AreasLow mood and hard feelings

Low mood and hard feelings

Feelings are information before they are problems. The practices here are about naming what you feel accurately, sitting with what will not move yet, and acting on what matters to you even on the days nothing feels like anything.

Narrowed down

4 practices
Theme · When you use something to cope
How long you have · Twenty minutes
Approach · DBT skills
About this theme

If you are using something to cope and it has become hard to stop, please speak to a doctor before changing anything.

When someone keeps doing the risky thing after every explanation, the missing piece is usually not information. The pull is simply louder than the knowledge.

Which means another lecture is mostly wasted breath, while changing what is within reach is not. Fewer bottles in the house, a route home that avoids…

Twenty minutesWhen you use something to copeDBT skillsQur’an 45:23

If a young person is using regularly, waiting to see whether they grow out of it is a gamble. Help early is nearly always cheaper than help later.

Families often hold off because raising it feels like an accusation. You can raise it without one: say what you have noticed, say you are not going…

Twenty minutesWhen you use something to copeDBT skillsQur’an 2:195

Sometimes the drinking or the smoking is not the first problem at all. It is somebody's own treatment for an attention difficulty or an anxiety nobody has looked at yet.

You can usually tell from what it is used for: to speak in a group, to sit still long enough to work, to sleep. Where that is the shape of it, work…

Twenty minutesWhen you use something to copeDBT skillsQur’an 13:11

Draw your own chart of the moment you usually give in, with the questions you actually ask yourself, and put it where you will see it.

One woman smoking around ten bowls a day made hers as a set of branches: is it a working day, have I been to work, are the errands done, are the…

Twenty minutesWhen you use something to copeDBT skillsQur’an 16:67