"Do you have any advice for ways that I can self-regulate?"
So, this is a big question.
I think the thing I would recommend here is there are a ton of really great resources on the internet for help with self-regulation, particularly looking at tools from DBT, Dialectical Behavior Therapy.
So Dialectical Behavior Therapy was started by Marsha Linehan.
It was designed to treat people who have issues with like chronic suicidality, substance abuse, trauma, those sorts of things.
People often associate it as a treatment for borderline personality disorder.
And it is like from a research perspective the gold standard of treatment for borderline personality disorder, but it is highly effective at treating a lot of different things.
And to be frank, the skills from DBT are so freaking useful that all of us would benefit from learning them and applying them more.
DBT has different kinds of sections that they focus on.
And so, for self-regulation, what I would look at, depending upon what is coming up that's leading you to need more help with self-regulation would be their mindfulness skills and their distress tolerance skills.
There are also the emotion regulation skills which might be helpful, but a lot of times when people are talking about ways to self-regulate, they're talking about when they have like a triggering moment or there is something that happens that gets them into a very heightened space physiologically and emotionally and mentally, often very precipitously.
Mindfulness skills are a big part of DBT because they talk about finding something they call wise mind.
So many people who have issues with addiction, trauma, borderline personality disorder, operate a lot of the time from something they call “emotion mind” or “emotional mind,” which is where our emotions are running the show, they're telling the story.
It can create a lot of impulsivity and reactivity, because our emotions tend to want things right now.
They don't think about the future, they think about right now, what would feel good right now, what would feel better, what gets me out of this bad feeling.
The other type of mind that they talk about as like a polar opposite to a motion mind is logic mind or I think it's called logical mind.
Let me double check that.
Reasonable mind.
That's what it's called.
I knew it wasn't logic mind. So, a reasonable mind.
So reasonable mind is like Spock.
It is coldly logical.
There is no emotion considered.
We disregard emotional evidence.
This is the type of thinking that many of us are encouraged to do by our culture because we have a culture that treats emotion as bad and worse and not valuable, whereas logic is good.
And so Cartesian dualism screws us all again.
Descartes was not even a good philosopher, but that's neither here nor there.
Anyway, reasonable mind, right, does not acknowledge the emotions or the information they are giving us. It just looks cold hard facts, makes decisions from that very cold and detached place.
What they hope for people to find is what they call “wise mind”.
Through mindfulness, what we're hoping to do is to down regulate the nervous system enough that emotion mind can calm down and not feel the need to run the show and that we can still get the benefits of reasonable mind and it's like information but synthesize it in a centered place that is that wise mind space where we're able to listen to our intuition and our logic.
We're able to hear from our heart and our brain.
All of the pieces of us get to come together to help us figure out what to do and when we're in that space of greater degrees of calm, that wise mind kind of space, it's easier to make better choices that move us towards our long-term goals, not just our short-term goals.
So, for a lot of people who have issues with self-regulating, the mindfulness skills from DBT can be very helpful because they're all about getting you out of that rush of emotion mind and instead into that wise mind space, which requires a certain degree of self-regulation.
The distress tolerance skills are also really good for when you're very triggered and getting to like a wise mind space feels inaccessible because they're basically about like how do you ride this wave without doing something that's going to make things worse.
And so, distress tolerance skills in DBT can include things like distraction or, you know, things like guided meditations or tuning into pleasure.
There are a lot of ways that they handle the stress tolerance.
So, like those two groups of skills, if you're looking for initial skills on self-regulation can be super helpful.
There are some great DBT workbooks out there
I think there's one called just like the Dialectal Behavior Therapy Workbook that has got like a green cover, like a white and green cover is very – like I've used that with clients before.
It's a really helpful resource for learning those kinds of skills.
You can also search online for like DBT skills handouts and there are a ton of them available for free.
Because DBT has become such a well-known and well-respected modality, you can find a lot of materials for it easily on the internet, which is great.
I think also that self-regulation and learning to better self-regulate, a component of it that can be really helpful is noticing earlier when you're becoming dysregulated because it's easier to return to regulation when you're closer to it rather than farther from it.
So, the more dysregulated you get, the harder it is to reclaim that regulation, the harder it is to get back.
So, I think that a piece of this also is noticing what are your early warning signs that you're starting to get dysregulated.
It's not exactly the same, but a kind of similar thing.
I get migraines and I have learned over the years that one of the early signs I'm getting a migraine is I ask myself whether I need to take my migraine medication and try to talk myself out of it.
Almost every time I'm going to have a migraine, I'm like, “Am I getting a migraine? Should I take the medication? I'm sure it's fine, I probably don't need to.”
And now, because I know that that is how my brain works when a migraine is coming on, as soon as that happens, I go and take a pill.
And it has not yet been the case that I have taken a pill when I was not getting a migraine.
That has never happened to this day.
So, part of learning to self-regulate is also learning what are the signs that you are getting out of that regulated space.
Most people when they're on this journey of learning to better self-regulate, start noticing that they're dysregulated when they're like 8 to 10 out of 10 dysregulated.
Our goal is to help folks move like down that scale gradually, so that instead of it getting to like an 8 or a 9 out of 10 where it's really hard to get back to regulation, you can instead start at like a 6 or a 5 where it's much easier to help yourself get to that regulated space again and help kind of prevent it from becoming as big of a disruption before it starts.
I think that like self-regulation also tends to be very like person by person.
The things that work very well for me for self-regulation may not be the same that work well for you.
One of the very common distress tolerant skills in DBT is called the TIPP skill, T-I-P-P. And so, it stands for temperature, intense exercise, paired muscle relaxation, and paced breathing.
So, temperature is basically find a way to change your body's temperature quickly.
So, they talk often about the dive reflex, which is this cool mammalian response where like, we evolved to if we fall in like a cold freezing river, kind of like slow all our body’s functions down so that hopefully like our parent would catch us when we're a baby.
But you can trigger it yourself by getting a bowl of ice water and diving your face forward into it and holding it in there for like 30 seconds, coming out, doing it like three times.
And what that does is like triggers your autonomic nervous system to move into parasympathetic activation rather than sympathetic activation.
So out of that fight, flight, freeze into the rest and digest.
Intense exercise, a lot of folks when they are dysregulated, benefit from burning off that energy.
In fact, there's an approach to treating trauma called “trauma release exercises” that looks at the ways that sometimes when we experience a trigger but do not allow ourselves to like move our bodies to like release that, it can make the reaction worse and so they work on helping your body release that energy.
So, any kind of intense exercise can be helpful because the fight-or-flight system, it is designed for our body to then use a bunch of energy particularly in our large muscle groups so doing stuff like squats, burpees, running, anything that's going to get that heart rate up and use those large muscle groups to help burn off that adrenaline and also help your body see that like the cycle has recessed, we can come back to a more relaxed state.
Paired muscle relaxation, this is also called progressive muscle relaxation in some places.
You can find scripts online for it, but the basic principle is you're going to squeeze your muscles in a group and release.
So, you would do your hands, your arms, all the way up.
You want to do each muscle group separately.
The reasoning behind this is that when our muscles, the way our muscles are designed is like overlapping groups of fibers and they are meant to be either fully relaxed or fully engaged.
But a lot of us with chronic tension, which is most folks in our society, the muscle fibers end up kind of stuck halfway and it can be very hard to get them to just relax.
So, it's much easier sometimes to fully engage them and then relax them than it is to try to get them to relax on their own.
So paired muscle relaxation is another good tool.
And then paced breathing, DBT often talks about bucks breathing, which is you inhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, hold for four seconds, like a square.
Four seconds on each side, in hold, out hold.
These kinds of skills I think are really helpful.
What I would recommend if you're working on self-regulation is figure out which skills you want to try and figure out a way that it's going to be easy for you to remember to use them when you get dysregulated.
Because when you're dysregulated, your frontal lobes are not as effective and so you're not going to be like, “I should use my regulation skills.”
What I recommend for folks a lot of times is like printing them out, writing them up, putting them somewhere that's obvious that you'll see when you're dysregulated.
It could be a bathroom mirror, could be the refrigerator, could be a phone background, whatever it is, but putting them somewhere that is concrete, that says exactly these are the skills you can choose from so that when you're dysregulated, you have a menu to pick from rather than having to like spontaneously recall something or look it up at that time.
You want to make it as easy as possible for yourself when it's time to do it.
I would also do some practice when you aren't dysregulated because it's easier to master a skill when we're not already dysregulated than when we are.
So those tips, it's a lot.
Again, there's a lot of different places to start here.
You can look at those resources, you can also see if there are other resources online that are helpful for you.
Different people like different things.
For me, the intense exercise doesn't tend to be as helpful when I'm dysregulated, but things like the temperature, paired muscle relaxation, distraction, like those are much more helpful for me.
So, everybody responds to things differently.
There's no right or wrong. Just figure out what works well for your body.
