Hello, this is Jordan Harmon compassionate behaviorist.
We're going to practice a DBT skill from the distress tolerance modules. And this skill is called paced breathing. It's one of the skills that's found in the TIPP skills, which is an acronym, if that helps you remember them. But the TIPP skills are used when there's crisis or distress, that is so high, that is leading you to experience high urges to do something destructive, that could be an urge to self harm, it could be an urge to act on suicidal impulses, such as writing a suicide note, or researching or planning means of suicide, it could be eating disorder, behavior, drug use behavior, any destructive urge that has been something that's helped soothe when you're in crisis, or avoid crisis or, or helped you to, you know, tolerate the distress, but hasn't worked, other than in the short term.
So a lot of the destructive behaviors that people develop, or that we've developed a times are beneficial in the short term, but immediately harmful in the medium or long term. So one of the skills we use is the TIPP skill. And it's tip up. So that's intense temperature or temperature, intense exercise, progressive muscle relaxation, sometimes people call paired muscle relaxation, where paced breathing.
So let's tip, and I'm gonna practice paced breathing with you right now. So go ahead and find yourself in a seated seated position if you can.
And what we're going to do is we're going to practice, inhale for four seconds. And then before you exhale, we're going to hold on to that breath for four seconds. Then exhale for four seconds, then hold and pause before you inhale for four seconds. And then inhale for four seconds.
Some people call this box breathing. So you can imagine an invisible box, you have four seconds, going this way of inhale. And then four seconds of pause, and then four seconds of exhale. And then four seconds of pause. And then start again with the inhale for four seconds.
And after you do that for a little bit, then you you expand the box to be five seconds of inhale, five seconds of pause. Five seconds of exhale, five seconds of pause. So we're going to we're going to go ahead and do that. And so just get ready wherever you're sitting.
Okay, and we'll go ahead. So first we start with the inhale. Now go to five seconds. So inhale for five. Let's try. Let's try six. So start with the inhale for six.
Okay, that was, I don't know, maybe four minutes of paced breathing, it's a little hard to do yourself when you're leading someone else because you're not able to count. So it might help you to you don't have to be perfectly 4444. Obviously, I was not.
But the process here is that by instead of having to control your urges and control your thoughts, you can control your breathing, you can practice breathing in a deliberate, patterned way. And that as you're doing that you're slowing down your breathing.
As you're expanding that number, you know, going up to four or 567, you're expanding the in slowing down your breathing. And as you're slowing down your breathing, you're also going to be likely slowing down your distress, and your racing thoughts, and your urges to act on a destructive urge. And so that's the point of pace breathing. It's to manage crises to tolerate distress.
And of all these DBT skills, of course, you don't have to do them. It's not a silver bullet, it's not like, Okay, I'm going to use this. And then if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
You use them in combination, you use paced breathing, and then try something else. You try progressive muscle relaxation, try a pros and cons list. And you kind of experiment and see how they work and you practice them, don't expect for it to work perfectly the first time, do your best, try them, and try them in different situations. reach out for help, of course, there's a whole lot of skills and things that you can do that when your mind is in a distressed or crisis place, oftentimes, it'll, what they say is your behavioral repertoire will narrow and you'll be focused on that one destructive urge.
And so let that be the trigger, if you will, that that urge to be the trigger to use skills, so that your behavioral repertoire will open up. And there will actually other ideas of what you can do instead of hurting yourself or relaxing on drugs or whatever it is, can come to your mind.
And of course, the whole point of all of this of any DBT skills is to help you to build a life worth living, not just about using skills just to use them and just to make it through another day to be miserable the next day. No, it's to build a life that's joyful life that's worth living.
And you can't do that, of course if you're stuck in really problematic disruptive patterns. And so hopefully this is helpful to you. This is paste breathing from DBT skills. Be good to yourselves and to each other. And we'll see you next time. Thanks bye
