Before You Hit Send: DBT's Three States of Mind
You've read the message three times. Your face is hot. The reply is already written in your head and it's a good one, the one that finally makes the point, and your thumb is sitting over send.
DBT would ask you one question here. Not whether you're right, because you might well be. Not whether they deserve it. Just this: which state of mind are you in right now?
It sounds like a stalling tactic. It's actually the whole skill.
DBT’s Three States of Mind
Reasonable mind is the cool one. Facts, logic, planning, no temperature. It's what gets your taxes filed and your car booked in. You are being logical, but you may not be attending to the emotional impact of the situation. Think about Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory — he may have been right a lot, but he often did not do the right thing. Reasonable mind gets us in trouble when we don’t pay attention to the emotional part.
Emotion mind is the hot one. Here your feelings aren't just present, they're driving the bus. The facts get bent to fit the mood. Everything is urgent, everything is certain. Its the state that lets you write the angry text or yell at someone you love, and it makes things worse because it is not the right thing in the moment.
Wise mind is the integration of both. Both the feeling and the facts are there, and neither one has the wheel. It's not a mood and it's not a mood-free zone. It's the state where your intuition and calm are there.
How to tell which one you're in
You don't need to guess. Each state has a signature.
Emotion mind feels urgent. It has to be now, tonight, before they go to bed. It feels certain, with no room for a second reading of what happened. It tends to deal in absolutes. And it's in your body before it's in your thoughts, so check for the heat in your face, the tight chest, the jaw, the buzzing hands. The clearest tell is this: the action feels like relief in advance. You can already feel how good it will be to send it.
Reasonable mind feels flat. You are stuck in logic and how it should go. You find yourself being rigid and justifying logically, and not paying attention to how it might emotionally impact you or others.
Wise mind is quieter than people expect, and often slightly boring. It doesn't need to convince anybody. It doesn't come with a rush. And it survives a night's sleep, which none of the others reliably do.
Emotion mind is not the enemy
Emotion mind isn't a malfunction and the feeling isn't wrong. It's frequently right about the important part. If you're furious, something probably did happen. Emotions carry information, and a life run entirely from reasonable mind is not a better life, it's a colder one.
What emotion mind is bad at is choosing the action. It's it can be accurate about the fact that something matters and unreliable about what to do next. Those are two different jobs, and it only does the first one well.
So the skill is not "stop feeling this." It's "don't hand this one the steering wheel."
The rule: not never, just not now
If you check in and the answer is emotion mind, you don't do the thing now. Not never. Now.
You don't send the message, resign, make the phone call, deliver the ultimatum, or say the sentence you've been rehearsing. The delay isn't a verdict on whether you're right. It's a delay.
Here's why it works, and it has nothing to do with willpower.
Picture a stream that's just been stirred up. The water isn't broken. There's nothing wrong with it. You just can't see through it. Everything that was sitting on the bottom is hanging in the middle of it now, and if you reach in you'll come up holding whatever your hand happens to close around.
Nobody decides what's in the water while the water is muddy. You wait. Not because waiting is the more virtuous option, but because silt drops on its own the moment you stop stirring, and then you can see what's actually down there.
Most people find the same thing when they try this. Some of what emotion mind wanted to do turns out to be exactly right, and you do it the next day with a steadier hand and it lands better. The rest of it you're relieved you didn't do. Both of those are good outcomes, and you can't tell in advance which one you're holding.
Getting to wise mind
So: ask, wait, breathe out longer than you breathe in, and ask again. What you're doing in that gap is letting the silt drop. You're not working anything out and you're not talking yourself round. You're just not stirring it.
If nothing settled turns up, that's information too. The water isn't clear yet, and not yet is a real answer.
You've been here before, by the way. Wise mind is the decision that felt quiet and slightly unexciting at the time and turned out to be right. Most people can name one if they look.
When the check-in isn't enough
For some people, the gap between noticing emotion mind and being able to wait it out is very small, or isn't there at all. If your emotions arrive faster and harder than other people's and take much longer to come down, a single skill used in the moment often isn't enough on its own.
That pattern has a name, and DBT was built for it specifically. It's a full treatment rather than a list of techniques, and the skills work better inside it.
Turn the Mind runs an adherent, DBT-LBC certified DBT program in Bergen County, in person in Glen Rock and by telehealth across New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and PSYPACT states.
Book a free 15-minute consult and we'll work out together whether it's the right fit.
Links to some other DBT Resources on our site:
