Using DBT Therapy Skills to Manage Stress & Overwhelm

Signs of Stress and Overwhelm

Stress and being overwhelmed are common experiences that can feel unbearable at times. Whether due to work, relationships, politics, mental health, or life’s many challenges, everyone faces moments of stress at varying levels. Stress is the body’s response to situations viewed as uncontrollable or unpredictable, triggering a “fight-or-flight” reaction and releasing hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to help us react. While short-term stress can be motivating and helpful, prolonged or chronic stress can negatively impact physical and mental health, leading to issues such as anxiety, depression, or burnout. Long-term or intense unresolved stress can also lead to feeling overwhelmed, which can include being flooded by emotions or thoughts, where everything feels too much to handle at once.

Given the increasingly demanding lifestyles and expectations humans face, these experiences are unfortunately not isolated events but can become everyday feelings. Stress and being overwhelmed can affect both the mind and body in various ways. Emotionally, it can lead to irritability, anxiety, sadness, and a lack of motivation. Mentally, it can cause difficulty concentrating, racing thoughts, and indecision. Physically, stress may result in fatigue, sleep disturbances, muscle tension, and digestive issues. Behaviorally, it can cause procrastination, social withdrawal, unhealthy eating habits, or reliance on substances to cope. In daily life, stress can reduce productivity at work, cause relationship conflicts, and impact physical health, contributing to conditions like heart disease and high blood pressure. Learning how to manage these factors in healthy and productive ways can make a huge difference in how we feel and interact with others, improving our overall well-being and relationships.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) for Stress and Overwhelm

DBT is an intervention founded by Marsha Linehan that focuses on helping individuals who struggle with self-destructive behaviors, emotional dysregulation, and difficulties in interpersonal relationships. DBT is used to treat a variety of concerns, from depression to eating disorders to anxiety, and in the case of stress and overwhelm, DBT offers a variety of tools and techniques to help understand and cope with intense emotions.

Mindfulness and Emotional Awareness for Understanding Stress

When one stressful situation triggers spiraling thoughts, it can cause stress to snowball and affect other areas of life. For example, after a disagreement with a partner, worrying about unresolved issues can increase frustration and tension, even when the original problem was minor. Mindfulness, a core DBT skill, helps break this cycle by increasing awareness and enabling you to observe thoughts and feelings without becoming consumed by them.

DBT teaches mindfulness through three skills: observe, describe, and participate. We can observe our immediate surroundings and internal experiences through our physical senses without attachment or labeling, which can be especially important to not letting stress build up. Describe involves accurately labeling observations, feelings, and thoughts without adding personal interpretations or judgments to help ground us. Lastly, the skill of participate asks us to throw ourselves 100% into what we are doing — to be present without worrying about everything else that needs to be done.

Mindfulness helps build introspection into our emotions, as we often experience feelings without fully understanding the event triggering them, our interpretation of the event, or the specific emotion we’re experiencing. The next time you experience stress or feel overwhelmed, try practicing awareness by describing the event that triggered the stress, noticing the body sensations experienced, and identifying the emotion you feel in the moment.

Manage Emotional Intensity with Crisis Survival and Emotion Regulation Skills

Sometimes, stress can create such intense emotional arousal that it becomes difficult to think clearly or make effective decisions. DBT acknowledges the challenges related to intense distress with crisis survival skills, which are short-term solutions to painful situations. Specifically, with the mind-body connection for stress, the TIP skills — a mnemonic for Temperature, Intense exercise, Paced breathing, and Paired muscle relaxation — quickly alter body chemistry to reduce intense emotional arousal.

A huge aspect of regulating emotions and making sure we are not always in a state of stress is reducing our physiological vulnerabilities. The DBT PLEASE skill emphasizes that an out-of-balance body increases vulnerability to negative emotions. The mnemonic covers:

Together, these help ensure we are engaging in the self-care needed to stay emotionally regulated.

Navigate Relationship Stress with Effective and Assertive Communication

Stress and being overwhelmed can be caused by interpersonal conflict or create conflict themselves due to heightened emotions. When we struggle to communicate our needs or set boundaries with others, it can lead to misunderstandings and, at times, resentment as emotions build up and frustrations arise. DEAR MAN is a core DBT skill that helps us effectively obtain our objective assertively without being aggressive. The mnemonic involves:

Long-Term Stress Management with DBT Skills

The DBT skills explored here are simply a small set out of the immensely wide range of skills DBT offers. It is not just about managing stress in the moment but also building long-term emotional resilience. By practicing these skills and engaging in DBT interventions consistently, we can create a stronger foundation for handling stress and overwhelm when they arise.