How to Build Distress Tolerance: Practices That Help You Stay Present When Things Are Hard
We hear a lot these days about the importance of resilience — the ability to bounce back from challenges. But what often goes unsaid is how we develop the emotional and physiological capacity to meet difficulty in the first place. And that begins with distress tolerance.
Distress tolerance is your ability to stay present when you feel bad. It’s the skill of being with emotional or physical discomfort without panicking, numbing out, or escalating the situation. It doesn’t mean you enjoy distress — it means you don’t immediately try to escape it, fix it, or blame someone else for it.
And in a world full of constant stimulation, polarization, and chronic stress, this ability matters more than ever — not just for individual well-being, but for our collective capacity to think clearly, relate compassionately, and respond wisely to the complexity around us.
So how do we build it?
What Does Distress Tolerance Actually Look Like?
Distress tolerance is the nervous system’s capacity to stay online when things are hard. In practice, it means you can:
Feel sadness without collapsing into hopelessness
Sit with anger without lashing out or dissociating
Endure uncertainty without defaulting to black-and-white thinking
Be exposed to new or conflicting ideas without shutting down
Acknowledge pain or grief without immediately needing to fix or escape it
It’s not about being stoic or passive. It’s about staying connected to yourself through moments of internal or external challenge — long enough to ride the wave, make sense of it, and respond instead of react.
And it’s not just mental. It’s deeply physical.
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How Distress Tolerance Grows
One of the myths about emotional capacity is that it’s innate — that some people are just naturally calm and others aren’t. In reality, distress tolerance is trainable. Like any other capacity, it grows when we practice feeling hard things in safe, structured, and supported ways.
Here are some of the ways that happens:
Mindful Attention to Bodily Sensation
Learning to track sensations in the body — especially when they’re uncomfortable but not overwhelming — helps build tolerance. This might look like:
Noticing your breath when anxious
Tracking your heart rate during stress
Feeling the heat in your face during shame
The goal isn’t to get rid of the sensation, but to stay with it, and learn that it comes and goes. This helps the nervous system re-map discomfort as survivable.
2. Relational Safety
You don’t have to feel safe to yourself before you can begin to build distress tolerance — sometimes, someone else’s nervous system helps anchor your own.
Relational safety includes:
Having someone stay with you when you’re upset, without trying to fix it
Being witnessed without judgment
Knowing you can express discomfort and not be abandoned
This kind of co-regulation helps restore trust in emotional experiences — especially if that trust was ruptured early in life.
3. Pacing and Choice
Pushing people into discomfort doesn’t build tolerance. It builds shutdown. What works better is titration — gently stretching someone’s capacity with small, manageable exposures to discomfort, paired with full permission to stop at any time. When people feel like they have a say in what they feel, they’re much more likely to stay present to it.
4. Name-It-to-Tame-It Practices
Describing what you feel — whether through journaling, storytelling, or internal labeling — helps reduce overwhelm. Language gives the nervous system a sense of containment.
You might try:
“I notice tightness in my chest.”
“This is what sadness feels like.”
“Something about this situation is activating old fear.”
This small step can be enough to create a bit of distance and restore choice.
5. Intentional Exposure to Discomfort
You can build distress tolerance on purpose by choosing safe, structured forms of discomfort.
Examples include:
Cold exposure (like ice baths or cold showers)
Heat exposure (like saunas or sweat lodges)
Fasting, when done carefully and voluntarily
Endurance sports, where you practice staying with challenge and fatigue
Vipassana and body scan meditation, which build awareness of sensation without reaction
These practices don’t just test your willpower — they train your interoceptive system to observe, breathe, and recover under strain. They teach the body: “You can feel this. You’re not in danger.”
6. Real-Time Soothing Tools
While we’re learning to tolerate distress, it helps to have tools that keep us from getting overwhelmed. These might include:
Slowing or deepening the breath
Physical movement (like walking or swaying)
Vocalization or humming
Applying pressure to the body (like weighted blankets or self-holding)
Orienting to the room or connecting with nature
Soothing tools don’t bypass distress — they keep it manageable so that we can stay in contact with it.
7. Rest, Nourishment, and Community Care
It’s hard to build tolerance when your body is exhausted, depleted, or alone.
Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do to increase distress tolerance is to rest, eat, connect, and stop trying to grow for a while.
Resilience doesn’t mean constant self-improvement. It means knowing when your system needs reinforcement — and letting yourself receive it.
Distress Intolerance Fuels Confirmation Bias
Here’s where things get even more subtle.
When we think of confirmation bias, we often imagine it as a cognitive flaw — the tendency to seek out information that supports our beliefs and ignore what doesn’t. But that’s not just an intellectual mistake. It’s an emotional coping strategy.
We’re wired to protect ourselves from distress. And new information — especially if it challenges our sense of identity or safety — is distressing.
So instead of updating our beliefs, we filter reality in a way that preserves our comfort.
We read the news that agrees with us.
We avoid conversations that challenge us.
We distrust people whose tone or worldview feels unfamiliar.
Not because we’re bad thinkers.
Because we’re uncomfortable — and we haven’t learned how to tolerate that discomfort.
Final Thought: Capacity Is the Soil for Change
Distress tolerance isn’t about “toughing it out.” It’s about staying human — in your own body — while navigating things that are painful, uncertain, or overwhelming.
It’s what lets you:
Stay in hard conversations
Hold complexity without collapsing into black-and-white thinking
Feel emotion without losing access to choice
Move through discomfort instead of avoiding it or acting it out
This kind of capacity isn’t just good for personal growth. It’s the foundation for better relationships, better conversations, and a more thoughtful, more humane world.
When we build distress tolerance — slowly, carefully, and with care — we build the inner infrastructure for the kind of society we actually want to live in.
Author
Dr. Mark Olson holds an M.A. in Education and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Illinois, specializing in Cognitive and Behavioral Neuropsychology and Neuroanatomy. His research focused on memory, attention, eye movements, and aesthetic preferences. Dr. Olson is also a NARM® practitioner, aquatic therapist, and published author on chronic pain and trauma-informed care. He offers a variety of courses at Dr-Olson.com that provide neuroscientific insights into the human experience and relational skill training for professionals and curious laypersons.
