Motivations 4U

Psychologists have a name for that. It is actually part of our stress response system. You might have heard of the fight or flight response. Psychologists have recently recognized a third characteristic of this response which is freeze . The freeze response is a way of protecting us from danger by a sort of  camouflage with not moving; you become "invisible." The thing is, our stress response automatically triggers regardless if it's an actual life and death situation or psychological stress. When you are overwhelmed and feeling stressed out, it's vital to reduce the intense feelings. I have another post that goes into more detail about TIPP skills they use in DBT , and you can click on the link here for that post. Once you reduce the intense emotions, then you can think cognitively. What I'm going to talk about in this post is more of a preventative measure, and by doing the skills, you will hopefully prevent feeling overwhelmed. Like anything else, they

    DBT's TIPP skills Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) uses acronyms for almost every skill. TIPP stands for T emperature, I ntense exercise, P aced breathing and P rogressive relaxation. The theory or the reasoning behind it is when we are feeling intense emotions - whether that be stress, anxiety, fear, overwhelmed, etc., our body goes into fight or flight mode. This is an innate reaction (innate meaning that we have no control over). It happens automatically. It's a survival skill to protect us from danger. So if there's a  woolly mammoth chasing us and we need to either fight or flee, our bodies react very quickly. We automatically respond to this danger by increasing heart rate, breathing more shallow, and digestion actually stops, and so does the part of the brain that problem solves. So the critical part of the brain that, you know, makes decisions based on facts, and all that stuff is put on pause. W e don't need it when we're responding automatica