you know, I got a big head. Right. So so I don't have a bowl that I can fill up fast enough.
Speaker: but So it's not like you have to submerge your face in a bowl of ice water. That's just an option if you want to be really dramatic and awesome, right? You know, even just splashing cold water on your face for 30 seconds is going to shift things.
Speaker: My go-to is is cold water on the wrists because it's accessible and it's fast and it has the exact same sort of shock impact. Next is I, intense exercise. twenty 20, 60 seconds of just really fast movements, jumping jacks, running in place, burpees, if that's your thing, you know.
Speaker: I just like saying them, I hate doing them. just dance aggressively, put on a song and just dance really hard, you know, go up and down stairs really, really fast. What you're doing is you're burning off the adrenaline.
Speaker: The adrenaline's in your body because it's preparing you for action. You know, that's the, of the four Fs, that's the fight and flight. And if you don't take action, it just sits there and it keeps you activated. So you have to really, you have to burn it out.
Speaker: An intense movement is going to use it up. You know, it essentially it metabolizes it. So it gives your nervous system permission to kind of come back down. and And the thing is, you don't have to do it for long. Adrenaline is not built to last in your body for very long.
Speaker: So even just doing, you know, 30 seconds of jumping jacks is going to make a big, big difference in your body. The first P is paced breathing. So that's a slow inhale, but a much longer exhale.
Speaker: Gentle in, usually through the nose, long out, usually through the mouth. If you can count breathing in for four and out for six, you you know, you can do in for three, out for five, whatever ratio works.
Speaker: At the end of the day, it's just about the long exhale. our body will naturally big inhale and small exhale. And when we're in these panic states, we actually think we're doing a longer exhale than we are, but we're not.
Speaker: So you have to really mindfully push the exhale out longer. Your exhale, the reason this helps is your exhale is connected to your parasympathetic nervous system.
Speaker: This is the kind of the rest digest system. This is the opposite of fight or flight. And a long, slow exhale is the signal to your body that the danger is over.
Speaker: So this is why taking deep these deep breaths really help. Not because it's a cliche, but it's it's literally biology. And just remember, longer out. The other P, the second P is paired muscle relaxation.
Speaker: And admittedly for me, this one is a little less instinctive, but it is really, really effective once you kind of get a practicing.
Speaker: It's about clenching muscle groups. So you clench your shoulders up hard for, you know, a count of whatever, a count of three, and then you release it on a slow exhale. So it's, you know, shoulders up to your ears, hold,
Speaker: exhale and release. Then you clench your fist tight with the inhale. You hold it, you exhale and release. You scratch your face, right? And then you hold it, exhale, release. And that tension release cycle teaches your nervous system what relaxation actually feels like.
Speaker: It's this physical reminder. This is what you're working towards. This is the sensation right here, right? So it's teaching your body how your body can feel when it's safe.
Speaker: I'll tell you a few brief examples of kind of my relationship to tip because tip on paper is incredible and tip in practice is only slightly more complicated. But truthfully, it's it's once you get into the rhythm of it, it's it's really, really applicable.
Speaker: I use tip all the time, like almost on a daily basis. You know, temperature is my number one go-to. Exercise, we could call my current enemies to lovers arc.
Speaker: You know, we're getting there, but it's it's complicated, right? Breathing goes really hand in hand with temperature for me. And muscle relaxation is one that I'm slowly accepting. And what I'm using it for lately is actually, I use it at the end of my day, every evening so that I can relax my body and get to sleep.
Speaker: And I want to be really clear about all these practices. They don't have to be elaborate. Breathing is obviously the most accessible because, you know, hopefully at least you're literally doing it right now. But honestly, they can all be as simple as you want them to be.
Speaker: You don't need a big setup. You can literally just run cold water on your hands if that's all that you can kind of manage to get set up. And that really counts. Um,
Speaker: When i but before my medical leave, i'll I'll frame it as, you know, I would use temperature and breathing every time my boss said something insulting, you know, which was often.
Speaker: I would step back. I would... go out to my kitchen or my bathroom, run cold water over my wrists, take a few slow, deep breaths. That's it.
Speaker: 30 seconds. But it was enough for me to bring that sort of first spike up from that eight to, you know, six, five. And that's distress tolerance. It's about getting you back into the window of what you can handle.
Speaker: It's not about erasure. It's just about getting it into a state that you can hold it I would go for a walk, that intense exercise. Every time I would get something assigned to me, that wasn't my field of responsibility, but that they had kind of left to the last second and now somehow it was my emergency, right? So I would walk fast.
Speaker: I go up and down my stairs. Being on the fourth floor, I would just go up and down those four stories a couple times and just sort of burn off that that that rage adrenaline. Rage adrenaline? Anyway, so I didn't say something that I regretted, right?
Speaker: And muscle relaxation is, is that's that's how I would be able to get into bed and not be sort of shaking from from the the the workday, right?
Speaker: There's a reason I'm on a medical leave. ah And does it work? Like, does, does tip magically fix everything? Fuck no, absolutely not.
Speaker: But it rarely fails to at least to not at least shift me to get getting out of that crisis zone and back into that zone tolerance.
Speaker: You know, take it from that 10 to that six, right? From being completely flooded to manageable, you know, and that's the goal, not Zen, just manageable. And, you know, for fruit for a listener, if you you haven't tried any of these, I would say start with cold water.
Speaker: it's It's the best sort of system shocker. It's the quickest kind of eye opener for me. You know, they all obviously have their deep merits and they work really well collectively as a system. But if you can just get to one skill when you're in that mode and and and all you can do is kind of like reach out to one thing, start with cold water, because at the end of the day, your nervous system can't be ignored.
Speaker: And when it's in that state, you have to give it something. You can't think your way out of this. so So start with something just really simple. Run cold water over your wrists and that's it. Or your back of your neck. Really lovely.
Speaker: Okay. We're going to do a really quick practice. And obviously, this is not going to be a real crisis. We're just going to be running a very small mental rehearsal so that when the real crisis hits, these skills are just that much more accessible.
Speaker: So take a second and think about your last meltdown moment. Or maybe it's a situation that sends you into crisis mode. I can't give you that example. You know it.
Speaker: You got that example? Okay.
Speaker: Now sit with that sort of train of thought and imagine the moment you spike again. But this time, remember that stop and tip are available to you.
Speaker: So if you're using stop, what does stop look like in that scenario? Are you putting your phone down? Are you walking out of the room? Are you not pressing send?
Speaker: What does take a step back look like? Physically, what do you do? Mentally, what do you do? What are you observing? What emotion is there? What's your body doing?
Speaker: What will you mindfully choose to do instead of the impulse?
Speaker: Now, if you're using tip, Which of the four do you think would help most in that scenario? Is it going to be temperature? going to be movement? Is to be breathing?
Speaker: Muscle relaxation? What will you actually do? Will you splash cold water on your face? Will you run in place for 30 seconds? Will you c clench your fists and breathe in and out slow?
Speaker: Imagine yourself doing that now.
Speaker: What shifts?
Speaker: And remember, you don't have to solve everything right now. This is just rehearsal. You're building a map so that when you are in crisis, you have somewhere to go.
Speaker: I would really encourage you write these down, consider them. But as always, this isn't homework. This is just, you know, for your consideration.
Speaker: Before we wrap up, though, here's a question to sit with. Again, not homework, just something to kind of roll around in the old logic.
Speaker: What's the impulse action you tend to reach for when things get overwhelming? For some people, it's sending a text. for For some, it's, you know, snapping at somebody.
Speaker: For some, it's shutting down completely. Maybe it's doom scrolling until that feeling kind of passes or or maybe it's something more serious. Whatever yours is.
Speaker: Just notice it. Name it. And then consider what skill might be able to interrupt it. If it's risky texting, try stop.
Speaker: If it's shutdown, freeze, try tip. Specifically, I would say movement or temperature. If it's, you know, doom scrolling, first you pace your breathing, then you look at stop.
Speaker: And you don't have to change the pattern right now. You just have to recognize what it is. And that's how you get into it. to it So that is Distress Tolerance Part 1.
Speaker: We looked at stop, the emergency break for when you're about to act on an impulse and you need to interrupt the pipeline long enough to make a choice. And we looked at tip, that biological reset for that moment when the impulse is so loud and the activation is so high that you need to work through your body rather than through your thoughts.
Speaker: Neither of these are a magic fix. Neither of them will make the crisis disappear, but both of them will give you a fighting chance to not make things worse while you're in the moment.
Speaker: And honestly, most of the time, that's the biggest win. Next episode, we're going to be continuing with Distressed Tolerance, but we're going to shift into a different type of crisis.
Speaker: The ongoing crisis, the slow burn, the situations you can't fix right now and you just have to live with.
Speaker: This is a tough one, given the current state of affairs of the world. We're going to be talking about self-soothing. We're going to be talking about the big one, radical acceptance.
Speaker: The idea of gentleness with the hard truth. And this is an episode coming up that is is one that I've been looking forward to since I started this season.
Speaker: um Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Thank you so much for sticking with me. um Let me know what you think of these episodes so far. Are they being helpful? Are you trying these skills? um Are they opening you up to something new? Are they complete bullshit? Are you like, James, where the fuck are the interviews? What is happening?
Speaker: Um, let me know, email me friendless pod at gmail.com message me on I'm mostly on Instagram these days at friendless pod. You can also find me on Tik Tok, same, same handle at friendless pod, but, but please do let me know. I, I really hope I will catch you back here next week with, with the next episode of the DBT micro season.
Speaker: But hey, as always, I'm not going to worry about that right now. And neither should you, because that is then, and this is now. So for now, I'll just say I love you, and I wish you well.
Speaker: Fun and safety, sweet peas.
