Here we are at the end of September, so it’s time for another guest post on The Anxious Morning. Today we have some words of wisdom from my friend and collaborator Joanna Hardis. Joanna is a therapist specializing in treating anxiety orders, and she’s pretty awesome. Let’s hear what she has to say on the subject of tolerating distress and discomfort.
In 1997, Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air: Death on Everest was released. I was
hooked. My fascination with people who have a high tolerance for discomfort was born. I was — and continue to be — mesmerized by whatever it is that motivates someone to do such extraordinary things like climb Mount Everest or free solo mountains, which is climbing without any safety gear or rope. My fascination started with high-altitude climbers, but it’s progressed to shows like Survivor and Naked and Afraid.
These people stare back at fear and keep going. They withstand extraordinarily difficult physical and emotional circumstances such as high altitude, extreme temperatures, and “rustic” sleeping conditions to reach their goal.
I love learning how people approach enormous physical and mental challenges,
challenges they sought out. There are many lessons we can take from these people, these professionals that I can then apply to my own life and to the lives of my patients. I’m attracted to their heightened ability to tolerate unpleasant and uncomfortable things. I’m attracted to their distress tolerance.
Sometimes it’s most helpful to understand distress tolerance by talking about distress intolerance. Distress intolerance is a perceived inability to fully experience unpleasant, aversive, or uncomfortable emotions combined with a desperate need to escape or avoid those uncomfortable emotions.
Distress tolerance has 2 components: a perceptual ability and the behavioral consequence.
For example, if you tell yourself you can’t handle something, your behavior will follow. If you do this repeatedly, you’ll begin to lose faith in your abilities to do difficult things. The more you avoid, the stronger the distorted belief that you can’t do hard things gets.
Those hard things don’t have to be climbing Mt Everest. They can be tolerating the uncertainty of your everyday life. It’s not just fear and uncertainty that we’re talking about with distress tolerance. It’s all those other unpleasant feelings we experience every day. Often when we think about distress, we imagine big feelings like panic, anxiety, and grief, but there are so many less intense but still unpleasant or uncomfortable feelings we may experience that we resist.
For example: most of us want to avoid feeling grossed out, ashamed, embarrassed, vulnerable, uncertain, sad, confused, awkward, bored, frustrated, lonely, angry, responsible, off, and, of course, wrong.
Joanna and I do a Zoom-based training every month about distress tolerance and how to practice getting better at that. It’s a skill that can help in recovery, and in life. Find out more on my website.
In the course of any given morning, I may walk through many of those, as I feel grossed out cleaning my bathrooms and picking up dog poop, bored, worried that I may have said something wrong to a client, frustrated that I can’t figure out the Wordle, guilty I didn’t call my parents, nervous why someone hasn’t texted me back, and awkward about a conversation I had with a friend.
It’s an ongoing practice for me to increase my willingness to experience discomfort.
When I notice myself replaying, overthinking, or resisting in some other way, I try to slow way down and ask myself, “How willing am I, right this second, to let whatever is in my head just be there and place my attention on something else. Thirty seconds later, when my brain has gone back to overthinking and resisting, I ask myself the same question again. Over and over until the feeling passes. The more open and willing I become to letting the discomfort be, the easier it gets.
That’s behavior changing perception.
The more I shift my attention, the more I’m reminded that feelings are temporary events: they peak and pass, and I can ride them out. People ask me if there’s a special tool or technique to become more tolerant.
Unfortunately, there’s no real magic involved. It’s simply about noticing when you’re resisting and then becoming willing (even for 30 seconds) to feel whatever is there, redirecting your attention to something else. Keep doing this over and over, with patience, compassion and kindness toward yourself. People increase their tolerance the more they practice.
Remember, too, that the feeling isn’t the problem. Our resistance to that feeling is. Playing with how you can accept and allow those feelings without judgment in that moment is the work.
Let’s practice it.
Joanna Hardis, LISW-S is a therapist from Ohio specializing in the treatment of OCD and anxiety disorders. She’s been educated at Cornell, Case Western Reserve, The Cleveland Center For Cognitive Therapy, and the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety at the University of Pennsylvania. You can find Joanna at her website at joannahardis.com or on Instagram at cbt.cle
178. Thoughts On Tolerating Distress And Discomfort