DBT for Anxiety: Holistic Healing with the Self-Soothing DBT Skill

Anxiety can have physical and mental triggers

Anxiety is often discussed with most of the focus on mental triggers, but it’s important to recognize that physical inputs and processes can trigger anxiety too. When you have an anxiety disorder, sights, smells, sounds, sensations, and even flavors that trigger memories or associations for your body and mind can make you feel like you’re in danger, even if you’re in a totally neutral or even positive place. These physical triggers can come from outside sources, or can come from your own body, e.g., when your heart rate increases from caffeine, it can trigger panic, or noticing a tickle in your throat and suddenly having intense anxiety over whether or not you’re sick.

Understanding that anxiety can have physical triggers opens the door to using physical inputs to help you overcome your anxiety. Just as redirecting your mind away from unhelpful or untrue thoughts and emotions helps you manage anxiety, redirecting your physical body away from concerning sensations and on to inputs that feel safe can help you as well.

You can reduce anxiety through mindful engagement of your senses

Mindfulness helps you manage anxiety

Mindfulness is a proven tool to support people in reducing the impacts of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, borderline personality disorder, trauma, and more. It is, in essence, a redirection of all of your attention to the present moment. With a mindset of openness, curiosity, and non-judgment, you observe your current sensations, emotions, thoughts, and what’s happening around you.

When something threatening or dangerous is happening, anxiety makes sense. But when anxiety starts intruding on the safe, neutral, everyday moments of your life, returning your attention to the present moment helps you align your body and mind with the safety of that moment.

Mindfulness of the senses helps you manage physical symptoms of anxiety

When your anxiety is triggered, even if it’s because of a physical sensation like a sound, a sensation, or a smell, you can use mindful attention to your senses to return yourself to here and now, and reduce your body and mind’s anxiety response in the moment. Mindfulness reminds you that even distressing emotions, thoughts, and sensations don’t last forever, and they aren’t the only thing happening right now.

Being mindful of the here and now works best if you use all your available senses. You can ground yourself in the sensations of the moment to help you recognize where you are and what’s happening around you, creating opportunities to feel safer, calmer, and more open to experiences, even if they’re difficult ones.

How to Self-Soothe with DBT

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) skills like IMPROVE and Self-Soothing tie together the DBT pillars of mindfulness and distress tolerance to help you manage anxiety. Attuning to your senses can help you stay present and centered, and can give you a chance to remember that comfort, enjoyment, and meaning are still possible even in the worst moments of the physical and mental distress of anxiety.

The Self-Soothing DBT skill engages your senses to expand your distress tolerance

The Self-Soothing DBT skill uses your physical sensing of the world around you to ease anxiety symptoms. You can change the intensity of your anxiety by creating positive and enjoyable sensory experiences for yourself, even in moments when anxiety has left you with a pounding heartbeat, short of breath, jittery, shaky, numb, or terrified. Self-Soothing can help you signal to your body that you’re in a safe, comforting environment, and when your body senses that it is safe, it will signal to your mind that it’s time to calm down.

When you’re struggling with physical symptoms of anxiety, try Self-Soothing with your senses. Focus your attention on your senses, mindfully. Describe what you’re sensing in detail. Notice what catches your attention, and when your mind tries to wander back to your anxiety, redirect it to the sense you’re focusing on.

• Sight: Look around you for something enjoyable to look at, move to a different space that offers you a beautiful view, or look at pictures of nature, space, cute animals, or loved ones.
• Hearing: beautiful music, voices you enjoy, a favorite audiobook, or sounds of nature can create enjoyment even when anxiety is trying to get you to focus on fear.
• Smell: seek out comforting scents like tea or coffee, spices, fresh flowers, a campfire, fresh cut grass, your favorite perfume or cologne, essential oils, etc.
• Touch: Find textures that you enjoy and engage with them with all your attention. Soft blankets, warm cozy clothes, fresh breeze on your face, a hot bath, sand between your toes, a cold drink, sitting in the sun, etc.
• Taste: Slowly and mindfully enjoy flavors that mean something to you, like a favorite recipe, your best-loved coffee or tea, or a meal from your favorite restaurant.

The IMPROVE DBT skill connects you to the moment in a more positive way

The Self-Soothing DBT skill aligns you to the present moment through pure sensory input. You can add to the mindful experiencing of your senses through the IMPROVE distress tolerance skill as well. The IMPROVE skill helps you work on exercising agency over your attention by directing it toward more enjoyable, assuring, or calming inputs.

You have power over your attention, even when anxiety is demanding you focus solely on fear, and IMPROVE can give you a framework to use when you’re distressed and want to redirect your attention to make it through the moment.

IMPROVE stands for:

• Imagery: imagine a safe, beautiful, calming place, like the beach, a mountain retreat, or a comforting space in your home.
• Meaning: Look for meaning in the lives of people who have made it through hard times or have learned from difficult experiences. Try to find meaning or purpose in something in your life, and focus on that.
• Prayer: Ask for strength and support from a deity, religious practice, the universe, or even your own Wise Mind.
• Relaxation: Create a relaxing environment for yourself; try using the Self-Soothing steps to support your relaxation.
• One thing in the moment: focus on one thing you’re doing in the moment. Direct all your attention to a small, simple activity like washing your hands or sitting in a chair.
• Vacation: Take a vacation from the moment. Take a walk, plan an actual vacation, or give yourself a mental vacation, even if it’s just for a short time.
• Encouragement: Recite positive self-affirmations aloud to reinforce your outlook on the situation.

Holistic mental health treatment in Bellevue can help you heal both the physical and mental symptoms of anxiety

THIRA Health’s expert practitioners use DBT, alongside other holistic therapeutic approaches, to help people manage both the mental and the physical disruptions of anxiety disorders. Learning DBT skills like IMPROVE and Self-Soothing at THIRA Health’s intensive anxiety treatment programs shows you that you can create a life worth living, even when struggling with anxiety symptoms.

Using mindfulness to attune to your senses can happen in many ways, and THIRA Health integrates multiple approaches to connect you to yourself as part of intensive anxiety treatment. These DBT skills, as part of a comprehensive DBT program, are an empowering complement to holistic mental healthcare choices like artistic expression, mindful movement, meditation, and more that are offered in THIRA Health’s mental health treatment programs.

If you or your teen are ready for lasting recovery from anxiety’s physical and mental impacts, our multidisciplinary, expert clinicians at THIRA Health in Washington are here for you. Contact us today to get started!