Your Therapist in Sugar Land explains what distress intolerance is and how you can overcome it
It’s human nature to experience emotions. We are created to feel a range of emotions, some comfortable and others uncomfortable. Emotions shape who we are and are essential to our survival.
However, most people dislike feeling uncomfortable. Things like hot, cold, tired, hungry, in pain, sick, etc can all be viewed as negative or causing discomfort.
And for some people emotional discomfort causes distress. Although experiencing uncomfortable emotions is something you may not like, there is a difference between realizing they are an inevitable part of life and riding them out, verses viewing them as unbearable and constantly needing to get away from them.
You may have heard someone say they “just can’t take it,” or “can’t stand” emotional distress, but being intolerant to emotional discomfort can interfere with your life. This is known as distress intolerance.
Today, we want to explore what this means exactly. We want to talk about what distress intolerance is and how you overcome it.
Your therapist in Sugar Land explains what is distress intolerance?
Distress intolerance is a perceived inability to fully experience negative or uncomfortable emotions. It is accompanied by a desperate need to escape from them. Sadness, anger and fear are three clusters of negative emotions people often find distressing and you may have trouble with just one specific type, or all negative emotions.
With distress intolerance, the negative emotion itself is not necessarily distressing, however you feel distressed thinking about it and want to get away from it.
It is thinking that negative emotion is bad in some way or that experiencing negative emotions is unbearable and/or can lead to disastrous consequences.
Common, unhealthy or unhelpful escape methods people use to get rid of emotional distress include avoidance, distraction, suppression, numbing and withdrawing, self injury, etc.
Your therapist in Sugar Land discusses how distress intolerance develops
Oftentimes distress intolerance develops from a combination of biological and environmental factors that lead someone to be more intolerant of emotional distress than others.
Some believe that biologically some people are more sensitive to negative emotions, experience them more easily, at a higher level of intensity and for longer than other people. This may mean that some people feel negative emotions as more painful and have a harder time coping with them.
A lot of experiences growing up shape with how you deal with emotions.
Some people may not have been shown how to tolerate emotional discomfort appropriately. This could be showing or even being allowed to feel things like sadness, anger, etc. Others might have been shown helpful ways of dealing with emotions.
Your therapist in Sugar Land gives distress intolerance thoughts
Regardless of how a person’s distress intolerance has formed, it’s important to realize that it can affect day-to-day life when certain beliefs about negative emotions take over. This is believing things like negative emotions are unacceptable, unbearable, or disastrous.
Here are a few common beliefs that people with distress intolerance have when they start to experience negative emotion:
I can’t stand this It’s unbearable
I hate this feeling
I must stop this feeling
I must get rid of it
Take it away
I can’t cope with this feeling
I will lose control
I’ll go crazy
This feeling will keep going on forever
It is wrong to feel this way
It’s stupid and unacceptable
It’s weak
It’s bad
It’s dangerous
Your therapist in Sugar Land talks about how to cope with emotional distress
Escaping from distress only works short-term. In the long-term the distress can get worse and create bigger life problems.
Emotional distress is impossible to get rid of because it is human nature. But learning how to tolerate emotional discomfort is an important skill to learn.
Your therapist in Sugar Land talks about distress tolerance skills
With therapy, learning distress tolerance skills can help you manage emotional crises and help you cope with feelings that accompany emotional distress.
A few skills that we can identify and work on together in therapy include:
Self-soothing techniques
TIPP skills
The STOP skill to stop yourself from engaging in impulsive behaviors
Pros and cons
Distraction
Radical acceptance
Improving the moment
When it comes to self-soothing techniques, therapy can help you learn to use your senses to mentally ground yourself. Here’s what we mean…
See: look at all the colors and textures around you
Hear: listen to the sounds around you and your own breathing
Touch: reflect on what things feel like around you like the seat you’re sitting on or the clothes on your skin
Taste: eat a small piece of food or candy and pay attention to the way it tastes
Smell: acknowledge smells in the room or use aromatherapy
TIPP is an acronym for temperature, intense exercise, paced breathing and paired muscle relaxation. It usually works fast, within minutes to calm the limbic system and lower the body’s emotional arousal.
Radical acceptance is a common technique that requires a lot of practice, and is not something you may think of helping immediately, however it can be very helpful.
Radical acceptance means accepting the state of things as they are, without trying to change them. It’s learning to acknowledge “it is what it is.” When you give up the need to control a situation and realize there is nothing you can do to change it, the pressure to fix it eases.
This could mean observing a situation without emotion and accepting that some things are out of your control.
In the end, when everything else fails, an easy skill to practice is distraction. If you are feeling particularly overwhelmed, it can help to temporarily do something to distract yourself from a distressing situation. This could be calling a friend, exercising, reading a book, playing with a pet or running an errand.
Everyone deals with stress and emotions differently. It can affect your sleep, day-to-day life, work and even relationships.
If you have struggled with emotional distress, or feel you could improve your emotional or mental well-being, give us a call today to speak to a therapist.
