Part One: DBT ABC PLEASE Skills: Building Emotional Resilience Through Daily Self-Care
Updated: Sep 11
This article is Part One of a two-part series on the DBT ABC PLEASE skills. Here, we focus on the ABC skills—practical strategies for building emotional resilience and reducing vulnerability to strong emotions.
As you learn DBT skills, think of yourself as a skilled builder, creating your personal DBT House of Happiness one skill at a time.
The ABC skills are a form of proactive self-care. They help you build positive experiences, strengthen a sense of competence, and prepare for situations that may be emotionally challenging.
Mindfulness Skills are the Foundation
Mindfulness skills are the foundation of your emotional stability. Consciously using Mindfulness skills in everyday life has many known evidence-based benefits, all supported by lots of recent research. The relaxation response created by habitual, daily mindfulness benefits your physiology and psychology – your mindbody.
DBT ABC Skills are the First Floor: Proactive Self-Care
The DBT ABC PLEASE skills are practical strategies that help reduce vulnerability to overwhelming emotions.
Unlike crisis survival skills, which are used when emotions are already running high, ABC PLEASE focuses on proactive self-care, strengthening resilience and improving emotional stability.
Think of ABC PLEASE as preventative maintenance for your emotional well-being.
When we consistently care for our physical health, create positive experiences, develop competence, and prepare for stressful situations, we build a stronger foundation for emotional balance.
ABC PLEASE is part of the Emotion Regulation skill set within Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). These skills are designed to strengthen resilience, improve emotional stability, and support overall psychological health.
Rather than waiting for emotional storms to arrive, ABC PLEASE encourages us to prepare in advance by creating healthy habits that support both mind and body.
DBT ABC Skills
The ABC skills help us cultivate a life worth living:
A – Accumulate Positive Emotions
B – Build Mastery
C – Cope Ahead
These skills encourage us to intentionally create moments of joy, develop confidence through meaningful activities, and prepare for challenging situations before they occur.
DBT PLEASE Skills
The PLEASE skills focus on caring for the body. They are your hihg-impact windows!
PL – Treat PhysicaL Illness
E – Balance Eating
A – Avoid Mood-Altering Substances
S – Balance Sleep
E – Get Exercise
Research consistently demonstrates that physical well-being and emotional well-being are deeply connected. When we care for our bodies, we reduce our vulnerability to anxiety, depression, irritability, and emotional overwhelm.
Remember, Mindfulness Skills are the solid foundation.
ABC emotional regulation skills are the first floor, complete with a smooth, strong, tiled floor and high impact doors and high-impact windows of PLEASE for weathering emotional hurricanes.
How to weather the storms of high emotion?
Develop solid ABC's.
A Accumulate Positive Emotions
Research shows positive events decrease the impact of negative events. Negative events are painful and the absence of positive events are painful.
And...you need to build up positive events in your life.
You need to create both short-term and long-term positive events as your first floor.
Short-term positive events are things that make you feel good in the now, and
Long-term positive events are things that create a lasting sense of happiness.
Sometimes the hardest part of accumulating positive experiences is simply deciding what to do. When you're feeling low, stressed or emotionally depleted, even thinking of an enjoyable activity can feel like work.
To make this skill easier to practice, I've created a companion resource:
100 Positive Activities: A DBT Worksheet for Accumulating Positive Experiences.
Use the list for ideas, notice which activities genuinely appeal to you, and choose a few small positive experiences you can realistically bring into your week.
B Build Mastery
What a wonderful concept this is!
Consciously choose to do things that you are good at.
Are you good at gardening? Cooking? Creating a small side business? Crocheting? Volunteering?
Choose some things you are good at and then focus on doing them!
Walking your dog? Scrapbooking? Kayaking? Swimming? Gym work? Yoga?
Do it! Schedule it! Complete it!
Feeling competent helps chase those “I’m not good enough” blues away.
C Cope Ahead
Coping ahead means thinking ahead about situations that you are going into that may cause you distress, then
plan a coping strategy ahead of time.
Rehearse your strategy in your mind, or
Write out something you may want to say.
Research supports the finding that imaginal rehearsal is effective in building new skills.
