Tips to Manage Anxiety Through Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

While there are several approaches for teaching anxiety patients how to control their condition, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is one of the proven methods to be considered successful in recent studies. Simply said, DBT blends cognitive counseling with the eastern Buddhist notion of mindfulness. The essential premise of DBT is that you can’t learn to control anxiety without being aware of your environment, mental state, and current emotions. According to this therapy, practicing mindfulness entails three components or skills known as Observe, Describe, and Participate.

How to Manage Anxiety by Using the Observe Skill

In this regard, you need to take notice of what is going on around you at any given time. You can count the colors in a picture or take note, without passing judgment, of the mood you are experiencing at the moment.

How to Manage Anxiety by Using the Describe Skill

You need to put what you’ve noticed into words. Out loud, name the colors and explain the feeling, including how it feels and where it is felt in your body.

How to Manage Anxiety by Using the Participate Skill

You can take part in this context as it implies allowing it to exist rather than attempting to erase it. Anxiety is often exacerbated when we seek to flee from it, and we empower it when we devote all our focus to evading it. Therefore, take part in color counting by devoting your whole concentration to that work. Count and identify the colors in a picture using your whole concentration, refusing to let it stray. If you’re seeing and reporting a feeling, make no effort to suppress or exaggerate it. Immerse yourself in it, and be aware of the fact that a feeling is only that: an emotion, and that regardless of how strong it seems today, all emotions inevitably occur and disappear.

When Should You Apply Your Skills?

If you make a conscious effort to practice mindfulness in your everyday life, you’ll get aware of how often you feel anxiety and which anxiety triggers are especially relevant for you. It’s a process, and it’ll take time to detect anxiety in its early phases, but it can begin by noting any symptoms connected with anxiety in your body. As you go about your everyday tasks attentively, check in with yourself periodically to see whether you’re experiencing any physical sensations that lead you to assume you are becoming nervous. As soon as you feel your anxiety level increasing, you can pause and employ the Observe, Describe, and Participate method.

Practice is critical to acquiring the ability to manage your anxiety. As basic as these approaches may seem, mastering DBT skills for anxiety management is not simple. It’ll take immense practice and time. Do not berate yourself if you are unable to master the abilities immediately. Rather than that, you need to let yourself make blunders and gently bring your attention back to the subject at hand when it wanders, as it most assuredly will. These abilities may take months or even years to fully perfect, and that is perfectly fine. You spent most of your life developing anxiety, and it’ll take a great deal of time for you to build the skills necessary to control it.