It can be challenging maintaining patience during a world of uncertainty. Every day there seems to be new information emerging regarding extended shelter-in-place orders or lengthier timelines of when our lives will return back to a sense of normalcy. With COVID-19 remaining outside of our control, it makes it all the more challenging to manage our frustrations and reign in any impulsive decisions that could compromise our health. Two therapeutic approaches can be helpful with this: Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
DBT is comprised of strategies and techniques that aid in managing the intensity of our emotions. With patience wearing thin, de-escalating our emotionality is crucial towards protecting our mental health. Heightened emotions can lead to impairment within our decision making, which can place us into positions of acting on impulses. For example, hearing that the shelter-in-place will be lasting for another month can lead us to feel out of control. Lack of control can lead to craving old routines for comfort to where we could impulsively decide to see friends and break social distancing protocol, potentially spreading the virus. In order to maintain our patience during pandemics, we need to be able to manage our emotions. DBT allows for this.
ACCEPTS are a series of coping skills that allow us to manage the peak of our emotions and resist from making any impulsive decisions while in an emotional mind.
Activities: Participation in an activity allows us to give into those intense urges and emotions without reacting to the situation
*Go for a walk *Call a friend
*Make a meal *Read a book
*Play a game (with someone or pull out your phone!) *Watch TV
Contributing: Helping someone else allows us to refocus our attention from ourselves to others. This can help us forget our own problems and can also makes us feel good.
*Give someone a compliment, make their day! *Do something thoughtful for another
*Give away things you don’t need *Volunteer
Comparisons: By comparing our situation to that of someone less fortunate or to a time when we made it through a similar situation, we are able to distract ourselves from the current situation and reframe it in a more positive light.
*Think about others who are coping with a similar situation or an even worse situation
*Compare how you are feeling now to a time when you felt differently
*Compare how you are coping now to a time when you were coping with a similar situation
Emotions: Generating a different, or opposite, emotion can change the current mood from negative to more positive. This can be done through certain activities.
*Read an emotional story or letter
*Listen to emotional music
*Watch an emotional movie
Pushing Away: Physically avoiding triggers or reminders of the situation, or blocking thoughts and emotions that go with the situation can allow you to distance yourself from the situation until you can use WISE MIND.
*Leave the situation for awhile
*Block thoughts/images from your mind (Yell “NO!” when you catch yourself ruminating)
*Deny the problem in this specific moment
Thoughts: Distracting with other thoughts fills your short-term memory to break the cycle of bringing up negative emotions.
*Count to 10 *Sing/repeat lyrics to a song
*Watch TV or read a book
*Work a puzzle
Sensations: Focusing your attention on other senses instead of on the negative emotions and urges of the situation.
*Squeeze a stress ball *Take a hot or cold shower
*Hold ice in your mouth or hand *Listen to loud music
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Heightened emotions also lead to irrational thoughts; this is where CBT comes in handy. CBT consists of therapeutic strategies that aim at removing irrational components of our thought process. Irrational thinking can also negatively impact our ability to manage our frustrations and decision making. Utilizing the same example as above, after finding out the shelter-in-place order has been extended, we could easily get into the mindset of thinking “this is going to never end” or “things will never go back to normal so there is no point in continuing to social distance.” These thoughts contain cognitive distortions, or dysfunctional/irrational forms of thought. Cognitive distortions make it difficult for us to maintain patience and evaluate a situation rationally. It can be helpful to familiarize ourselves with the types of cognitive distortions that may be coming up more frequently, so we can be mindful of when we are thinking in unhealthy ways.
Magnification and Minimization: Exaggerating or minimizing the importance of events.
Overgeneralization: Making broad interpretations from a single or few events.
Jumping to Conclusions (Fortune Telling): The expectation that a situation will turn our badly without any evidence.
Disqualifying the Positive: Recognizing only the negative aspects of a situation while ignoring the positive.
All-or-Nothing Thinking: Thinking in absolutes such as “always,” “never,” or “every.”
The combination of DBT and CBT is helpful when managing our patience. By de-escalating our emotions, followed by recognizing unhealthy forms of thought, we will improve our ability to manage our frustrations and resist impulsive decision making throughout this pandemic.