Emotion Regulation: Improving Happiness and Preventing Distress

Hosted By:
Dr. Dawn-Elise “Doc” Snipes

Dialectical Behavior Therapy
Techniques
Emotion Regulation
Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes https://docsnipes.com Access additional videos, worksheets and coaching.
Presented by: Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes Executive Director, AllCEUs
Podcast Host: Counselor Toolbox & Happiness isn’t Brain Surgery
Author: Journey to Recovery (2015) & Happiness Isn’t Brain Surgery (2017)

Objectives
 Review the basic premises of DBT
 Learn about the HPA-Axis
 Define emotion regulation
 Identify why emotion regulation is important and
how it can help you reduce your distress
 Explore emotion regulation techniques

Basic DBT Premises
 Dialectical Theory
 Everything is interconnected
 Reality is not static
 Constantly evolving truth can be found by synthesizing
differing points of view

Activity
 Interconnectedness
 How do your relationships impact your mood and how
does your mood impact your relationships?
 How does your environment impact your mood, and
how does your mood impact your environment?
 How does your health/energy impact your mood, and
how does your mood impact your health/energy?
 How do your thoughts impact your feelings, and how do
your feelings impact your thoughts?

Activity
 Interconnectedness
 How do your thoughts impact your feelings
Think about a time you dreaded doing something.
 What was your mood like?
 How patient and tolerant were you toward others?
 How did others seem to react to you?
 How did their reaction to you affect you?
 What was your environment like?
How is this scenario different when you are looking
forward to something?

Activity
 Reality is ever-changing
 What is real and accurate in this very moment may not
be accurate in the next moment.
Have you ever started exercising and gotten stronger?
Have you ever gained or lost weight and changed clothing
size?
Have you ever known someone who was attentive and
kind who started being neglectful and irritable?
How have your needs changed over the past 5 years?
How have your needs changed over the past 5 hours?

Activity
 Truth can be found by synthesizing differing points of
view
 Think of a disagreement you had with someone.
 What was your perception of what was going on?
 What was their perception?
 Was reality somewhere in the middle?
 Think about a time you had to make a decision about
something you were totally torn on. Play Devil’s advocate.
 Think about a time when you had to make a decision and
your heart told you one thing, but your head told you
something else?

Section Summary
 Everything is interconnected
 Your feelings, thoughts and physical health all impact
each other
 Your mood and behavior impact your environment and
your relationships which, in turn, impact you.
 You have the ability to control
Thoughts
Physical vulnerabilities (health)
Environment
Relationships

Section Summary
 Reality is not static
 However, it is what it is.
 Needs, wants and situations can change dramatically over
time
 Reality is based on finding the truth
 Truth can be found by synthesizing differing points of
view at that exact moment
 In situations involving other people, put yourself in their shoes
(or ask them) and explore their point of view
 In situations involving only yourself, examine situations from a
logical perspective of how it will help you achieve your long
term goals, and from an emotional perspective of what will
ultimately make you happier.

Objectives
how it can help

What is Emotion Regulation
 Emotional dysregulation results from a
combination of
 High emotional vulnerability
 Extended time needed to return to baseline
 Inability to regulate or modulate your emotions
 If you are emotionally reactive you may find that
your environments have often been invalidating

Understanding Emotions
 Emotions are a natural response
 Emotions are functional to the person in their
reality at that moment
 Emotions function to:
 Communicate to others and influence and control their
behaviors
 Serve as an alert or alarm which motivate your own
behaviors

 Emotional regulation is how you experience and
express emotions
 Emotion Regulation
 Mitigates unwanted emotions by reducing
vulnerabilities
 Teaches that:
Emotions in and of themselves are not good or bad
Suppressing emotions makes things worse

Emotion Regulation & Vulnerabilities
 Sleep
 Nutrition
 Illness
 Pain
 “Stress”

Activity
 Reactivity Solution
 Identify all of the vulnerabilities you have today, and decide
how much “room” you have for additional stressors
 What can you do to make room for stressors today? (What
vulnerabilities can you eliminate?)
Additional
Stressors
Nutrition
Illness
Pain
Sleep
Stress

Activity
 Vulnerability Reduction: How can you reduce each
one of these vulnerabilities
 Lack of quality sleep
 Poor nutrition (including hydration)
 Pain
 Illness
 “Stress”

Activity
 Emotions are normal
 Think about finding a spider crawling on the wall next to you
 In that moment, your reality at the time, did the situation involve
a threat to your safety or sense of control?
 If so, getting anxious would be a normal response
 Think about a time you got angry because a friend disagreed
with you
 In that moment, your reality at the time, did the situation involve
a threat to your safety, sense of control or self-esteem?
 If so, getting angry was normal

Addressing Emotions
 Change the reality to change emotions
 The situation
 Your knowledge
 Your thoughts

Activity
 Emotions are normal
 Think about finding a spider crawling on the wall next to
you
The situation
Your knowledge
Your thoughts
 Think about a time you got angry because a friend
disagreed with you
The situation
Your knowledge
Your thoughts

Section Summary
 Emotions are not good or bad.
 You tend to be more reactive with unpleasant
emotions when you are already “vulnerable”
 By reducing vulnerabilities you can reduce your
reactivity because you have more energy available to
deal with what life throws at you.
 The next step is to address unpleasant emotions by
improving the next moment through changing
 The situation
 Your knowledge
 Your thoughts

 Emotional vulnerability refers to [situations] in
which you are more emotionally sensitive or
reactive than others
 What makes people more reactive
Current vulnerabilities (including stress)
Differences in the central nervous system and HPA Axis
Different learning experiences
Degree to which something conflicts with your beliefs
about how the world “should” be

The HPA-Axis
 Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal (HPA) axis is our
central Threat Response System
 When it is activated it causes cortisol to be released
 Cortisol causes
 Blood glucose to increase
 Wake-up/Excitatory chemicals and hormones to be
released
 Stimulation  exhaustion
 Sex hormones to be SUPPRESSED
 Anxiety
 Poor sleep
 Depression

Basic Threats
 Loss of control/The unknown
 Rejection/Failure
 Death

The Brain and Stress
 When there is a chronic threat to safety and a
constant underlay of anxiety
 You brain makes connections from your experiences and
prunes away connections that are not utilized.
 If 5 out of 6 of your last friendships ended poorly, and one
is still going, what is your expectation of that relationship?
 People who feel a lack of control over their
environment are particularly vulnerable chronic
stress
 Abused and neglected children or adults
 Adults with anxiety or depressive disorders

The Brain and Stress
 The hypervigilant state activated by stress:
 Disrupts the ability to focus and learn
 Impairs the ability to form new memories and recall
information (Do you really learn much when you are
highly stressed or feeling threatened?)
 Is associated with emotional and behavioral
dysregulation.
You remember the unpleasant things
Have difficulty recalling the pleasant ones
Have difficulty exploring alternate possibilities
= STRESS
https://campuspress
.yale.edu/exploring
mentalhealth/stress-
and-the-hpa-axis/

Chronic Stress and Hypocortisolism
 When people are under chronic stress, the brain
 May stop getting as stressed about each individual thing
to prevent overload
 Conserves excitatory brain chemicals for the fight or
flight response
 When it perceives a threat/stressor worth responding
to, it responds extremely strongly. (dysregulation)

Chronic Stress and Hypocortisolism
 By reducing chronic stress, over time your brain
will
 Recover and rebalance and quit staying in survival
mode.
 Become more able to access positive memories
 You will be more able to tolerate distress and explore
stressors from the wise-mind.
 Form new, positive memories

Section Summary
 Emotional dysregulation results from high
emotional vulnerability due to
 long-term stress
 Invalidating environments
 If you grew up in an invalidating environment, you
may have never developed the tools to deal
effectively with your emotions
 This created a source of constant stress for you
which only intensified your emotional reactions.

Section Summary
 Under stress your brain does not learn or retrieve
memories as effectively
 When you are feeling unpleasant emotions, you
notice and remember things that support those
feelings.
 Emotional dysregulation activates the Threat
Response System which:
 Disrupts the ability to focus and learn
 Impairs the ability to form new memories and recall
new, contradictory, positive information

Section Summary
 Emotion Regulation involves eliminating or
mitigating vulnerabilities in order to allow the
brain to rebalance and get out of survival mode.

Connect With Us
Subscribe to the podcast
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
https://youtube.com/allceuseducation
Join our Facebook Group
https://Docsnipes.com/Facebook
Join our Community & Access
Additional Resources
https://docsnipes.com

Objectives
how it can help you

Emotion Regulation
 Is useful for anyone
 Increases present focused emotion awareness
 Increases cognitive flexibility
 Identifies and prevents patterns of
 Emotion avoidance
 Emotion-driven behaviors
 Increases awareness and tolerance of emotion-
related physical sensations
 Uses emotion focused exposure procedures

Identifying Obstacles to Changing Emotions
 Biological factors
 Organic
Brain abnormalities
Trauma induced brain damage
 Situationally caused by
Chronic stress
Addiction
Sleep deprivation
Nutritional problems +/-

Activity
 Mitigation
 Some days you just won’t be 100% What can you do to
be kind to yourself so you have the resources to deal
with the must dos?
When I am having an off day, to be good to myself, I
will…
By being kind to myself, I am preventing emotional
distress which…

Activity
 Time Management
 Make a list of everything you need/want to do this
week
 Cross off anything that doesn’t have to be done this
week
 Highlight everything that MUST get done
Identify people that can help
Identify any short-cuts to make it more do-able

 Skills factors
 Cognitive responses
Unhelpful thoughts
Pessimism
 Behavioral responses
Inability to tolerate distress
Inability to delay acting on urges

Activity
 Identify 2 positive things you can tell yourself for
each of the following types of stressful situations
 Loss of control/the unknown
 Failure/rejection
 Safety threats

 Environmental Factors
 People
 Places
 Things

Activity
 Identifying and overcoming obstacles to changing
emotions (one page for each)
 Identify all of the people who cause stress in your life
How can you deal with that?
 Identify all of the people who buffer stress in your life
How can you nurture that?
 Identify common stressful situations/things and places
How can you make them less stressful?

Summary
 Emotion regulation helps people become more
aware of their emotional states throughout the
day
 Obstacles to changing emotions include
biological, skills and environmental factors
 All obstacles can be traversed…
 Prevent as many as possible
 Find ways to work with or around the ones that are not
preventable.

Objectives
 Explore emotion regulation techniques
 Mindfulness
 Identifying and labeling emotions
 Changing emotions/Improving the next moment

Mindfulness
 Nonjudgmental observation and description of
current emotions
 Remember that primary emotions are often
adaptive and appropriate
 Much emotional distress is a result of secondary
responses:
 Shame over having it
 Anxiety about it being “wrong”
 Rage due to feeling judged for it
 Mindfulness serves as an exposure technique

Mindfulness
 Exposure to intense emotions without negative
consequences (Nonjudgmental acceptance)
extinguishes the secondary emotional response
Scenario 1
• Unpleasant experience
• Unpleasant emotion
• Guilt/Shame/Anger
• Acting to stop the avalanche of
negativity in the absence of
adequate skills
Scenario 2
• Unpleasant experience
• Unpleasant emotion
• Ability to deal with one emotion

Identifying and Labeling Emotions
 Mindfulness in context
 Identify
 The event prompting the emotion
 Thoughts
 Physical Sensations
 Urges
 Expressive behaviors associated with the emotion
 Interpretations of that event
 History prior to the event that increased vulnerability to
emotional dysregulation
 After effects of the emotion on other types of functioning

Changing Unwanted Emotions
 Check the facts
 For and Against
 Emotional vs. Factual reasoning
 Problem Solving
 Changing the situation that is causing the unpleasant
emotion
 Prevent vulnerabilities
 Reduces reactivity
By turning down the stress response
Helping the person be aware of and able to
learn/remember positive experiences

Reducing Vulnerability to the Emotional Mind
 Building mastery through
 Activities that build self-efficacy, self-control and a
sense of competence to handle your stressors
Goal Setting
Small steps
Mental Rehearsal

Reducing Vulnerability to the Emotional Mind
 Physical Body-Mind Care
 Pain and illness treatment
 [Laughter]
 Eating to support mental and physical health
 Addictive or mood altering drugs or behaviors
 Sleep
 Exercise

Activity
 Creating Mastery
 Think of a situation that often gets you upset or
stressed out.
Identify the thoughts causing your distress
Check the facts
Identify how you want to react (set a goal)
Identify the steps in making that happen (don’t forget to
eliminate vulnerabilities & care for mind and body)
Rehearse it in your mind. See yourself successfully
handling the situation

Summary
 Emotional dysregulation is common in many disorders
 People with dysregulated emotions have a stronger and
longer lasting response to stimuli
 Emotional dysregulation is often punished or
invalidated, increasing hopelessness and isolation
 Emotional regulation means
 Using mindfulness to
 Be aware of and reduce vulnerabilities
 Identify the function and reinforcers for current emotions
 Checking for facts
 Problem solving

Emotion Regulation: Improving Happiness and Preventing Distress

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Similar to Emotion Regulation: Improving Happiness and Preventing Distress

Similar to Emotion Regulation: Improving Happiness and Preventing Distress (20)

More from Dr. DawnElise Snipes ★AllCEUs★ Unlimited Counselor Training

More from Dr. DawnElise Snipes ★AllCEUs★ Unlimited Counselor Training (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Emotion Regulation: Improving Happiness and Preventing Distress