ABSTRACT
Emotion regulation plays a critical role in well-being and quality of life. The goal of both emotion regulation and distress tolerance is to help people manage emotion that is aversive and even unbearable. This chapter focuses on two go-to approaches that have been used by many cognitive behavioral therapists for decades—muscle relaxation and breathing. Innovations in the realm of affect management center on two main domains. One domain is critical examination of the degree to which one of these techniques—specifically breathing training—is indicated or contraindicated. The second domain centers on advances in the field that expand the repertoire of affect management tools available to therapists and their clients. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) was developed as a cognitive behavioral treatment for clients with borderline personality disorder (BPD), a population that had the reputation at the time as being difficult to treat. Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is an anxiety disorder that has historically been difficult to treat.
