Dinner has been in front of you for an hour and you have moved it around the plate without eating any of it. Something happened this afternoon and it is still sitting in your chest.
Nothing more can be done about it until tomorrow, and there is a whole evening between now and sleep.
Distraction techniques for distress tolerance are what dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) offers for exactly these hours. They are not for fixing what happened. They are for getting through the evening it has taken over.
We have already covered what these skills are for, the STOP skill, and the TIPP skills for when arousal is running too high for anything to reach you. If that is where you are tonight, start there.
What follows is what distraction as a distress tolerance tool is for, when it is the wrong call, the ACCEPTS skills, and what separates any of it from ordinary avoidance.
What Distraction Is Actually For
Distraction skills for distress tolerance were built for a particular kind of moment: highly stressful, short-term, and creating intense pressure to resolve things right now. They are not for everyday problems.
That boundary is what makes distraction reasonable here. The problem genuinely cannot be solved tonight. The task is only within reach tomorrow.
You can usually tell you are in one of these moments by the pressure rather than the size of the event. Something in you insists this has to be settled immediately, and nothing about the situation allows it.
Which is also why the suggestions that follow are low mental effort. Clean a room. Count the colours out of the window. Organise your books by height. Without the surrounding context, these suggestions can sound insulting, like advice from someone who has never been where you are.
They are small because you have very little to spend right now. Anything larger would ask for capacity you don’t currently have.
When Distraction Is the Wrong Call
Some evenings the honest move is something else.
If the problem can actually be worked on now, work on it. Distraction applied to a solvable problem is only a delay, and you pay for the delay later. For example, an assignment that’s due soon which you’re worried about, you haven’t started working on, and is probably going to take a while to do. Just get started even if you can’t finish it all in one go!
There are also things that need you to process your emotions rather than get around them, and none of this will do that work. For example, an intense breakup. For the first couple of months distraction skills and help you get to a new normal, but these same skills can keep you stuck without actual emotional processing.
It is therefore important to assess your current needs and act accordingly.
Wise Mind ACCEPTS
In DBT distraction strategies sit under a memory aid called Wise Mind ACCEPTS. Wise mind is the part of you that weighs which action will make things better and which will make them worse, and ACCEPTS is an acronym for the ways of buying the wise mind enough quiet to work:
- Activities — do something.
- Contributing — do something for someone else.
- Comparisons — measure this moment against another one.
- Emotions — deliberately feel something different.
- Pushing away — set the problem down for a while.
- Thoughts — fill your head with something simple.
- Sensations — give your body something else to register.
It is helpful to remember this acronym before things go wrong, because at the point you need it you will not be in a state to work any of it out from zero.
Activities and Thoughts: Something Mechanical Enough to Hold You
Focus your attention on a task you actually need to get done. Clean one room in your house. Go out walking. Play something.
Or work on your thoughts directly: count to 10, count the colours in a painting or out of the window, run the words of a song through your head, do a crossword.
Both are doing the same job. They occupy the part of your mind that would otherwise be going over the problem for the fourth time that night.
None of this is meant to be interesting or entertaining. What you want is something absorbing enough to hold you and undemanding enough that you don’t have to work at it. A comfort film you have already seen asks less of you than a new one.
Contributing: Doing Something for Someone Else
Do someone a small favour. Send a message that just says hello. Make something for somebody, or give away something you don’t need.
It works because it is difficult to hold another person in mind and stay entirely inside your own head at the same time.
It is also a genuine ask. Being told to help someone while you are drowning is not a small thing, and on some nights it is not the way to go. Check in with yourself and your capacity before doing this.
Comparisons and Pushing Away: Putting It in Proportion
Compare how you feel now to a time when you felt different, or to a time when you felt similarly. Did those times end? Or did they last forever?
It is a powerful reminder that feelings are momentary and that you will feel differently with time.
Pushing away is the plainer of the two. Leave the situation, mentally if you cannot do it physically. Build a wall between yourself and it. Box the pain up and put it on a shelf for the night. When you notice yourself going over it again, say no and refuse to.
Disclaimer: Use this skill very carefully because if it turns into a habit, one can become a stranger to their own emotions.
Emotions and Sensations: Comedy, Loud Music and Rain
Two that work at different levels. One changes the feeling. The other changes what your body is taking in.
For the feeling, go deliberately for something that produces a different emotion. A comedy, a scary film, a joke book, music that soothes you or music that fires you up, the funny greeting cards in a shop.
It is important that the thing generates a different emotion and doesn’t match the one you already have. A sad film chosen because it suits your mood is not what this skill suggests.
For the body, squeeze a rubber ball hard. Put music on very loud. Go out in the rain, or if it’s the summer, consider a shower. Changing your body temperature belongs here too — TIPP skills come in handy here.
What Separates This Skill from Avoidance
Most people have been distracting themselves for years already. A phone. Work. A drink. It is fair to ask what makes any of this different.
Three things do, in principle.
- This is chosen rather than drifted into.
- It is bounded, because the crisis it was built for is short-term by definition.
- And the return is written into the strategies themselves, which set the problem down for a while rather than for good.
In the moment, that distinction is not much use to you. Everyone pouring a drink believes they have chosen it, and everyone intends to come back to the problem later. Choosing and drifting feel identical from inside the evening.
What makes it different is the check afterwards. Not tonight, but tomorrow, with one plain question: did it keep you from doing something that made things worse? That is answerable only once the storm has passed.
Used occasionally and with discretion, distraction is a skill. Used often and never returning to the problem turns distraction into a limiting obstacle. It can severely hamper one’s experience of the beauty of life.
Distraction techniques for distress tolerance don’t give you relief and they don’t give you resolution. What they give you is time.
Time to reach a point when you can tackle your problems with thoughtfulness and patience, instead of panic and impulsiveness.
And if you need help looking at what sits underneath evenings like these, we’re always just a call away!