The purpose of mindfulness is to help individuals accept and tolerate difficult emotions, especially when involved in an upsetting situation. This approach involves paying attention to your thoughts and accepting them without judgement, while remaining in the present moment and experiencing your thoughts and emotions fully. 

Key skills in mindfulness involve: “What” skills (observing and describing thoughts without judgement and remaining present while participating in an activity) and “How” skills (focusing on one task, doing what works and describing facts non-judgmentally).

This step is focused on helping people to manage and regulate strong emotions such as anger, depression, frustration or anxiety.

Skills learned in emotion regulation include: identifying and labelling emotions, identifying barriers to changing emotions, trying to remain logical as opposed to becoming emotional, increasing positive emotional events, increasing mindful behaviour, using opposite actions (when the individual is tempted to behave negatively) and use distress tolerance techniques as needed.

The ability to experience intense emotions without reacting impulsively, or using negative coping behaviours such as substance use or self-injury to decrease feelings of distress.  

These skills involve accepting oneself and the situation in a non-judgemental way, without becoming overwhelmed and avoiding the situation. While in the proper mental state, people can make wise, logical decisions. 

There are many skills that can be learned to improve distress tolerance and the words ACCEPTS and IMPROVE are key acronyms which represent the first letter of a new skill. These skills are focused largely on accepting difficult situations, using self-soothing behaviour, finding meaning in the situation, and tolerating distress.

This stage is focused on building strategies to help people ask for what they need, develop the ability to say “no” and deal effectively with interpersonal conflict. 

There are many skills that can be utilized in this area. The acronym DEARMAN represents skills that can be used to help someone get what they want in a situation, while the acronym GIVE represents tasks an individual can engage in to help maintain healthy relationships. The acronym FAST focuses on developing skills to maintain self-respect. The final step in improving interpersonal effectiveness focuses on improving problem solving skills.