DBT Skills for Anxiety

By Gabby Tsilfidis

Introduction

When anxiety takes over, it can feel like your body has hit the gas and your mind is trying to keep up. Your heart pounds, your breathing tightens, and your thoughts start stacking catastrophes out of nothing. You might know, rationally, that you’re safe, but your nervous system doesn’t believe you.

At Rainbow Counselling, we see anxiety as more than worry. It’s a protective system that sometimes misfires. The good news is that it can be retrained. One of the most effective approaches for this is  Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), a skills-based method that helps people calm the body, steady the mind, and rebuild confidence in their ability to cope.

What DBT Brings to Anxiety Work

DBT was first developed for people struggling with intense emotions, but its tools apply just as well to anxiety, panic, and chronic stress. It teaches clear, repeatable skills that anyone can learn.

In Rainbow’s DBT Skills Individual Therapy program, clients practice these skills between sessions, adjusting them to fit their environment and sensory needs. For many people, especially those who are neurodivergent, grounding doesn’t mean stillness or silence. Movement, texture, and temperature can all work as anchors to the present moment.

Three DBT Skill Sets That Help with Anxiety

1. Distress Tolerance: Riding the Wave Without Wiping Out

Anxiety tends to spike fast. DBT’s distress-tolerance tools lower physical arousal so the wave passes instead of pulling you under. A favourite is the TIPP skill:

• Temperature: cool your body down with a splash of cold water or an ice pack on the back of your neck to slow your heart rate.

• Intense Exercise: twenty jumping jacks or a brisk walk to discharge adrenaline.

• Paced Breathing and Progressive Muscle Relaxation: exhale longer than you inhale, then tense and release each muscle group in turn.

Simple, concrete actions like these reset the body faster than reasoning ever could.

2. Emotion Regulation: Working With, Not Against, Fear

When anxiety says  avoid, DBT suggests  opposite action. If your instinct is to cancel plans or escape a situation that’s safe but uncomfortable, taking a small step toward engagement teaches your brain that fear doesn’t have to run the show.

Other regulation skills include checking the facts (“Is the threat real or imagined?”) and reducing vulnerability through consistent routines—sleep, nutrition, movement. DBT calls these the PLEASE skills, and they form the foundation for steadier mood and lower baseline anxiety.

3. Mindfulness: Returning to Now

Mindfulness in DBT isn’t about clearing the mind. It’s about noticing what’s happening right now without judgment. Try:

• Naming what you can see around you: “blue mug, window light, plant, laptop.”

• Noticing tension in your body and breathing into that spot.

• Using music, scent, or touch to bring your focus back.

For neurodivergent clients, this might mean mindful stimming, fidgeting, or gentle movement—whatever keeps awareness grounded without discomfort.

Building a Toolbox You Can Actually Use

Anxiety work isn’t about eliminating anxious feelings. It’s about lowering their intensity so they no longer control you. DBT offers a set of tools you can reach for when things start to spiral.

Therapy gives you the structure to learn those tools safely and adapt them to your life. Our clinicians often pair DBT with trauma-informed and somatic approaches, helping clients feel safe in their bodies again after years of hyper-alertness.

Download: DBT Skills for Anxiety

We’re sharing a free resource based on Sonny Jane Wise’s Neurodivergent-Friendly Workbook of DBT Skills, which adapts traditional DBT exercises for diverse sensory and cognitive styles. Inside you’ll find:

• Grounding through the five senses

• Distress-tolerance activities using temperature or movement

• Emotion-regulation worksheets and visual prompts

• Mindfulness practices that work for restless minds

This resource pairs well with DBT Skills Individual Therapy at Rainbow Counselling for anyone who wants to strengthen emotional regulation and reduce anxiety in everyday life.

Final Thoughts

Anxiety doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It means your body learned to react quickly to stay safe. DBT helps you relearn the difference between danger and discomfort, and to find calm that feels earned rather than accidental.

Curious? Book a Therapist Matching Meeting with our Clinic Coordinator team to learn more!

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DBT Skills for Anxiety

If you have both Autism and ADHD (also known as AuDHD), you might have noticed that navigating your gender identity comes with unique challenges and insights. Maybe you feel conflicted about your relationship with gender, or maybe you’ve been exploring what gender means to you for a while. Wherever you are in your journey, your experience is valid.

In this post, I’ll explore how living with both Autism and ADHD might impact your relationship with gender and how therapy can support you in connecting more deeply with your body and identity.

The Unique Experience of Navigating Gender Expansiveness with AuDHD

Having both Autism and ADHD can create a unique lens through which you experience the world, including your understanding of gender. On one hand, you may feel disconnected from or question societal norms and expectations around the gender binary. This can be freeing and open up possibilities for gender expansiveness. On the other hand you may experience impulsivity, hyperfocus, or difficulty in managing the nuances of gender exploration.

For example, you might spend hours researching gender identity, reading everything you can find, and thinking about how you want to present yourself. But when it comes to taking the next steps—whether that’s experimenting with clothing or even accessing gender-affirming care—challenges with executive functioning might make those tasks feel overwhelming or hard to start.

This combination of deep introspection from Autism and the impulsivity or difficulty with follow-through from ADHD creates a unique path to gender exploration. It’s okay to feel both empowered and overwhelmed at times. Therapy can help you unpack these feelings and offer strategies for moving forward in a way that feels manageable.

Executive Functioning & Gender Exploration
Executive functioning—skills like organizing, planning, and managing time—might be a struggle for you if you have ADHD, Autism, or both. If you find it difficult to plan out your steps toward gender exploration or taking action on gender-affirming care, that’s totally okay. These steps are often overwhelming and can come with a lot of mental load.

Your journey doesn’t need to be linear or follow any particular timeline. It’s perfectly fine if you’re unsure of your next step or if things feel messy right now. A therapist can help you break things down into more manageable steps, and together, you can figure out what feels most important to you in your exploration.

Emotional Regulation & Gender Dysphoria
Emotional regulation might be another challenge if you have AuDHD. If you experience gender dysphoria (feeling discomfort or distress related to your gender), it can bring up intense feelings like anxiety, frustration, or sadness. These emotions may be harder to manage if emotional regulation is already tricky for you. On the flip side, gender euphoria—the joy of feeling aligned with your gender—can feel even more powerful and affirming.

Learning to manage the highs and lows is important, and working with a therapist can help you develop tools to feel grounded and present during those emotional waves. This can give you more room to experience your gender in ways that feel affirming, while also holding space for the emotional complexities that come with it.

How Therapy Can Help You Tune Into Your Body
If you’ve ever found it hard to connect with your body or understand what it’s telling you, you’re not alone. Many people with Autism and ADHD experience challenges with interoception—the ability to understand and feel what’s going on inside their body. This can make it difficult to tune into things like hunger, thirst, or even feelings of gender dysphoria or euphoria.

Therapy can help you improve interoception by teaching you how to reconnect with your body. This might mean learning to notice the subtle ways your body responds to different experiences, such as moments of gender euphoria or discomfort. Over time, this awareness can help you feel more in tune with your gender and how it shows up in your body.

Your Journey is Yours
If you’re feeling conflicted about your gender identity and how your AuDHD might be impacting this journey, remember that there’s no “right” way to explore your gender. Your path is unique, and there’s no set timeline for figuring things out. AuDHD might bring its own set of challenges, but it also brings strengths—like creativity, deep introspection, and hyperfocus—that can support you on your path.

At Rainbow Counselling, we’re here to support you as you navigate these intersections in a way that feels true to who you are. If you’re ready to explore how therapy can help you on this journey, we invite you to book a consultation with one of our team members, or submit our online form to be matched with a therapist on our team!

Healing