ADHD and DBT skills for emotional regulation: the ‘manual’ you never knew existed
- Feb 6
- 5 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Like many others, you may be exploring ADHD coaching because emotional regulation feels hard. You might describe big feelings, fast reactions, difficulty calming down, acute sensitivity to rejection, and cycles of shame or self-judgement.
Often you assume you need better systems to give you more self-control. But there’s another possibility: you may never have been taught emotional regulation as a skill set or even understood it involved one.
Particularly if you were diagnosed later in life, you may have spent years improvising ways to cope which have become habitual - many of them effective in the short term but less helpful or actively harmful in the long term. Food, alcohol, doomscrolling, people-pleasing, avoidance, and harsh self-criticism are often attempts at regulation.
They are not moral failings. They are strategies developed in the absence of knowing any better while finding your big emotions unpleasant and often frowned upon.
This is where DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy) can be so useful. Not necessarily as therapy, but as an organised framework of skills you may never have known existed.
Emotional regulation is a skill set
ADHD involves nervous system dysregulation. Emotions can spike quickly and feel all-consuming. Returning to baseline can take longer.
You might have come to think of your emotional dysregulation as a character flaw, telling yourself you’re too sensitive or prone to overreaction, or believing the criticisms that you simply needed to ‘calm down’, without ever being told how.
You never learned that instead of being something you were bad at, emotional regulation involves:
noticing emotional shifts
understanding what they signal
choosing how to respond.
DBT provides a systematic, well-organised set of skills for doing exactly that.
It doesn’t pathologise emotion. It structures responses to it.
For someone who has never had emotional regulation explicitly explained, this can feel like being handed a manual you never knew existed but still secretly thought everyone else must have had.
Why DBT is particularly useful for ADHD
At the heart of DBT is a dialectic: Acceptance and change.
This balance is especially important for ADHD.
You’re likely to always have a reactive nervous system. Emotional intensity is something that can be lessened, not eliminated. That’s why acceptance matters.
Starting from trying to change can lead you down the path to trying to ‘fix’ yourself. After acceptance, there is enormous room for change.
DBT teaches skills that help you:
soften emotional spikes
reduce vulnerability to dysregulation
return to your window of tolerance more quickly
advocate for your needs more effectively
stop relying exclusively on coping habits that work fast but cost you later.
This combination, accepting your nervous system while strengthening your regulation, is why DBT aligns so well with ADHD.
A brief overview of the skill areas
DBT is organised into four areas:
Mindfulness – foundational awareness - you can’t shift what you haven’t noticed
Distress tolerance – what to do when you’re already flooded
Emotional regulation – ways to reduce long-term vulnerability to emotional spikes and widen the green zone in the window of tolerance
Interpersonal effectiveness – skills for getting needs met and setting limits without people-pleasing or escalation.
Online DBT resources
Many online resources explain DBT skills in an accessible way. A few particularly clear and practical ones include:
The Skillful Podcast (The overview episodes are a great place to start)Dial
ectical Behavior Therapy
If you search DBT and the category names you can also find a range of infographics you can print out or save on your phone to remind you of the options while you are learning which ones work for you in which situations.
If you want to learn more you could then progress to one of many excellent books, courses or even deepen it in therapy.
Learning DBT skills outside of therapy
DBT was originally developed as a therapeutic approach for those with Borderline Personality Disorder and is now used to treat a range of conditions involving significant emotional instability.
If your emotional regulation difficulties are primarily ADHD-related, meaning reactive nervous system patterns rather than trauma-driven or other diagnosed mental health conditions, you may not need therapy to begin learning these tools.
You can instead approach DBT as:
a highly organised emotional regulation framework
a smorgasbord of skills you can use to discover tools which work for your nervous system
not necessarily a therapeutic intervention.
When therapy may be needed instead
If emotional dysregulation is tied to:
significant trauma
severe anxiety or depression
active addiction
other co-occurring conditions
then using DBT within therapy may be essential.
The difference is whether deeper healing work is required before this can simply be approached as a skills gap.
Closing the skills gap first
I regularly see adults come to ADHD Coaching wanting help with their emotional regulation.
But when we start exploring things, the first gap isn’t designing systems that work for them. It’s a knowledge gap about what is effective for emotional regulation. And DBT is all about taking effective action.
It’s very hard to design structures, cues or reminders if your toolbox for emotional regulation is limited. If emotional regulation is your primary goal, learning these skills first can be transformative.
Where ADHD Coaching might help
If after learning DBT skills and finding some that particularly work for you, you still:
forget to use them in the moment
struggle to notice early warning signs of dysregulation
default to old habits under pressure
judge yourself when you don’t use them
can’t translate understanding into action.
That is where ADHD Coaching can come in. ADHD is not a problem with knowing what to do, it’s about doing what you know.
In emotional regulation, however, the difficulty is sometimes genuinely about knowing what to do. DBT skills can provide that foundation. Then if still needed, ADHD Coaching can support you with translating this knowledge into actions in the moments you need it.
A note on overwhelm
Overwhelm is one of the most common forms of emotional dysregulation for adults with ADHD.
Part of managing overwhelm involves regulating the nervous system. DBT skills drawn from distress tolerance and emotion regulation can be powerful in bringing the intensity down.
But ADHD overwhelm often has a second layer. It frequently originates in cognitive overload and executive dysfunction – too many inputs, too many unfinished tasks, too little structure. In those cases, calming the emotion isn’t enough. The underlying organisational problem also needs attention.
DBT includes the skill of problem-solving. With ADHD, that problem-solving needs to focus specifically on executive functioning and practical structure. This is where emotional regulation and ADHD-specific strategies meet.
Where to start
If you are considering ADHD Coaching and emotional regulation is your primary focus, I recommend exploring DBT skills first for those challenges.
You may discover that simply understanding and practising them brings meaningful change.
And if the sticking point with emotional regulation becomes implementation, not knowledge, then coaching can support that next step.