No one likes emotional discomfort.

No need to be shy in admitting that tolerating sticky emotions in this one big beautiful life can be hard.

Distress Intolerance is the term for a person’s inability to fully experience uncomfortable emotions. It makes a person desperate to escape or avoid these uncomfortable emotions such as sadness, anger or fear. Distress intolerance is when people believe that they cannot handle uncomfortable emotions and feel a strong urge within to numb or escape these emotions.

Signs of Distress Intolerance thinking:
If you take desperate measures to get away from uncomfortable emotions, that is a clear sign of distress intolerance. Examples are:

Numbing: Indulgence in alcohol, substances, social media, over eating, over sleeping (the list goes on) to get away from emotional discomfort. 

Avoidance: Avoiding an activity because you’re anxious, putting off doing something you really need to because you’re frustrated etc.

Harmful Releases: Kicking, biting, cutting or other destructive activities. It causes physical harm to yourself or others while also worsening the emotion that is left unhandled.

Suppression: Telling yourself to stop and trying to push away the distress. It’s hard to sustain and eventually becomes tiresome... "crashing down" usually follows so beware.

Why is Distress Intolerance unhelpful?

  • A negative emotion is like a snowball, they get bigger and bigger without proper coping. 
  • By continually relying on these escape strategies, you cannot learn more effective ways to cope with emotional distress.
  • You might believe that you need to run from emotional distress because you can’t handle it but you’ll never know how much you can tolerate unless you try to do it.

Overcoming distress intolerance: Accept whats happening, do something to create a new sensation, practice self soothing, problem solving

An example in action is

What do you do, What does it mean, What will happen, what should you do next time

READ MORE ABOUT DISTRESS TOLERANCE HERE

 

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