I often say that there are two things in life that we can count on besides death and taxes and that’s stress and pain. With that said, it’s my pleasure to bring to you Christy Matta, MA. Christy has over 15 years experience in the mental health field, is author of the recently released book The Stress Response: How Dialectical Behavior Therapy Can Free You from Needless Anxiety, Worry, Anger, and Other Symptoms of Stress, founder of the blog Dialectal Behavior Therapy Misunderstood and contributor for the Huffington Post and MentalHelp.Net.

Today, Christy talks to us about what Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is, how it can help with your stress right now and some advice for those of us who are struggling.

Elisha: Can you give us a brief synopsis of what Dialectal Behavior Therapy (DBT) is and how it relates to stress?

Prior to becoming a Psychologist,  I was in the corporate world leading teams of people and becoming intimate, maybe too intimate, with being overwhelmed and feeling stress at work. The amount of workers today that say job stress is a major problem in their lives has doubled in the last decade. Recently, I wrote a popular post called Outsmart Your Stress: The 1-Minute “Be” Practice and now it’s time to see how to make this now effect come alive at work.

In today’s accelerating business world people are constantly being told there’s no time to “BE” and they don’t manage their time well, so it’s no wonder why more and more people every day are left feeling exhausted, unfocused, unproductive, unhealthy, and burnt out.

“You need to manage your time better and learn to juggle more,” is the conventional reply to getting more things done faster. The American Psychological Association put out a report saying, the inability to focus for even 10 minutes on any one thing at a time may be costing you 20% to 40% in terms of efficiency and productivity.

What more and more business leaders are finding is instead of doing more things faster, you need to learn how to prioritize your attention and do the most important things really well.

I love when people in various areas of life integrate mindfulness into their work. Dr. Jason Selk is the Director of Mental Training for the St. Louis Cardinals, and best-selling author of 10-Minute Toughness and newly released Executive Toughness. He contributes to ABC, CBS, ESPN, and NBC radio and television and has been featured in USA Today, Muscle and Fitness, Men’s Health, Shape, and Self Magazines.

Jason utilizes his in-depth knowledge and experience of working with the world’s finest athletes, coaches and business leaders to help individuals and organizations outperform their competition.

Recently Jason shared with me very practical mindful ways to create mental toughness to increase our happiness and success.

“A man lies dying in a hospital bed. He has spent his entire life building for the future, doing what needed to be done to amass wealth and raise his status to a level he thought worthy. Now he has reached the end of his days and finds himself filled with remorse rather than satisfaction.

In his final moments, he turns to his doctor and says, “I spent my whole life stepping on people in order to get to where I want to be, and now there’s no one left for me. It’s only now that I realize it’s so simple. It’s who you love and how you love and the rest of it, the rest of it never mattered.”

That is a powerful lesson, yet he has little time left to make use of it. 

He came to clarity at the end of his life; what if you could get this clarity now?”

There is no doubt about it, today’s business is a round-the-clock atmosphere. We are hounded with external pressures, overwhelmed with information overload, asked to deliver more with less, work longer hours, and have less personal time for renewal activities. What is the result?

Self-inflicted attention deficit disorder, exhaustion, lack of focus, reduced health, and burnout. This leads to lower job satisfaction, morale, and productivity. Hardly the results we want.

Did you know that over 50% of the workforce in the US says Job Stress is a major problem in life? This is twice as much as ten years ago. We also have 50% greater healthcare expenditures and corporations are losing over $300 Billion annually because of work-related stress! What’s going on here?

In an age of so much distraction, the old approach of time management at work is being thrown out the window in favor of attention management.

In the past couple weeks I’ve been asked by a few different people in leadership positions how they can work with inherent and constant interruptions in their workday. One minute you’re engaged with an important project and the next someone calls you up or walks into your office with an urgent matter that needs attention. This constant moving back and forth interrupts focus and creates frustration that makes it difficult to concentrate. It’s a vicious cycle.

What is important to recognize is that being yanked back and forth and getting caught up in an auto-pilot of increased frustration isn’t going to make you more effective at work (or at home). We can also accept the reality that this is inherent in our workdays, especially now that we live in a 24/7 world where people expect us to be available at all times.

To minimize interruptions, the most basic thing a person can do is schedule times during the day that are un-interruptible times of complete focus. Whether you’re in a management position or not, you can make sure people know about these hours and then have an open door policy the rest of the time.

Mindfulness and Psychotherapy has been gaining a mounting interest among  thousands of clinicians and clients. The following is one in a series of informal conversations between Trudy Goodman, Ph.D., Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D. and Steven Hickman, Psy.D., the teachers for a unique upcoming professional training retreat entitled “Mindfulness in Psychotherapy” to be held October 2-7, 2011 at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center in Southern California. This series is primarily aimed toward clinicians, but I’m hoping if you are not a healthcare professional you can also gain some insight from it. Enjoy!

Today Steve, Trudy and I talk about the importance of mindlessness in the therapeutic session.

Steve: Today as I worked with a particularly frustrating client whom I experience as quite intransigent and unwilling to make change despite constantly extolling his desire for things to be different, I was caught off guard. I had just pointed out his apparent lack of motivation to change, and he replied by asking in a slightly defensive tone of voice, “Do you talk to all your patients like this?” I’m embarrassed to admit it, but he called me on my mindlessness in that session. Fortunately, I was able to make use of the moment clinically.