When you are someone has experience managing anxiety disorders, you know anxiety is way more than just a feeling.
Your mind goes from being calm, rational, and present to a completely different state. In mild forms, you might be agitated and want to use a ritual to soothe yourself. At the worst moments, you feel that horrible, familiar impending doom. It feels urgent, like you are in danger and your very well-being is at risk.
Regardless of how anxiety affects your life, even if you’re trying to ignore it, in the end it does affect your life!
So what can you do about it?
Dialectical behavioral therapy, or DBT, might be the answer. In our DBT treatment for anxiety at Suffolk DBT, DBT skills are taught and practiced weekly within a structured, full-model DBT program. You get to learn how to manage anxiety in a supportive space, so you can manage it in real life between sessions.
Here are four ways in which learning DBT skills at Suffolk DBT on Long Island helps with managing anxiety disorders:
1. Managing Anxiety Disorders with Mindfulness
DBT uses mindfulness skills to help people better manage anxiety disorders through grounding their attention in the current moment, letting go of fears for the future and worry that the past will repeat itself. Mindfulness can include meditation, but it’s not limited to that at all.
One area of mindfulness that is useful with anxiety is how you direct your attention. When you are anxious, your attention can lock on to the source of that anxiety. With mindfulness, you can redirect your attention, again and again, to the air you’re breathing, the things you can see, the sensations your body can feel, and the thoughts and feelings passing through your mind. The source of the anxiety becomes one piece in a much bigger puzzle with mindfulness, reducing its impact.
Anxiety also causes your head to spin with all the negative thoughts associated with that trigger. Instead of giving in to those anxious waves of thought, mindfulness teaches us how to be more present so as not to hyper-focus or catastrophize. This practice can help you stay grounded when you do experience anxiety.
Practicing mindfulness with DBT for panic attacks, anxious thoughts, and other symptoms of anxiety can help you find calm in moments that would otherwise cause you to panic.
2. Practicing Emotional Regulation
Another tool that DBT offers for managing anxiety disorders is by practicing emotional regulation with a series of skills that are often the focus during group therapy sessions at Suffolk DBT on Long Island. Emotional regulation is a skill involves more than simply staying calm; nobody is calm all the time, but emotional regulation helps you ensure your emotional responses are proportionate. It’s both a proactive and reactive process.
Let me explain.
- You can manage anxiety disorders by being proactive through practicing healthy lifestyle choices that support greater emotional regulation, especially when anxiety is driven by underlying patterns of emotional dysregulation. These choices include getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, engaging with our support network, and having a healthy diet. While these steps can reduce vulnerability to anxiety, they alone are not enough without skills practice and therapeutic support.
- In the moment when anxiety arises, you can respond reactively through skills like “opposite action.” When you feel anxious, instead of doing things that reinforce anxiety, do the exact opposite. For instance, if social situations stress you out, choose to attend that party or gathering.
While it may seem counterintuitive, it is these actions that allow us to break out of the anxious cycle, to avoid reinforcing the notion that avoidance of a trigger is what will lessen its presence in our lives. By facing our anxiety triggers, we may learn instead that we are capable of facing our fears, and engage in the very things that will help us discover better mental health (hint: the proactive strategies discussed above).
With locations across Long Island and Manhattan, anxiety therapy is available near you!
3. Using Distress Tolerance
One of the biggest problems with anxiety is the impact of runaway emotions. When you feel anxious, it might not be significant at first. Maybe it’s something that causes you to start worrying in the back of your head.
However, those thoughts and feelings compound on each other. They get amplified, your emotions become overwhelming, and the result is that your anxiety gets worse and worse.
Distress tolerance skills help you cope so that your emotions neither get out of control nor exacerbate an already stressful situation. Distress tolerance is one of the best DBT skills we teach at Suffolk DBT for helping prevent panic attacks and other symptoms of anxiety disorders. The goal of these skills is to help you make it through the hardest moments without total overwhelm or resorting to destructive or damaging behaviors.
Some helpful distress tolerance tools include:
- Distracting yourself from the source of the anxiety
- Weighing both pros and cons in the moment
- Using your five senses to self-soothe (such as listening to music)
- Accepting that you can’t change the situation, but you can decide how to respond to it
Perhaps of all the distress tolerance skills, radical acceptance is the most powerful. It gives us permission to acknowledge that we don’t have control over a certain scenario from occurring, and that’s okay. It’s more important to focus on how we respond to those situations, rather than trying to change them. With radical acceptance, by recognizing we don’t need to control the situation, we really do have a lot of power and control over ourselves and our reactions.
4. Managing Anxiety Disorders through Improving Interpersonal Effectiveness
When you are anxious, it really affects your ability to communicate effectively. That’s a problem, because in that moment you might need something. Yet, you can’t get your message across because of the anxiety.
For example, imagine a situation where you become angry at someone while you are feeling anxious. It’s common in that situation to vent those conflicting emotions in a number of ways:
- Show passive-aggressive tendencies – You may not express your anger directly but instead make sarcastic comments, give the silent treatment, or be indirectly critical.
- Struggle to express themselves – You might start to speak up but then hesitate, backtrack, or downplay your anger.
- Seek reassurance – Despite being upset, you may ask others if you’re overreacting or if your feelings are justified.
- Over-explain or apologize excessively – You could feel the need to justify your anger or soften it with repeated explanations and apologies.
- Avoid confrontation – You may want to express your frustration but feel too anxious to do so, leading to bottled-up emotions or passive handling of the issue.
Anxiety treatment at Suffolk DBT helps individuals communicate frustration effectively using interpersonal effectiveness skills, particularly when anxiety is driven by patterns of interpersonal dysregulation such as avoidance, over-apologizing, or fear of conflict.
Here’s how DBT can help with managing anxiety disorders in interpersonal interactions:
- Using “I Statements” Instead of Blame – Rather than saying, “You never listen to me,” which may escalate conflict, DBT encourages “I feel unheard when I try to share my thoughts.” This approach reduces defensiveness and keeps the conversation constructive.
- Setting Healthy Boundaries Ahead of Time – Establishing clear expectations before issues arise can help prevent frustration from building up. For example, if someone tends to overstep, a DBT-informed approach might involve calmly stating, “I need some quiet time after work to decompress.” This proactive step reduces anxiety by creating structure.
- Minimizing Anxiety’s Impact – If frustration arises despite boundaries, DBT techniques like self-soothing and mindfulness can help manage the emotional intensity before addressing the issue. By pausing and checking in with their emotions, the person can approach the conversation with greater calm and clarity.
- Balancing Assertiveness and Understanding – DBT teaches DEAR MAN (Describe, Express, Assert, Reinforce, Mindful, Appear confident, Negotiate) to help individuals express frustration while maintaining respect for both themselves and the other person.
Overall, DBT’s Interpersonal effectiveness skill helps people manage frustration by fostering assertive, clear, and boundary-respecting communication, reducing the risk of escalating conflict or experiencing overwhelming anxiety.
These four aspects of DBT are simple yet powerful concepts. To learn more about how we provide structured DBT for anxiety through in-person services in New York and telehealth support across Upstate New York, you can schedule a screening call.
How Can Long Island Anxiety Treatment at Suffolk DBT Help You?
Suffolk DBT proudly provides quality dialectical behavior therapy, a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, at their offices in Manhattan and Long Island, New York and online. Their experienced therapists specialize in serving teens, children, adults, and college students struggling with depression, borderline personality disorder, eating disorders, and self-harm. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) skills and treatment can help you or your kids to manage emotions and work through life’s challenges. Suffolk DBT Manhattan and Long Island offer a free screening call so you can get started right away.
Frequently Asked Questions About Anxiety Treatment and DBT
People develop anxiety disorders for a variety of reasons, but it’s important to know, nobody develops an anxiety disorder because they’re weak or broken!
Anxiety disorders can happen due to (or from a combination of):
- Medication side effects
- Underlying physical health issues
- Trauma
- Stress
- Other mental health challenges
- Genetics
- Substance use/abuse
An anxiety disorder regularly triggers our instinctual stress response (the fight-or-flight response) and drives us to face perceived threats (fight) or get out of dangerous situations (flight). More recently identified stress responses include being unable to act against a threat (freeze) and avoiding conflict by trying to please someone else (fawn). These responses may indicate an anxiety disorder when they persist, occur at the wrong time, or cause unwanted consequences and behaviors.
Emotions that are difficult to manage and cope with can be brought on by and cyclically lead to distress and anxiety. DBT is good for anxiety because it emphasizes distress tolerance and emotional regulation—the ability to tolerate uncomfortable emotions, and practice your experience and expression of them. Considering the vital role emotions serve in our lives, these are skills that can enhance the well-being of individuals with and without an anxiety disorder.
Another reason DBT is good for anxiety treatment for adults, teens, and children because it also relies on the concept of dialectical thinking to cultivate acceptance and change simultaneously. Dialectics refers to the stance that two seemingly opposing ideas—like acceptance and change—can exist and be true at once. When implemented in anxiety therapy in New York, our professionals at Suffolk DBT teach clients to accept their present and embrace the fact that their futures must require change. We guide them through the process of making that positive change.
DBT can fill in gaps left by traditional CBT and other psychotherapy methods by giving as much attention to acceptance as to change. Most therapy modalities emphasize changing thoughts and behaviors, which could be invalidating to some clients and make them feel unsupported where they are right now. Not only is DBT good for anxiety because it emphasizes accepting clients’ experiences as they are in the current moment, but it also treats symptoms as more than just problems to be solved.