Written by Jessica Oliver, MSW, LCSW (formerly Jessica Tappana), with clinical contributions from Samantha White, MS, LPC. This post is based on my interview with Sam on October 16, 2026.
You already know sometimes you are “too much” or react to things in ways you regret. That's the frustrating part.
You know the reaction was bigger than the situation. You knew it while it was happening, or at least a few minutes after. Someone was ten minutes late and you felt abandoned. A text had no punctuation and you spent an hour convinced they were done with you. A small criticism at work and you were either fighting back tears or snapping at the next person who walked by.
And you've tried to stop. You've told yourself to calm down. You've promised you'd handle it differently next time. People in your life have told you, with varying levels of kindness, that you're overreacting. None of it has worked, which leaves you with a conclusion that feels pretty bleak: I know I overreact, and I can't stop.
I asked Sam White, one of our DBT therapists, what she says when someone tells her exactly that early in treatment. Her answer and our subsequent discussion inspired me to write this blog post-hopefully our thoughts and discussion can help you.
Why do I react this way in the first place?
The first thing Sam does is not try to fix it. She said:
"Usually it's a validation of, it makes sense that you would react the way that you do, just with your background and maybe the biology that we have in the moment."
I want to sit on that for a second, because people tend to hear "it makes sense" as a nice thing therapists say. It's not a nicety. It's a clinical fact. And we first have to acknowledge how the behavior makes sense before we can figure out an effective way for you to change that behavior.
Some people are born with a nervous system that reacts faster, feels things more intensely, and takes longer to come back down. That's biology, not character. And if you grew up in a home where your feelings were ignored, punished, or treated as too much, you probably learned to turn the volume up just to be heard, or to shut down completely and then explode later. Those aren't flaws. They were solutions. They worked, at least for a while.
So when I say your reaction makes sense, I mean your nervous system and your history built it on purpose. The problem is that it's now costing you more than it's protecting you.
Why doesn't "just stop" work?
Because you're trying to use the thinking part of your brain to override something that happens faster than thinking.
By the time you notice you're overreacting, your body is already at an eight or nine. Your heart rate is up, your muscles are tight, and the part of your brain that plans and weighs options is mostly offline. Telling yourself to stop at that point is like trying to steer a car that's already sliding on ice. The instruction is correct. The timing is wrong.
There's another problem with "just stop." It sets you up to fail, and then it hands you one more thing to feel bad about. Now you're not only upset about the original situation, you're upset at yourself for being upset. The shame piles on top of the original emotion, and the next reaction is bigger, not smaller.
This is why a DBT therapist doesn't start by asking people to stop. Sam explained pushing toward stopping "can seem like a lot," and it can throw someone "into threat or distress" before they have any tools to handle it.
So what do we ask you to do instead?
Track it. That's it, at first.
Here's Sam again:
"Sometimes it's just, can we track it? Just identify when it's happening and getting them to track it on their diary card versus trying to push towards stopping it. Because we know that if we just begin to observe behavior, behavior begins to change. And so it feels like it's coming at it sideways versus hitting it straight on."
I love the phrase "coming at it sideways," because that's exactly what it is. We're not asking you to win a head on fight with your nervous system. We're asking you to notice. When did the reaction happen? What was going on right before? How intense was it, on a scale of zero to ten? What did you do? That's it. No grade, no judgment, no promise to do better.
In DBT, this happens on a diary card, a daily sheet where you record emotions, urges, and the behaviors you want to change. It's simple on purpose. You can do it in two minutes before bed. And it's the first thing we look at together each week, which I walked through in what actually happens in an individual DBT session.
Why does tracking change anything?
Honestly, I’m a research nerd so part of the reason I’m so passtionate about this is that there’s real research behind it.
A large review published in Psychological Bulletin looked at 138 studies with nearly 20,000 participants and found that simply prompting people to monitor their progress toward a goal made them more likely to reach it. Monitoring more often helped more. And writing the progress down, rather than just noticing it in your head, helped even more. Most of those studies were about things like eating and smoking, not emotions, so I'd hold the finding loosely. But it fits what Sam and I see in practice every week. I'll also be honest that tracking by itself isn't enough for everything. Some reactions, especially the ones that put you or someone else at risk, need skills practice and closer support alongside the tracking, not instead of it. Tracking is where we start. It isn't where we stop.
Here's my explanation for why it works. The problem with overreacting is that it happens all at once. There's no gap between the trigger and the reaction. When you start tracking, you're training your brain to notice the reaction as a thing that's happening, rather than just being swept along inside it. At first you only notice afterward. Then you start noticing during. Eventually you catch it right at the start, and that's where a gap opens up. Once there's a gap, there's room for a skill.
Tracking also gives us something to work with in session. When you come in and say "I overreacted again," that's a feeling. When you come in with a card that shows three reactions this week, two of them on days you slept under five hours and one right after a hard phone call, that's a pattern. We can do something with a pattern.
And there's one more thing. When you track without judging, you start to see that the reaction isn't random. It makes sense. It has triggers and a shape. For a lot of people, that alone takes some of the shame out of it.
What comes after tracking?
Skills. But in a specific order, and only once tracking has opened up a little room.
The first skills are usually about your body, not your thoughts. If your reaction starts at an eight, we need something that brings the volume down fast enough that your thinking brain comes back online. Sam's favorite skill to teach is one of these. It's a distress tolerance skill called TIPP, and the first piece of it uses cold water on your face to change what your nervous system is doing in the moment. We wrote about it in our post on the four kinds of DBT skills.
Once you can bring the volume down, we work on skills for what to do next. Checking whether the emotion fits the facts of the situation. Acting opposite to the urge when it doesn't. We covered those in What Are Emotion Regulation Skills in DBT?
None of this is about becoming a person who doesn't feel things strongly. You'll probably always feel things strongly. The goal is for your reactions to fit the situation more often, and for you to have a say in what you do with them.
When does this point toward DBT?
Tracking and skills can be taught in regular weekly therapy, and for some people that's enough.
But if your emotions run on a roller coaster more than a straight line, if your reactions have cost you relationships or jobs or your own safety, and especially if you've already tried therapy and it hasn't changed the pattern, that's who comprehensive DBT was built for. Sam described the people who do best in it as the ones who are "undercontrolled or impulsive at moments, who are maybe described as chaotic or feel erratic at times, who have high highs and low lows."
If that's you, the full program adds a weekly skills group, coaching calls for the moment the reaction is happening, and a consultation team behind your therapist. We wrote about who DBT is and isn't for in Do You Have to Be in Crisis to Do DBT?
One more note. Some people read "I overreact" and recognize themselves, but their version is quieter. They don't blow up. They clamp down, get rigid, and feel it all underneath. That's a different pattern, and standard DBT isn't always the right fit for it. Sam and I are both trained in a related approach called RO-DBT that was designed for exactly that kind of overcontrol, and we take it into account when we're figuring out what treatment makes sense for you.
Begin DBT in Columbia or Lee's Summit
If you've been telling yourself to stop for years and it hasn't worked, that's not because you're weak. It's because "stop" was never the right first step. Noticing is. And noticing is something we can teach.
Our therapists in Columbia and Lee's Summit, and online across Missouri (and occassionlly online for people in Kansas), work with people whose emotions run fast and hard. Some of them do that in weekly therapy that teaches these skills one at a time. Some of them do it in our comprehensive DBT program, which adds a weekly skills group, coaching calls, and a consultation team behind every therapist. The free consultation is where we figure out which one fits you.
Call us at 573-328-2288 (Columbia) or 816-287-1116 (Lee's Summit), or reach out online and our client care team will call you back. You can read more about the program on our DBT page, or meet us in person at our Columbia or Lee's Summit office, or online anywhere in Missouri.
Whenever you're ready for effective care and lasting change, we're here.
About the Author
Jessica Oliver, MSW, LCSW (formerly Jessica Tappana) is the founder and clinical director of Aspire Counseling. She has been working with people whose emotions feel bigger than the moment since 2008, first as a BSW intern at Fulton State Hospital and later at a school for kids with severe emotion dysregulation. DBT was her primary treatment approach for more than a decade, and she still believes the diary card is the most underrated tool in therapy.
This post is based on Jessica's October 16, 2026 interview with Samantha White, MS, LPC. Sam sees clients at Aspire Counseling in Columbia and online throughout Missouri. She spent much of her career at Ozark Center in Joplin on both the DBT and RO-DBT teams, served as DBT Team Lead from 2020 to 2022, and has more than 40 hours of continuing education in eating disorder treatment. She is DBTmo certified, certified in RO-DBT Level 1, and certified in Prolonged Exposure. Sam and Jessica both serve on Aspire's DBT consultation team.
Sources
Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229. APA summary of the study · Open-access author manuscript
