Hello. Quick disclaimer before we get started. Remember, my podcast is educational. I am a DBT practitioner, I'm enthusiastic about it, but I am not licensed or trained in any formal way. If you are experiencing crisis or distress, after all, that's what this episode is about, please seek help from a licensed mental health professional. This episode is not meant to help you through that crisis in the moment.

We are talking about skills that are very helpful to do that, but if you're in the thick of it right now, please seek out the help of a licensed mental health professional. Thank you. Now let's get into it. Hey, welcome, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Meaningful Sh!t Show. So today you are seeing me with quite a different background and audio setup. So I'm recording this on the go.

Sometimes it's more important to get new content out than to do it exactly in the way that I want to. On technologies these days, you know, I'm sure nobody will really see or hear the difference. So let's focus on our episode today. And today we are going to talk about crisis survival. So this is another episode inspired by dialectical behavioral therapy, which I know I've touched on quite a bit.

And crisis survival is part of the distress tolerance module. So the distress tolerance module has three different sort of rough sections. One of them is the one that we're talking about today. It's surviving crisis situation. So we're going to talk about what surviving is, what a crisis is, et cetera, et cetera. And the tagline there is we're surviving crisis situations without making them worse. Also not with solving them because it's a crisis.

You can't always solve it really quickly. All right. The second part of the stress tolerance. So not for this episode, but for an later episode is to accept reality. So then we can replace suffering and being stuck with just ordinary pain and the possibility of moving forward, ties into those dialectics again of radically accepting what is and making progress, right? Sometimes your resistance for pain can prevent you from moving through it.

The third is becoming free. So the moment that we accepted that reality, we can get and move into the situation that we do not have to satisfy the demands of our strong desires, urges, and intense emotions. So we are less driven by this distress that's ultimately being created by ourselves, right? So that might pretzel your mind a little bit, and that's always the risk or even the guarantee of a topic like this, right?

So what is crisis exactly, and how does it relate to the emotion regulation skills that we've talked about before? Crisis is more severe, right, by and large. So emotion regulation is trying to hang in regular life, not to become dysregulated and get into crisis. So emotion regulation is all about staying cool in a way, staying composed and staying in what DBT calls wise mind. But remember that DBT is designed for people that suffer from borderline personality disorder, which I like to describe as someone just feeling very intense, raw emotions that can explain why distress tolerance is an important aspect of this therapy modality.

We like to re-underline that DBT is actually, of all the therapy modalities out there, is one of the ones that is the best researched, right? Now, there's a lot of empirical data underlining that these skills are skills that actually help people forward. You don't have to have borderline personality disorder. If you struggle being in a crisis situation and then making shit worse, this is a skill that can be very advantageous for you.

And it was for me, although I do not have a BPD diagnosis. So what is a crisis? A crisis is highly stressful. It's kind of obvious, but also remember that highly stressful means that it's subjective. Right. For example, a fire can be highly stressful to me, but a firefighter maybe doesn't really have the same response to it. They can be in emotional situations as well. Like, something can happen and a piece of criticism can be highly stressful for me or, you know, a stern conversation, where for someone else, it cannot even move the needle.

A crisis is also ephemeral, meaning that it poof, just suddenly is there. Of course, there is a cause for it, but it can arise really quickly. Right. Another characteristic of BPD, you know, that intense emotionality. Someone can say something that just triggers you in a very strong way, says the wrong thing, and especially the closer these people are to us, family, partners, friends, that can happen very instantaneously.

And then we're in distress. And now what? Right. The ephemeral nature also means that it can dissipate as quickly as it came up. I sometimes think about it as smoke. Smoke could just pop up relatively quickly if something catches fire. But the moment you open up a window, the smoke is gone pretty quickly, but it can linger around for a long time as well.

So the fact that it's often ephemeral in nature doesn't mean it necessarily automatically moves away. But the key here is, is that they're not situations that are like a multi day process, right? And that is the underlying thing of like crisis. Crisis is short, right? In our heads, crisis can be longer. That's not really where you would want to use this skill for. So it's a skill that is really focused on getting through a couple of minutes, a couple of hours, maybe a day, but that's it.

More about that later. So there is a pressure, you feel pressure to resolve it now, right? Like there is some laser focus to that. And remember the episode about parasympathetic nervous system? The more activated we get, the more in fight or flight we get, the more we put blinders on, the more we go from I can to I should to I must, right? And it's not optional at one point anymore, right?

So when we're in a crisis, we feel that that's the case. Although that might not be the actual truth. So look in your own experience, how often have you been in a discussion with someone, with a parent, with a sibling, with a spouse, whatever, that you felt, we have to resolve this now. We are either going to compromise on this, or we're going to burn this shit down.

For how many of you is that recognizable? For me, it certainly is. You lose track of what's actually important. So there's a pressure to resolve it now. It doesn't mean that that pressure is real for you, because you're feeling it. But it might not really be objectively there. If you get a little bit of distance, you might realize, oh, you know what? This actually does not have to be resolved right now.

Okay. So to repeat, highly stressful, ephemeral, and a pressure to resolve it now, that's a crisis. We want to survive a crisis. What does that mean? To get to the other side with not making things worse. So that's really important in the DBT skill, and the different skills that we're, the module and the different skills that we're going to look at. They're all focused on not really interacting with the crisis, just not making it worse.

That doesn't mean that DBT says, oh, when you're experiencing crisis, just don't process it. Or if all you do is not make it worse, then it's fine. No, no. There's, of course, the next step to that, and that is accepting reality, right? That's not what we're going to talk about today. We're going to stay a little bit in the mode of just getting through the moment in an okay way without making it really worse, right?

So, there's also like another thing that I recently heard in a book that it reminds me of. You, you have like a, different ways of, sometimes you can put something away for, like you can, it's not really distract, it's a different word that they were using, and I can't remember it. But let's just say that it's, it was with a D, but gosh, I just can't remember it.

But let's call it like an F for forget. It can be a lowercase F, where you're just like, you know that it's kind of there, but you're going to ignore it for, for now because now is not the right, the right time, which is very different from something that is actually hurtful is to with a capital F, forget it, right? So there is a right moment in time to address some of these different things.

And this module builds on that is recognizing you sometimes have to get through something by like putting it away, not ignoring it because that would be to miss the actual lesson here, right? So the capital F, forget, is like sort of a frozen lowercase F where you get stuck in forgetting, but the concept here is to not forget, it's just to put it away for a little while.

Anyways, let's touch on these skills here, in case I severely distracted you or actually confused you is what I meant. I'm going to get you back on the straight and narrow, I promise. So the skills that DBT has here, there are six of them. There's the stop skill, the pros and cons skill, the tip skill, the distract skill, the self-soothe skill, and the improve skill. I would like to add sort of something that goes through all of these skills, like sort of intersects them.

And it's the skill that is known as urge surfing. Right. I feel that the entire concept of crisis survival is actually surfing on your crisis urge. Right. When you're in crisis, there is usually an urge of something you want to do. You might want to punch someone in the face. You may want to run away. But there's generally an urge that comes with it. That oftentimes you want to resist.

Not always, but oftentimes. Right? Urge surfing is the concept of taking that urge, feeling that it's really hard to manage, but also seeing that you can manage being present with that urge for one minute. So just get through the minute. And then at the end of the minute, you can commit to another minute. Maybe you feel that you can commit to five minutes. Maybe you could feel at one point you can commit to a day.

So it's a principle that I know from addiction recovery theory, that sometimes it can be really, really hard to accept that whatever behavior or substance that you've been struggling with, that you really are really committing now to it, that you're never going to use it again. Right? That's, you know, huge commitment to make, but maybe you can make the commitment to not do it in the next hour.

Right? So that's the concept of urge surfing. The underlying principle here is that an urge over time dissipates like a wave. Right? So you can just ride that wave, be with that wave, and it's going to take care of itself. That's the concept of urge surfing. And ultimately, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to surf on that crisis urge wave. Right. And there's a bunch of different skills that help us to surf in a different way.

So I feel that urge surfing is applicable to all of these skills that we're going to talk about. Before I talk about the skills, a couple of do's and don'ts. So you use your crisis survival skills. I've underlined some of these things, but if there's an intense pain that cannot be helped quickly, if you can help it quickly, do that. If you have, you stepped in glass, don't go surviving this crisis by distracting or any of these other skills that we've just talked about, resolve the problem.

Get the glass out of your foot, get a bandaid on there, you're done, right? So a personal example for me, that can be like an argument that I can get into, right? That can be in an intense pain, that can be an emotional pain, and it can be like one of the situations in an argument, there's not always a quick solution. There's not always like any solution.

Sometimes, what really is required is for the emotions to simmer down. So a second characteristic when to use these skills is if you have the intuition that you want to act on your emotions, but the intuition is telling you it will make things worse, but you have a hard time like resisting that urge. You're getting closer and closer and closer and closer to that line where you're going to lose it and you're going to do something terrible, right?

Especially if you're under the influence of something. And the sort of extension of that, the third one is when you actually are being overwhelmed by emotion mind, and there's a need to still stay skillful. So you feel your control slipping, your skills breakdown point, as they call it in DBT. But you also have this intuition, this responsibility, accountability, to stay skillful. Like you're not just like throwing it in the wind like a child, and going on your tantrum, you're like, okay, well, I could do that, but I would really want to stay skillful.

Right? So in that way, it's a very mature thing to do. The fourth is if you're already overwhelmed, can always happen, right? Someone just says the right three words, the right sentences, and you're just like completely overwhelmed. You can't really handle in this situation. Yet there are still elements in life that need to be taken care of. Like maybe it's not the crisis right now, but maybe something happened with your boss, something in work context, that you still need to pick up the kids and, I don't know, go on a holiday retreat or whatever it is, life goes on.

It can be very important to have crisis survival skills that allows you to get some distance from that. And the more that you train that, the better it gets, of course. Right. So there's a fifth characteristic in the DBT handbook, which is arousal is extreme, but problems can be solved immediately. Maybe someone can explain how that's different from the first one. You have intense pain that cannot be helped quickly.

I see them as equivalent. Maybe the pain is like the negative slant, and then arousal can also be positive. I'm not sure, so I don't have wonderful insights for you there. This entire thing reminds me of the skill of opposite action that we've talked about, where we just basically recognize our existing pathways lead us to doom, but we don't have the wherewithal to do better right now.

That's another principle that I think of often is awareness alone can be curative. Leads me into talking about what you don't want to use your crisis survival skills for. You don't want to use your crisis survival skills for everyday problems. Everyday problems, you just resolve them, right? That's not where this skill is meant for. This skill is for when you're like 90 out of 100, 90 to 100 out of 100, right?

Solving all your life problems, that's not where this is for. That's... and making your life worth living, so it's not really going to do a ton for meaning. So it's really an emergency skill. And so that's the only time that you have to take that tool out of your tool belt. I want to actually switch over, and I realized that I have a quote for this episode, and it's actually one of my favorite quotes in the world.

It's by Viktor Frankl, and the quote is, between stimulus and response, there is a pause. Within this pause lies your freedom. So I'm going to talk more about Viktor Frankl later, a little bit about who he was, why this quote is really relevant, but what we'll see as we're going to talk about these crisis survival skills, we're all about inhabiting that pause. There is the stimulus. The stimulus has happened.

We cannot deny that. We are triggered. Something went down. The response has not been given yet, and we're trying to stretch that pause so that we can get okay before we respond and not react. Wonderful. So I'm excited to dive in and actually talk about all these different skills, and we're going to start with the stop skill. So those of you who have seen other episodes of me or KnowDBT know that all these skills, they generally are acronyms.

So it's actually the stop skill, that's S-T-O-P, where S stands for stop. So that's hilarious and a little confusing, but it also makes it really easy to remember. So the S is for stop, the T is for take a step back, the O is for observe, and the P stands for proceed mindfully. As far as I'm concerned, that kind of like overlaps with that quote from Viktor Frankl very accurately because what you're trying to do is you're trying to recognize the fact there was a stimulus.

There was something that aroused me in an extreme sense. I'm in a crisis state now, but let's not do anything. Let's just stop, take a step back, see what we're dealing with, try to ground ourselves, and then proceed mindfully. Proceeding mindfully might actually not, might actually be not proceeding at all. It might actually tapping out of that situation where you're recognizing, hey, this is not, I'm not going to be able to handle this in the right way.

I need to get a different skill. Some of those skills are skills that we're going to talk about. Personal example for me when I use the stop skill where it's helped me a lot, it's generally in interpersonal conflict. Those are the things that get under my skin the most, and I'm probably not unique in that. Or if there's any type of insult being done to me, or there's any risk of me or not a risk, but a chance of me having made some kind of mistake, usually in a work situation, that can get me into this automatic way of reacting, that the stop skill really helps me to keep contained.

The second skill is pros and cons. So the pros and cons in DBT, I like to really, it's a pretty elaborate skill, but I like to collapse it to what I think the essence of the skill is. The essence of the skill is to be your own devil's advocate, and I have to explain that a little bit better. Because what do we think of when we think about pros and cons?

When we think about pros and cons, we can go into that crisis situation, and we can think about, okay, I have a crisis urge now, which is to punch my boss in the mouth. Pros and cons would be, okay, well, let me think about the pros, it's going to feel really good, and it's going to blah, blah, blah. And then you go through cons, and then probably you have 10 times as much cons as pros.

So then you're not going to punch your boss in the mouth. Kind of hard to do in the moment when you're about to punch your boss in the mouth. So you have to like sort of use this skill. It's more a situation where you can take some distance, right? You get in a conflict situation, but you're like, hey, I'm going to have to like take a little break.

And then you can do this formal analysis. But the thing that you can do in the moment is the devil's advocate part, because what do they recommend to you in DBT? Not to just do the thing that I just told you, which is look at your crisis urge and think of the pros and cons, but also flip it around. So what if you don't act? Go inhabit the situation that you're not going to punch your boss in the mouth, like you're going to resist the crisis urge, and then you're going to think about the pros and the cons of that.

In a way, the pros of one are the cons for the other and the other way around, that is true, but you're using the power of your imagination to anchor yourself into a different situation. You're allowing your intuition to spot these two different scenarios and already pull you into the same direction. So I do find it powerful in the moment to quickly cycle through what if I act on these crisis urges and what if I don't.

You can do that in a relative split second. And the wonderful thing about the power of our imagination is that we can probably intuitively feel which of the two makes most sense. But there is something really powerful in inhabiting that devil's advocate mindset of like, I'm not going to follow my crisis urge. How does my situation feel? So very powerful. I've talked about that in other episodes as well.

How powerful our mind is when we truly, clearly imagining being in a situation, we actually feel the exact emotions that we would feel in that situation. It's kind of magical if you think about it. That's super powerful. The next skill is the tip skill. It stands for tip the temperature. I have to look at my cheat sheet on this one. Okay.

The T from tip is indeed for tip the temperature of your face with cold water. It's called water immersion. The I stands for intense exercise and the P stands for either paced breathing or paired muscle relaxation. So let's dive into this a little bit. So this is a very physical skill that you can do to calm down. And I've talked about it in context with the parasympathetic nervous system already.

So that all mammalians have a dive reflex. So the moment that you hit water with your eyes closed at a horizontal angle, your body is going to prepare to be underwater, which is usually associated with less oxygen, etc. So what happens? Your heart rate slows down, your breathing slows down, it calms you down. It activates your parasympathetic nervous system, it pulls you back in that rest and digest or at least de-escalate you.

It's very, very, very powerful. There's much more about cold water immersion that I could go into. So there's all kinds of different benefits, but keeping it on the crisis survival, it's just a really good way to just get out of that activated state. Intense exercise, same situation. The moment that you get activated in a situation, you're in crisis mode. There's a lot of adrenaline in your body, there's a lot of energy in your muscles.

It can be really great to expand that physical energy that you have. Think of running, walking fast, jumping jacks, burpees, push-ups, lifting weights, et cetera, et cetera. Contrary to what I usually talk about, because I'm very much into exercise and the benefits of exercise, but I usually go into the direction, if you do it for 25 minutes, you get most of the benefits in the endorphins, et cetera, et cetera.

In this context, just doing it for a minute is fine. Like if you're in a situation that it's a stressful work, something and you just get the possibility to sprint down the parking lot and back, that's just already going to do a ton for you, or maybe splash cold water in your face and in the bathroom, maybe that makes more sense. But both of these techniques are very powerful.

They can be hard to actually accomplish because you're not always in a situation that you can do that. Also, you're going to get willful and not wanting to do that. Even if you know that you're in crisis survival, you're just like, I want to win this argument and I'm not going to calm down because they are obviously wrong. So this requires maturing as well. This requires introspection so that you actually do what is required of you.

Let's talk about to pee. Pee is breathing, so that's just, I would say that that's deep breathing. The focus is to breathe out more slowly than you breathe in so that you slow all these things down. But some other people that I know, they prefer the practice of box breathing. That basically means box being square, so there are four sides. Let's say that you breathe in for five, then you hold, do nothing for five, then you breathe out for five, hold, do nothing and then breathe in again.

Some people can find that very uncomfortable, in which case just stick to the five seconds of breathing in and seven seconds of breathing out. That's completely fine as well. But it's a very effective way of course calming down. Again, the parasympathetic nervous system, getting the adrenaline out of your system, calming down. Paired muscle relaxation is a little bit similar to that. You can actually pair it with paced breathing.

As well, you're breathing in, clench, like in this case, your fists, but like any type of muscle. And as you breathe out, relax them. So it makes the relaxing aspect of the deep breathing, the paced breathing, stronger, and it allows you to calm down even better. So it's just basic mindfulness that we're applying here. We're also like noticing the tension in our body. We can even go into like a mantra, like saying relax as we're doing that, right?

And like noticing what the difference is. So honestly, this is a very physical skill that is combined with mindfulness. So that can be very, very, very advantageous there. As you can imagine with something like that, it's biological, it's physical, it's just going to calm you down. And it's not going to do anything else. So this fits very well in the crisis survival. Next, we have two skills that I find a little bit more complicated.

And that is the distract skill. And there's like a sort of a subtitle there with wise mind accepts. And the reason they have that is accepts is the acronym that you can remember. With A is activities, C is contributing, the other C is comparisons, then we have emotions, then we have pushing away, then we have thoughts, and we have sensations. And we have self-soothe that is soothing yourself with the five senses, vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

So what the thing is about these two skills, from my personal experience, is those are only applicable for certain types of crises, and not the crises that I deal with the most, I would say. So I don't tend to use these skills too much, and also for a reason that you can indulge in them too much. So, distracting, the skill is very much what, you know, you probably already anticipate that distracting is.

You do want to be like a tad more skillful with your distraction than you would normally do that, right? Because if you're distressed, you do not want to distract yourself with a compulsive activity that's going to like just keep you restless in a way. So you want to be mindful doing things like, watching TV series, although it can calm you down, right? It depends on your personality as well.

Playing video games, things like that. Engaging in compulsive sexual behavior, that can also be a very bad idea when you're in a state of distress. It's not the best high quality distraction that you can do. So, that's the reason that we have the accepts acronym there so that we can select activities that have sort of less downsides. They're more, you know, get you in the situation that you get more regulated quicker.

So, some of the activities that DBT has you focused on, I buy into those as well. For example, focused attention on a task you need to get done. Because what you're doing in that situation is you are engaging your reward mechanism so that you get some dopamine and that helps your self-esteem in the situation. So, if you're dealing with a distraction, with a distress, with a crisis that you can't resolve right now, so you're just trying to regulate yourself without actually problem-solving anything yet, instead of just doing an activity that's going to waste time, that's going to make you feel worse about yourself, that's going to hurt others around you, focus on something positive.

Makes a ton of sense to me. So, focus attention on a task, clean a room in your house, find an event to go to, go walking, exercise, play sports, eat some high-quality food that can really help bring you down as well. Spend time with children, with animals, just engage meaningfully with life. Can be very hard when you're in a crisis situation, but it can be very important nonetheless to flex that muscle.

Contributing, also very important, is the moment that you're in a state of crisis, it's often to have something to do, in my case, at least like sort of an egoic thing. Someone has slighted you. When you have focused on someone else's needs, helping a friend or family member, surprising someone, giving a hug, giving away things that you don't need, raises like your general vibration, if you will excuse me the term.

Comparisons is next. I'm a little, I don't know about that this much. I think that comparison is fine if you compare yourself with yourself. The moment that you compare yourself with others, for me that doesn't really turn out that well. All of the time, most of the time. Although in DBT, they advise you to compare yourself to those less fortunate. I would switch that comparison around to gratitude, which is as a G and not a C, so it doesn't fit the acronym.

But I think just focusing on the gratitude for the things that you have versus the things that you're lacking, gratitude can always level you out. So switch out comparisons with gratitude and you have the Vincent stamp of approval. You can also distract yourself with different emotions. If you're angry, if that's your crisis, you can pull yourself, try to pull yourself out of anger by reading emotional books or stories or watching a comedy special, listening to emotional music, even watch a scary movie, something like that, listen to religious music, soothing music, something that evokes something else, to grab you out of that crisis situation can be great as well.

Pushing away. This comes to what I was talking about earlier, is generally when we hear pushing away in context with our emotions, it's not something that we're fond of because what you resist subsists is what they say. But you can push things away for a while. Just you leave it for a little while. You leave the situation mentally. You build a wall between it. Because a lot of these crisis situations, and remember that was like part of the assumptions that we had in the beginning, we have an urge to resolve them right now.

But we're not in a state to actually resolve them. And there's also not a need to do it right away. Which is a little counterintuitive. Crisis feels more urgent. But a lot of the situation, it's actually not the case. Something can be really severe. But that doesn't mean that you can take a pause to really formulate a meaningful response from a calmed down situation, right? So, putting the pain on a shelf, box it up and putting away for a while is great, as long as you go and open it back up.

Right? I am prone when I distract to distract for too long. So if I distract, I give myself time. Right? So, an hour. I have an hour long pity party or something like that, or I will start in the morning. And starting in the morning can be a little bit tricky because then sleep passes and stuff like that. But my discipline in the morning is pretty good, so your mileage may vary.

We're not done with the skill yet. We have thoughts, so that's the T. So that's more engaging, like putting some cognitive load on your head so that you get, you know, sucked into some problem. So that can be just like counting, repeating words to a song in your head, puzzles, reading, programming is for me a great way to get sucked into a tunnel that I forget everything that's happening around me for a while.

Maybe for you that can be like a creative endeavor as well that creates cognitive load. Sensations as well. So it's a little bit similar to the tip skill, I would say. Going out in the rain, taking a hot or cold shower, squeezing a rubber ball very hard, or holding ice in your hand. So holding the ice in your hand is actually a really powerful one. I've read research about it.

I don't remember which, so I'm not going to quote it in the show notes, but that actually holding ice in your hand while you're in some kind of emotional situation, you're working through something is actually really, really effective. So that can be just another, together with the tip skill, a very powerful tool to have in your tool belt. Sometimes just knowing that you're taking out a tool and using the tool, the placebo effect basically can already be very powerful.

So especially with this skill where ice works better than placebo, that's what the research was about. You're just like, you're in a great spot. In a lot of the situation, honestly, probably placebo alone can be enough. Depends, of course, on the situation. Cool. The second skill that I'm going to talk about in this context is self-soothing. And I feel that these overlap a lot, right? Because when you're distracting that, that has a self-soothing aspect of it.

And if you're self-soothing, that has a distracting aspect to it. The focus here of the skill that focused very much is on your five senses. So what can you do to engage with your vision? Right? Looking at a flower, looking at a tree, watching a sunrise or a sunset, looking at stars, lighting a candle, looking at the flame, like something that is calming for you. Right? And so that's, that's a great way to pull yourself out.

Hearing, so that's obviously music, music can pull you out of a situation really well as well. Doesn't really require that much explanation. The same goes for smell. You can imagine that. Smell the roses, light a scented candle, smell coffee, things like that. It can switch your, like the situation that you're in when you're engaging with a different, with a sense like that, it can pull you out of like generally like that mental space that you are in with a crisis.

Then you have taste. So think of eating some of your favorite foods, having a piece of chocolate and tasting it really well, having a nice dessert. I'm really focusing on tasting it, not just like stress eating, but really taste the food, eat it mindfully. All right. Chewing gum can also be a good way to get rid of some like physical energy. And then we have touch. So for example, petting a dog or a cat, having say physical touch with someone like a hugging them or something like that, running your hand around a surface.

A personal one that like I really like is walking bare feet, or like on socks through like my apartment, or if I can be on grass or something like that, it's even better. Like that has a very grounding effect to me, just like feeling the impression of the different types of surfaces on my feet. That arbitrarily works very well for me. I think it has for me to do as well as like I like to move a lot.

So this combines touch with actually being in movement, having like some kind of like cardio activity going on. So, but it can be, if you're more like a type to wrap up in like a nice soft blanket, that can work as well. Right. Excuse me. So, I would want to point back to my previous episode as well, where I spoke about seven things that help you with your feel-good molecules to balance them out.

A lot of them overlap with some of the skills that I've spoken about, right? And although we've still one more skill to go, I do, in context with the distract and the self-soothe, I thought it good to mention it here. So, remember the seven things that we identified there. Just mindfulness in general. So, we've talked to that in context with some of these skills here. Exercise, quality food, goal achievement growth.

So, that was that dopamine activation that we saw in activities. Imagination, we're about to talk about that. Laughter. So, that's where you're self suiting or distracting with something that pulls you out of that crisis situation. And sunlight. So, remember those again. Again, so mindfulness, exercise, quality food, goal achievement, imagination, laughter, and sunlight. So, what you're doing then is you're calming down your crisis urge. We've seen these skills that there's an overlap with these skills as well.

And then you know as well that the ideas behind your dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and what's the last one that I'm forgetting, the endorphins, that will help you to pull out of the crisis situation as well. Right. Wonderful. I have a warning with the distract and the self-soothe. I've already given it. And that is that you get stuck in that too much, that you avoid the crisis situation by just distracting and self-soothing.

And that you give yourself permission to engage in compulsive, self-soothing behavior, such as self-medicating or unwanted sexual behaviors, that that's like, you're in a crisis situation, so you're allowed, and that then allows you to escalate and act out, right? That's obviously not what we're trying to do here. So in context of distress tolerance and crisis survival here, it's very important to underline is if you're struggling with an addiction, when you're in a state of crisis, you're going to want to have that comfort blanket of your addiction more than ever.

So that can be a reason. If you're prone to that, if you have an addicting distracting behavior, or you self-soothe by using a substance, that can be a reason to steer away from these two skills. Actually, DBT has a specific crisis survival when the crisis urge is an addiction. So maybe in the future, I'll record an episode on that. But if you're listening to this and you know that you're prone to addiction, addictive behavior in context with your crisis urge, this might be a good reason for you to either look at a future episode that I record, or just grab the DBT manual and doing it without my great director's commentary and personal experiences.

But know that it exists as a resource in the DBT handout. Let's get into the last skill, and that is the improve skill, where improve stands for approving the moment. So that is through imagery, that is through finding meaning, that's the M. Prayer, relaxing actions, one thing in the moment, a brief vacation, and self-encouragement and rethinking the situation. So let's zoom on this a little bit. Imagery, as far as I am concerned, overlaps with the imagination that I've talked about a bunch of different times.

Our brain is wonderful if you imagine in a clear way that you're in a different situation. If it's possible to relate it to your crisis situation even better, in a way. So if you imagine that everything will go well with this crisis situation, and you get detailed about that situation, that will improve your moment. So it's all about you're in this crisis situation, but you just want to transmute that moment.

You want to redefine it in such a way that it's more tolerable. Because what we're really trying to achieve is like, again, that urge surfing to get in the state where I'm just like, okay, I'm riding this urge, but I can hang. I can keep doing that. I can commit for another minute. Refraining some of these things or diving into imagery can be really helpful. It can be advantageous to even exit the entire scene that you're in.

Let's say that you're in very distressing conversation, and you can just escape for a moment to your happy place. There can be advantageous to that, especially if that happy place involves, for example, imagining all your emotions draining out of you, like hurtful emotions draining out of you, like water out of a pipe, like something like that. If it moves you in the direction, in the state that you would want to be, you can absolutely use the power of your imagination.

DBT talks about making up a calming fantasy world that is possible if we look back at the distract and the self-soothing and the caveats that I gave there. There is the risk of staying stuck there. Like it's fine to have a calming or an exciting fantasy world, but there's stuff in the real world to still address, so don't get too comfortable there. There might be more effective ways of using your imagination, which is more related to using your imagination and focusing on that the situation is actually going to turn out well.

Meaning, also very, very important. You can do that even when you're in a tough situation, when especially with it, if it's with a loved one. We assign our own meaning in life, right? Like meaning doesn't come pre-assigned out there in the universe, although your meaning might be influenced by the values of your group, your society. But if we really get serious about that and really honest about it, we make up meaning.

So the moment that something is happening to us, we can definitely lean into the fact that there is some meaning to that. So you can have different temperaments there, right? There's a more realist approach of saying like, oh, I don't really believe that things happen for a reason. That like if I'm just engaging with someone who is hurting me, that that's meant to grow me and that's fine.

That depends on your temperament, how you feel that that suits you. But what I often go to is Viktor Frankl again. So Viktor Frankl was a prisoner in a concentration camp in the Second World War. And what his observations were is that the inmates, the prisoners that would find meaning in their struggle in the present moment and not linger too much about the past or what's going to happen in the future, they would survive.

The ones that would find meaning in the moment. The ones who didn't would wither away and die. Although I have talked about comparison and I'm not being a fan of comparison, I do find it completely fine to get inspiration from stories. Like, we are social creatures as humans, and stories, narrative structures, that inspires us to do things, has done for generations and generations. So that inspires me to find meaning in my suffering in that situation.

And I think that by and large it can be found. So you can find purpose or meaning in a painful situation. You can find positive aspects of a painful situation, although it feels sometimes like you just want to say, oh, but this just sucks. And I would just want to say that it sucks. I'm not saying that you can't say that, but I'm saying it's a dialectic.

Yes, it absolutely sucks, sucks, and there's positive aspects, and there's growth that we can get from that. Very important. On to prayer. You might not be a religious person. And as far as it goes for me, I feel I am a spiritual person, but I do not really think of God as a gentleman with whiskers in the sky. I can very much get into praying or requesting strength, asking for strength for something that's bigger than me at that moment.

That can be my compressed ego self that wants strength from my bigger self. I know that in a more calmer state, I have more energy to deal with that, I have more strength. I can request that strength from me, from me in the future or me in the past. If you just don't concern yourself with how time seems to work. But as long as in the power of our imagination and belief that works, I feel that we can access welts of strength to bear pain that we have in a moment.

I'm not particularly great at that. I didn't grow up with prayer. So I'm not, it doesn't really come to me as well as a knee jerk to be able to like relinquish control for a second and opening my heart to something larger. I do think it's incredible, incredibly powerful. So it's very similar. I find it comparable to meaning. I think meaning and like asking for strength are related in some way.

Meaning may be more self-assigned where prayer is more asking for something that's bigger than you. But still they, I feel for me that they're like the energy is coming out of the same direction, right? It's both like somewhat of a spiritual connection, right? It's not as like mundane physical stuff. Meaning is stuff of concepts, prayer is stuff of concepts, I feel. The R stands for relaxing actions.

I don't know why this is repeated here, probably so that we can get to a right acronym. But as far as I'm concerned, this just repeats, you know, breathing deeply, taking a hot bath. We've talked about all of these skills before, massages. So hey, it's being repeated one more time. Just like the O, which stands for one thing in the moment, that tends just to be the reference within DBT to just mindfulness.

So this is just like you can generally improve a moment, like the moment can be more bearable when you become present, right? Because suffering is in thoughts, and if you put yourself in the present, and put your mind in the present, and focus your entire attention on the physical, suffering tends to be a lot less. Because even if you're having like this very severe argument or something like that, I mean, for me, these things are often interpersonal.

If you can just focus on that in this situation for the rest, there are so many neutral things or good things, you know. You can still be wearing a comfortable outfit. You still can be sitting comfortable on the couch. You can still be like a pleasant temperature. That can just help immensely. The principle of the vacation, so that's the V, a brief vacation. I feel that's very related to destruction again, so I don't really know.

I mean, I'm very much into this, right? Life's hard. We need breaks. And especially if, even if we take this approach, that we're very like, you know, we just like grind all the time, and that's what we do, and we don't take vacations, and we go to work. I think that that creates a dynamic of that. You do that, and then at one point, you can't keep that up anymore, and you fall off the wagon, and then you're disappointed with yourself.

So I actually think that planning breaks, planning in a brief vacation in this situation is very essential. You're dealing with a crisis, something really bad has happened. It is actually very, very important to take that one hour breather from that hard work. Maybe something really scary in your family is happening. Maybe it's someone who's got in trouble with the law, or is sick, is in the hospital.

Your inclination is to keep working, keep working, keep working, but it is also important to take a brief vacation from your responsibility. So I don't know if I completely understand why they put that in the improve skill right here. I feel like it's more part of distraction. But hey, it's an important principle nonetheless. To whatever is going on, give yourself the permission to actually take a break, not just permission.

Mandate yourself to take a break because shit's hard. It's hard work. Finally, closing out with self-encouragement and rethinking the situation. So encouragement is actually really, really important for personal development and allowing people to do hard things. And the primary source of encouragement is from yourself. We are very, very good at talking ourselves down. We're not that great by and large at self-encouragement. So having that as tool in your tool belt is very important, and it can be things like just literally cheerleading yourself.

You can do this. I will make the best out of this. To more like tolerance. So as I can stand this, I can write this wave. This too shall pass. I will be okay. It won't last forever. Like there's a little bit of a temperature difference between those two. Whatever works in the situation for you, lean into that. But it's important. If I look at my own personal examples, and again, a lot of my examples are interpersonal conflict, things like that.

I at one point like sort of fold, right? Like I can't pep myself up anymore. And then I just get more sulky and I'm like, okay, everything's my fault, and that doesn't help, right? So this can actually be very important to dip into repeatedly while keeping an eye on your energy, right? Because encouragement oftentimes allows you to stay into in the moment.

That's why it's part of this improved skill. I feel the improved skill is much more focused on sticking with the crisis where, you know, distract themselves to remove you from the crisis for a little bit and allows you to come back. So, you know, that I think that there's a lot of a lot of value to that. There's a lot more details to go into, right? Like what are relaxing actions?

What are good relaxing actions? How do I pray? How do I find meaning in life? If you want to find meaning in life, check out my episode about values. That's the start of finding your values and that helps you assign meaning to things in the universe a lot better. But for now, I wouldn't want to start rounding this up. So we've talked about all the skills that I wanted to talk on.

I do want to re-highlight the importance of urge surfing here, the concept of not having to say, okay, I can get through this entire crisis without crumbling. I don't know if I have the energy for, that's fine to say, but commit for the next five minutes, and then for another five minutes, and another five minutes, while you're working all these other skills to reduce your agitation, to reduce the stress that you're under.

I like to talk about as well about like knowing your level of your mastery of something, something like that, so that you can tag on like how much do I need that? I think for this topic is pretty straightforward. But to just reiterate on that is like, how do we know if you need this? I mean, probably if you're still listening to this, you need it or you think you know someone that needs it.

But it comes down to if you get into a lot of situations where you get emotionally overwhelmed, you get in a crisis situation and you get in trouble, you make things worse, you get in a bar fight, you call your spouse an asshole, you, you know, any of these things, you punch someone out, right? That's a good example or you fly from the scene, like you start packing your bag to leave the house because you're being treated so poorly, right?

I also like to talk about backlash from your environment. I think for this skill, it is quite important to announce it to your environment that that's what you're doing, right? Because if they're not accustomed to you being skillful in this way, that can be hard for them to interpret. So it can actually be important as you're listening to this episode now, as one of the takeaways to be like, hey, person in my life or before a situation occurs to actually start talking about that.

Now, that's not always possible, right? So it depends on how intimate you are with someone. Because the more it's like a work relationship or your boss or something like that, the less you get backlash from that environment, right? Like if you have a heated conversation with your boss, and you just say, okay, I want to go to the bathroom, they're not going to be like, but I had this heated conversation with you last weekend, and this is something completely different.

That's generally not how it goes. So these people don't really have that deep knowledge of you and understanding of your patterns. So you can just basically do whatever you want. But the more close it gets to you, it's your wife, your children, your brother, your father, your mother. It can be important to highlight before you start doing it, or as you're doing it as, hey, I feel like I'm in a state of crisis.

I have some skills that allows me to sort of calm down, and I'm going to do this thing. I will come back in 15 minutes, or we will talk about this in the morning, or would it suit you to talk about, to continue talking about this in the morning? That's not always accepted very gracefully, but you're not making things worse. And if you establish this pattern in your life, I think that people ultimately will be thankful for it.

Not in the moment, but in the longer term, they will be. So I hope that this set of skills is useful to you. It has been very useful to me. Again, in next episodes, we're going to talk about how to get beyond just simply surviving a crisis situation, but what comes next? Accepting reality and becoming more free? To be like less of a puppet of this crisis feeling that you get into.

See if I have any closing remarks here. I find it important to highlight, if you're someone that is prone to getting into a crisis state a lot, to not shame yourself, to not compare yourself, to not do that. Because the reason that you slip into a crisis response, there is a historic reason for it, probably. That is probably a way in the environment you grew up or whatever, that you got to get what you need by acting out, by really leaning into the crisis aspect of it.

There might have not been any good role model to show you to actually handle crisis in a correct way. Like you might not have had an adult in your life that showcased, this is how you deal with a crisis situation in the right way. You might not have an adult that would take care of a business but would also take a break at the right moments. And the moment that that gets imprinted to you when you're a child, that's wonderful.

And then probably you would never even have clicked on this episode because you're good. What do you mean, crisis or survival, right? So it's really important to, like everything in mental health and personal development, to deeply accept where you are, to not shame yourself, to not want to grow too fast, and at the same time grow. Because the acceptance of the fact that you can't learn this overnight actually enables this growth in the long term.

So, excellent. I think that's all the things that I wanted to mention. Stay tuned for the next episodes on more distress tolerance. And yeah, this has been Vincent for The Meaningful Shit Show, and see you next time. Thank you.