The mindful regulation practices in ERT are important to support your ability to Catch Yourself Reacting and are organized and sequenced to help you improve your ability to respond better in emotional moments. We first will introduce attention regulation skills in the early sessions followed by metacognitive skills after that. We choose to strengthen mindful attention regulation first, because when distressed minds are often “busy” and filled with these worried, ruminative, self-critical thoughts, it can be hard to learn a new complicated skill. By working on attention regulation first, we hope to offer you a skill that does not make your mind even more busy while also helping you notice cues or triggers for the emotions that arise in moments.
Attention regulation refers to our ability to selectively concentrate and “home in” on cues that are most personally relevant while ignoring other noticeable cues, in a particular moment. Being able to place your attention where it is most relevant to your current goal, but flexibly, when potentially new and important information appears, is important. Unfortunately, distress can interfere with our ability to find the truly personally relevant information by increasing the salience of cues that might indicate threat and loss more than the ones that relate to reward, opportunity, and safety.
The first practice we introduce in ERT, called Orienting, is based on traditional mindfulness meditation practices and is designed to help you learn to anchor your attention on your breath and then to deliberately move it to different areas in your body and to bring your attention back to your selected point of focus when your mind wanders.
This practice sounds simple but it’s not easy to really tame your mind. That is why we want you to practice with the guided recordings that are in the portal. Like exercising a muscle or training for a race, mindfulness practices are in many important ways like exercising in a gym. The more time we commit to the practice, the stronger and more able we will feel in stressful moments to make use of that skill or capacity.
There are four practices in total, which you will learn over sessions 1 to 4 of ERT. As a whole, these practices can help you strengthen your attention and metacognitive abilities, especially when you can really commit some time each day to practice with the recordings on the emotion regulation training website.
