ABC PLEASE

What ABC PLEASE Is

ABC PLEASE is a set of DBT emotion-regulation skills for lowering how vulnerable you are to overwhelming feelings — so that on a normal day, your emotions are easier to steer and far less likely to drive you toward a substance. It isn’t a crisis skill you run in the heat of a craving. It’s the daily groundwork that makes the heat less likely in the first place.

The name packs two checklists into one. ABC is the part that fills your life with good and steadies it: Accumulate positive experiences, Build mastery, and Cope ahead for the hard moments you can see coming. PLEASE is the unglamorous body-care floor underneath all of it: treat PhysicaL illness, balance Eating, Avoid mood-altering substances, balance Sleep, and get Exercise. Together they answer a question most willpower-based plans skip — not “how do I survive this urge,” but “how do I build a life where the urges are quieter to begin with?”

For addiction, that shift matters more than it sounds. The reach for a substance so often rides on an emotion you couldn’t tolerate, and a body running on no sleep, skipped meals, and a hangover feels everything more sharply and tolerates none of it. Emotion dysregulation drives the severity of substance dependence, and an impulsive urge frequently rides on the feeling underneath it^[1]. ABC PLEASE works on that vulnerability at the root, in advance, on the ordinary days — which is exactly where recovery is either being built or quietly eroded.

Why Reducing Vulnerability Beats Out-Skilling a Crisis

Most of the DBT skills people reach for are firefighting tools — something to do in the worst second of a craving. ABC PLEASE is the opposite. It’s fire prevention. It works on the slow, background conditions that decide how flammable a given day is before any spark lands.

Think of it as your emotional vulnerability — how easily and how hard your feelings get set off. On a day when you’ve slept, eaten, moved your body, and stayed sober, a setback is a setback. On a day when you’re exhausted, hungry, and hungover, the same setback feels like a catastrophe, and the urge to numb it arrives faster and louder. The trigger didn’t change. Your tolerance did.

That’s why ABC PLEASE is an emotion-regulation skill rather than a distress-tolerance one. It isn’t trying to get you through the wave; it’s trying to make the sea less stormy. Emotion dysregulation drives the severity of substance dependence^[1], and the daily work of ABC PLEASE chips directly at that vulnerability. DBT groups that teach these skills have been shown, over time in real addiction-treatment settings, to improve emotion dysregulation and impulsivity^[4] — the very machinery a craving runs on.

There’s a quieter point worth saying plainly. You cannot out-skill a body in crisis. No breathing technique, no urge-surfing, no clever reframe holds up well when you haven’t slept in two days and haven’t eaten since yesterday. The fancy skills work far better when the boring ones are in place underneath them. ABC PLEASE is those boring ones.

ABC — Building a Life Worth Staying Sober For

The ABC half is about what you put into your days. An empty, joyless life is fertile ground for relapse; a life with real texture in it gives the urge less to work with. Each letter adds something.

A is for Accumulate positive experiences. Deliberately stack small good things into your days, and work toward bigger ones over time. This is not fluff or self-indulgence. Addiction blunts your capacity for ordinary pleasure — the brain that’s been flooded by a substance struggles to feel the small joys it used to — and rebuilding that capacity is part of how recovery holds. Disturbances in positive emotion are fundamental to how substance use disorders develop and persist, and positive-emotion regulation shapes both craving and the risk of relapse^[2]. A coffee you actually taste, a walk, a text to a friend, a project you’re slowly returning to — these aren’t rewards for staying sober. They’re part of the mechanism.

B is for Build mastery. Do something each day that makes you feel capable, that leaves you a little more competent than you were. Cook the meal, fix the thing, finish the workout, learn the chord. Addiction erodes self-trust; every relapse whispers that you can’t be relied on, even by yourself. Mastery answers that whisper with evidence. Small, repeated wins rebuild the sense that you’re someone who can do hard things and follow through — which is exactly the self-belief sobriety leans on when it gets difficult.

C is for Cope ahead. When you can see a hard moment coming — a wedding with an open bar, a stressful family holiday, a court date, a first sober weekend — you rehearse it in advance instead of walking in unarmed. You picture the situation in real detail, decide which skills you’ll use, and run through it in your imagination so the plan is already in your hands when the real thing arrives. It’s the difference between improvising at the bar and showing up with a script. The skill is detailed enough to stand on its own, and it’s worth walking through the DBT cope ahead skill before a high-risk day arrives.

PLEASE — The Body-Care Floor Under Every Other Skill

If ABC is what you put into your life, PLEASE is what you do for your body so that life is livable. These are the five unglamorous physical conditions that decide how steady your emotions are — and in recovery, they’re not optional extras. They’re the floor everything else stands on.

P and L are for treat PhysicaL illness. Take care of your body’s health. Treat the infection, take the prescribed medication, see the doctor about the thing you’ve been ignoring, manage the chronic pain. Being sick or in pain drags your whole emotional baseline down and makes every craving harder to resist. This matters doubly in addiction, where physical health is often neglected for a long time and where untreated pain is itself a powerful pull back toward a substance.

E is for balanced Eating. Eat regularly, eat enough, and don’t lean on sugar and caffeine to fake the energy a meal would give you. Blood sugar crashing through the floor reads to your brain almost exactly like emotional distress — shaky, irritable, on edge — and an edgy, depleted body makes a much louder case for using than a fed one does. In early recovery especially, when appetite and routine are often wrecked, “did I actually eat today” is a real and frequently missed question.

A is for Avoid mood-altering substances. Here the skill says it outright: stay off alcohol and non-prescribed drugs, because they sabotage the exact emotional stability you’re trying to build. This is the line where ABC PLEASE stops being generic wellness advice and becomes a recovery skill. DBT doesn’t tuck sobriety away in a separate program — it writes “avoid mood-altering substances” directly into the daily checklist for keeping your emotions steady. Using doesn’t soothe the system; it destabilizes it, and the better days come from leaving it alone.

S is for balanced Sleep. Get enough sleep, on something like a regular schedule — not too little, and try not to hide in too much. Sleep is one of the strongest levers you have over your emotional baseline: it’s critical for emotional regulation, and poor or disrupted sleep is an active contributor to the course and relapse of mental illness, not a harmless side issue^[5]. A single bad night noticeably thins your tolerance for distress the next day, and recovery is full of bad nights — which is exactly why protecting sleep is doing real clinical work.

E is for Exercise. Move your body regularly, even a little. You don’t need a gym or a program; a daily walk counts. Movement steadies mood, burns off the restless physical energy that often rides underneath a craving, and gives the body a clean way to discharge stress instead of reaching for a chemical one. Done consistently, it’s one of the most reliable mood stabilizers you have, and it costs nothing.

ABC PLEASE at a Glance

Here’s the whole checklist in one place — the seven habits that quietly decide how steady tomorrow feels.

It’s worth lingering on the A in PLEASE, because it’s the part that makes this a recovery skill and not just a wellness poster. DBT could have left substance use out of a daily emotion-regulation checklist. It didn’t. “Avoid mood-altering substances” sits right there beside sleep and food, treated as one of the basic conditions for keeping your feelings steady.

Sobriety Is Built Into the Skill

That placement carries a quiet argument. The using brain tells you the substance is what soothes you — that it’s the thing taking the edge off. PLEASE says the reverse: the substance is a destabilizer, in the same category as a sleepless night or a skipped meal, something that makes your emotions harder to manage rather than easier. Sobriety isn’t a separate project you bolt onto your mental health. It’s part of the floor your mental health stands on.

This is also why ABC PLEASE pairs naturally with the rest of the DBT toolkit. The skill keeps your baseline low so feelings are manageable, and the emotional steadiness it builds is exactly what the DBT emotional regulation skills are built to grow. When a feeling does spike despite the groundwork, you reach for an in-the-moment tool — and ABC PLEASE is the reason fewer of those moments arrive, and the ones that do arrive land on steadier ground.

Check In With Your PLEASE Every Day

The skill only works if you actually run it, and the simplest way is a short daily check-in — a quick yes-or-no down the list to catch the gaps before they catch you. Check in with yours right here:

Where ABC PLEASE Fits in DBT

ABC PLEASE lives inside emotion regulation, the DBT module built not for surviving a crisis but for changing your relationship with your feelings over time — understanding them, lowering your vulnerability to them, and shifting the ones that aren’t serving you. Reducing vulnerability is the foundational layer of that module, the part you build first because everything else rests on it.

It also leans on the same root as the rest of DBT. Running PLEASE is itself a small act of mindful attention — noticing how you slept, whether you’ve eaten, how your body actually feels — the same open attention that mindfulness-based approaches bring to addictive disorders^[6]. And it’s one piece of a connected system: DBT skills training has been field-tested for relapse prevention in opioid treatment^[3], and the broader approach works on the emotion dysregulation and impulsivity underneath addictive behavior^[4]. You can see how the DBT skills fit together and where each kind of moment has its own tool, all inside the wider dialectical behavioral therapy approach these skills grow out of.

It pairs most directly with cope ahead — the C of ABC opens straight into it — and with the change skills you use when a feeling does flare. When the groundwork is solid but an emotion still pushes you toward using, that’s the moment to act against the urge with the DBT opposite action skill, which turns a feeling’s pull on its head instead of obeying it.

Making ABC PLEASE Work in Real Life

A checklist you admire doesn’t help; a checklist you run does. A few things make ABC PLEASE actually stick.

Start with one letter, not all seven. Trying to overhaul sleep, food, exercise, and your whole social life at once is how people quit by Wednesday. Pick the one that’s most broken — for a lot of people in early recovery that’s sleep or eating — and steady that first. One reliable habit beats seven aspirational ones.

Treat it as prevention, not repair. The point of ABC PLEASE is to run it on the good days so the bad days are rarer and milder. It’s a daily maintenance habit, like brushing your teeth, not something you scramble to apply once a craving is already roaring. The work happens before the hard moment, which is also what makes it easy to skip — and worth protecting anyway.

Make the check-in tiny and routine. A thirty-second scan down the PLEASE list, same time each day, catches the gaps while they’re still small. Tired, skipped lunch, didn’t move — naming it early lets you patch it before it stacks into a day you’re too depleted to manage.

Forgive the off days and start again. You’ll have stretches where the whole list falls apart — that’s being human, not failing. A bad week doesn’t undo the skill; it just tells you which basics to rebuild first. The goal isn’t a perfect streak. It’s a body and a life steady enough, often enough, that your feelings stop running the show.

If ABC PLEASE speaks to you, it’s worth learning inside a fuller plan — the emotion regulation it belongs to, and the support that helps the habits hold. You don’t have to assemble that alone, and you don’t have to white-knuckle your way through recovery on willpower while running on no sleep and no food. There are people who teach exactly this. Find treatment and people who can help, and pair these skills with the wider dialectical behavioral therapy approach they belong to. The way through addiction is more bearable than the fear of it — and a steadier body, day after ordinary day, is a real part of why.

Written by

Jessica Miller

Editorial Director

Jessica Miller is the Editorial Director of Addiction Help. Jessica graduated from the University of South Florida (USF) with an English degree and combines her writing expertise and passion for helping others to deliver reliable information to those impacted by addiction. Informed by her personal journey to recovery and support of loved ones in sobriety, Jessica's empathetic and authentic approach resonates deeply with the Addiction Help community.

Reviewed by

• Fact-Checked
• Editor

Kent S. Hoffman, D.O.

Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer

Kent S. Hoffman, D.O. has been an expert in addiction medicine for more than 15 years. In addition to managing a successful family medical practice, Dr. Hoffman is board certified in addiction medicine by the American Osteopathic Academy of Addiction Medicine (AOAAM). Dr. Hoffman has successfully treated hundreds of patients battling addiction. Dr. Hoffman is the Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of AddictionHelp.com and ensures the website’s medical content and messaging quality.