Checking the Impact

As a check for how well reducing your physiological arousal worked, go ahead and re-rate your SUDS. Did your SUDS go down? Generally speaking, the lower your score is, the harder it is to reduce your SUDS, so if your SUDS was already low to start with, your score probably didn’t change very much. After all, it’d require some significant relaxation (or a vacation) to get from a “1 - alert and concentrated” to “0 - total relaxation.”

But what if your score wasn’t low to start, and it didn’t decrease after trying one of the TIPP skills? In this case, go ahead and try one of the TIPP skills again. This time, try out a different skill (e.g. if you tried paced breathing last time, try progressive muscle relaxation this time) or try the same skill for a longer period of time (e.g. taking 10 breaths instead of 5; tensing and releasing muscles 4 times instead of 2).

If your SUDS still doesn’t go down, that’s okay! We recommend that you simply move on. Remember, the goal of this step is NOT to get you to “0 anxiety.” The goal is simply to bring your physiological arousal down enough to do the next step. We also don’t want to get into a cycle of avoidance, where we’re just taking paced breaths all day instead of getting that code review done (Avoidance makes anxiety worse in the long run), so try this step up to two times before moving on. You got this!