Building Your Tolerance of Discomfort
In this article, I’ll provide a simple and effective way to build up your distress tolerance. This is one of the most important skills we can nurture to help us build a successful life. It’s fair to assume that anyone reading has a great bit of discomfort between them and the lives they want. If that’s connecting with others, working to build healthier bodies, being more present and loving parents, or further developing their career, there are plenty of difficult moments ahead. Without this skill, we are likely to run when we encounter a notable obstacle. A lack of distress tolerance can snowball into loads of avoidance behaviors and spending energy going all over the place but not in the directions we seek.
We’ve all known someone or been the person to be extremely irritable when they are hungry or not feeling well. The entire Snickers advertising campaign has been built on this for years. If this is something that you notice in yourself quite rarely, I wouldn’t worry much. If you catch yourself regularly feeling ashamed of how you acted based on something unpleasant, then working on your distress tolerance will likely allow you to be your best self in a much broader set of circumstances. Please know that it is normal to have difficulty with this stuff. This is a skill not a trait. It’s something to be practiced. If it doesn’t come naturally, that doesn’t make you less of a quality person. As humans, we’re designed to seek comfort. There are plenty of times where you will find yourself seeking comfort, and it will be the right thing to do. Here, we want to notice if we are seeking comfort and doing so in a way that is harming us or others.
How resilient we are to stress influences our drives and motivations. This deeply impacts our lives at both the conscious and subconscious levels. There are handfuls of studies, which have reported that further developing one’s distress tolerance skills helps to better regulate anger and impulsivity while being a protective factor against depression and anxiety. In my professional experience, it is absolutely worth the effort to develop this skill.
What is distress tolerance?
Distress tolerance refers to our ability to sit with discomfort. To endure emotionally difficult situations without feeling the need to escape.
What’s the simplest way to build it?
Practice being less comfortable when you have opportunities to be comfortable. Find ways to do this consistently. That’s it.
Go for a walk when it’s colder than you’d like. Cook some food in the fridge that you don’t necessarily feel like eating tonight. Start exercising again. Push yourself a bit further than you normally would. Get out of bed as soon as your alarm goes off even though your bed is comfortable and warm. For anyone who wants to build this skill, I’d invite you to reflect on something that you’ve wanted to work on for yourself for a while. Maybe that’s your fitness. Perhaps it’s finding and nurturing a support system. Chase that. See the moments of discomfort that are necessary to made strides towards that goal. Use those as your steppingstones. You will build this skill along the way.
How can I build distress tolerance faster?
Increase the discomfort when you don’t have to. Being uncomfortable for its own sake seems silly to me. I’d always encourage you to find opportunities that will be helpful towards other things that are important to you. That said, it is still effective even if you are not moving towards a bigger goal of yours. Turning the water to cold for a minute at the start or end of your shower is an effective way to consistently take strides towards this. It does have some side benefits, but it likely will not be moving you towards some of your bigger goals in life.
Again, we want to find ways to regularly do this. If we go on a walk on a day that feels too cold for us once a week, we aren’t likely to build this skill swiftly.
Self-soothing to keep things within range
As with anything that might be helpful for you, it’s important that things are difficult but doable. If you are having a rough time working at this, take a few steps back. Add some comfort back in. If it’s difficult but doable, you’ll be making great strides in no time. Of course, please always be safe. I’d hate for anyone to hurt themselves working towards this.
What if my feelings seem like too much to endure?
For those who experience overwhelming feelings regularly, I strongly encourage talking to a professional. The scope of this article is for helping individuals to be better at dealing with mild to moderate stress. Sure, you can say that being in agony does count as discomfort, but we’d want to find ways to dramatically reduce the negative experience to keep it in that difficult but doable range. If you feel overwhelmed after an experience, you may be pushing yourself too far. If you are someone that experiences these bigger feelings, I encourage you to connect with professionals who can help. If this sounds like you, there are likely a wide variety of providers in your area on Psychology Today: Health, Help, Happiness + Find a Therapist. A style of therapy that has great techniques for enduring great levels of distress is called Dialectical Behavioral Therapy or DBT. After you type in your city or zip code, the “All Filters” section (top rightish) will allow you to scroll down and selection DBT in the “Types of Therapy” section. These providers are likely to be best equipped to meet your needs.
Written by Dr. Luke Bieber on October 11, 2025.
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