Your brain has a fast setting, and it is usually the right one. The trouble is when it engages during an argument with someone you love.
Daniel Kahneman's distinction between fast and slow thinking has become common vocabulary, and it maps unusually well onto what happens when emotion drives behavior in a direction a person later regrets.
Fast thinking refers to relying on quick, automatic biases to determine how we respond to a situation.
Fast thinking is not the problem
Worth stating clearly, because the skill gets misapplied by people who conclude that all quick reactions are suspect. The fast system is not a bug that therapy removes. It is most of your cognition, and it is right most of the time.
Our mind usefully makes quick snap judgments so that we do not spend all our time deliberating over things and then move nowhere in life. We need to make quick judgments.
Almost everything you do in a day runs on it. Crossing a street, reading a face, deciding which email needs attention. A person who deliberated over each of these would accomplish nothing. Fast thinking is the default because the default is usually correct and always cheaper.
Where it goes wrong
The failure mode is specific: high emotional arousal plus a complex situation. Either one alone is manageable. Together they produce the conversations people replay at two in the morning.
Where this can get a little tricky is when we are in emotion mind, and let us say we are in a fight with somebody, and all of a sudden our body is so filled with adrenaline, cortisol, we are feeling some intense physiological arousal. We are more likely to default to fast thinking because it is efficient and our body is already using so many resources.
This is the part that is worth sitting with. The shift to fast thinking during conflict is not a character failure or a loss of discipline. It is a resource allocation. Your body is spending heavily on arousal, and deliberation is expensive. The system does what systems do under load and falls back to the cheap process.
Which would be fine, except for what the cheap process is good at.
Once we start relying on biases, especially with complex situations and people that we may care about, we might end up falling into the trap of saying things or interpreting things that are actually not that effective or helpful.
Snap judgments are excellent for simple, familiar, low stakes decisions. A conversation with a partner about something that has been building for months is none of those things. That is exactly the situation where a bias produces a sentence you cannot take back.
It also explains why these arguments feel so repetitive. Under load you are not generating new responses, you are running stored ones. The same interpretation arrives, the same sentence follows, and both people experience it as the other person being predictable.
The STOP skill
DBT's answer is a skill designed to insert a gap between arousal and response. It is an acronym, and unusually for acronyms, each letter is a real instruction.
- S: Stop. Literally stop. Do not move, do not speak, do not send.
- T: Take a step back. Physically if you can. Out of the room, away from the desk, a breath.
- O: Observe. What is your emotion, what are you thinking, what is happening in your body and in the situation.
- P: Proceed mindfully. Act in a way that serves what you actually want out of this, not what the arousal is recommending.
STOP literally stands for stop, take a step back, observe your emotion, what you are thinking, the experience, and proceed mindfully.
What it is mechanically doing
The skill has two effects, and they happen in order. Getting the order wrong is the most common reason people report that it did not work.
Literally we are trying to put the brakes on the fast thinking so that we do not default to biases that may cause more trouble for us in the long run, and so that we can slow down the intensity of our emotion. So we can begin to eventually dip into some of that slower, more deliberative thinking.
First, it interrupts. The bias was about to produce a response and now it cannot, because you are not moving. Second, and only because of the first, arousal has room to come down. Slow thinking is not available at peak arousal no matter how much you want it. It becomes available once the physiology has changed, and the pause is what allows that.
Order matters here. People try to reason their way out of an escalated state and fail, then conclude the skill does not work. The skill is not reason. It is a brake applied before reason is possible.
Using it before you need it
A skill you have never rehearsed is not available at a nine out of ten. That is the practical problem with STOP: the moment it is most needed is the moment you are least likely to remember it exists.
The usual fix is to practise it somewhere cheap. A minor irritation, a slow queue, an email that annoys you. Run all four letters deliberately even though the situation does not require it. What you are building is not the skill itself, which is simple, but the association between rising arousal and the instruction to stop.
It also helps to decide the physical move in advance. Where do you go, what do you do with your hands, what do you say to buy the minute. A plan made at a two is a plan that can be executed at an eight.
When STOP is not enough
At very high arousal, stopping alone will not bring you down fast enough, and that is what the TIP skills are for. They act directly on the body, through temperature, intense exercise, and paced breathing, and they work on a timescale of a minute or two. The full set of crisis survival skills covers the range.
For the observing part of STOP, the mindfulness What skills are the underlying training. Observing your emotion accurately in the middle of a fight is not a natural capacity, it is a practiced one.
Working on this
Dr. Jesse Finkelstein teaches DBT skills for emotion regulation in individual therapy and the DBT skills group at Axis Psychological Services in New York City. If fast thinking is costing you conversations that matter, you can book a free consultation.
If you want to practice STOP with support, learn about DBT therapy in NYC, or join the DBT skills group in NYC.
Common questions
What is fast thinking, and why is it a problem during conflict?
Fast thinking is the quick, automatic, bias-driven mode your mind uses for most decisions, and it is usually correct. The problem is specific: high emotional arousal plus a complex situation. Under load your body is spending heavily on arousal, deliberation is expensive, and the system falls back to the cheap process. Snap judgments are excellent for simple, familiar choices and poor for a conversation that has been building for months.
What does the DBT STOP skill stand for?
Stop, Take a step back, Observe, Proceed mindfully. Stop means do not move, speak, or send. Take a step back means physically if you can. Observe means notice your emotion, your thoughts, and what is happening in your body and the situation. Proceed mindfully means act in a way that serves what you actually want, not what the arousal is recommending.
Why does the STOP skill work when reasoning does not?
Because it has two effects and they happen in order. First it interrupts, so the bias cannot produce a response. Only then does arousal have room to come down, which is what makes slower thinking available again. People who try to reason their way out of an escalated state fail and conclude the skill does not work. The skill is not reason, it is a brake applied before reason is possible.
How do you remember to use it in the moment?
By practising it somewhere cheap first: a minor irritation, a slow queue, an email that annoys you. Run all four letters deliberately even when the situation does not require it. What you are building is the association between rising arousal and the instruction to stop. It also helps to decide the physical move in advance, because a plan made at a two can be executed at an eight.
