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. Just this: which State of Mind are you in right now? That’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 being in it doesn't mean your feeling is wrong. It doesn't mean your feeling is right either. That's the part people collapse together. Emotion mind is a state, not a verdict. It describes who's steering, not whether you've read the situation correctly.
Those are two separate questions, and DBT keeps them separate on purpose. Whether the emotion fits the facts is its own skill, called “check-the-facts”. You can be in emotion mind about something that genuinely happened, and you can be in emotion mind about something you've misread. From the inside, the state looks identical either way.
Emotions carry information, and a life run entirely from reasonable mind is not a better life, it's a colder one. So the instruction here is not to stop feeling this, and it isn't to talk yourself down until the feeling agrees to leave.
What emotion mind does is pick the action. In that state the emotion chooses what you do next, and it chooses for relief now rather than for the outcome you'd want on Thursday. That's the problem, and it holds whether or not you're right. 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. 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 you wanted to do, you still do 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 sort one from the other while the water is still moving.
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 waters clear. If nothing settled turns up, that's information too. The water isn't clear yet, and not yet is a real answer. 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.
Links to some other DBT Resources on our site:
