Distress Tolerance
One of the most important things we can teach our kids is to sit with their negative emotions.
Photo of me, not at the 1979 dance recital, but at some other wildly important dance performance.
“Mom, can I skip geometry? I’m going to fail my test.” The text came in mid-day from a nervous teenager.
“No, you can’t skip class,” she answered. “Sit with the discomfort and take the test. If you fail, you’ll discuss the next steps with your teacher. We’ve talked about this. You must learn to sit with discomfort.”
“What the heck does that even mean?” The response from the high school hallway was agitated and angry. If it weren’t for the automatic notification of skipped classes on the portal, the mother knew her son would’ve skipped geometry that day.
He took the test. He actually did fail the test, but not by much. And then he had to deal with the consequences of failing the test. An awkward conversation with his teacher about how to learn a subject matter he despised. A lower grade in the course. But he was OK.
Today I want to discuss what might be a boring topic, but one I want you to help your kids learn: distress tolerance. Distress tolerance refers to a person’s “perceived capacity to withstand negative emotional and/or other aversive states (e.g. physical discomfort), and the behavioral act of withstanding distressing internal states elicited by some type of stressor” (1).
In other words, it is sitting with discomfort.
I think that increasing our kids’ distress tolerance – and increasing our own parental distress tolerance – can lead to emotionally healthier kids, and emotionally healthier parents.
Think about what makes you anxious. It’s different for each of us. Waiting for a doctor visit to discuss a new diagnosis. Driving over a bridge. Public speaking. Walking into a party where you don’t know a soul. Spiders and snakes. Speaking honestly in a relationship that carries decades of emotional baggage. Setting appropriate relationship boundaries.
Now think about what makes your child anxious. Getting shots. Being dropped off at preschool. Separation anxiety at bedtime. Trying new foods. Starting a new team. First day of class. Going up to bat in a baseball game. Trying out for the school play. That party the mean girl is attending. Taking a driver’s test. Again, with the social situations. Again, with the spiders and snakes.
Whatever situation causes the sympathetic nervous system to be activated will bring physical symptoms, ones that prepare our bodies for fight or flight. I heard a therapist suggest one time to say out loud to your body in those situations, “Body, thanks for being ready to run from a tiger, but there’s no tiger chasing you, so you can calm down now.”
The physical symptoms that occur when a person is anxious are well known. Heart racing. Knot in the stomach. Some get sweaty, dizzy, or have difficulty taking deep breaths. Often there is a sense of impending doom. We can imagine our children feeling the same way. The younger ones will just cry or scream, not having the words to describe what they feel. The older ones will offer a biting comment like “what the heck does that even mean?”
But avoiding situations that cause distress doesn’t make it easier when we face them again. In fact, avoidance makes the next exposure worse. So we must help our children learn to sit with the uncomfortable feelings instead of fighting them, and to name them.
By doing so, our children regain control and take back power from the emotional response. “I miss you when you leave me at school.” “I am scared alone in my room at night.” “I feel nervous taking that test.”
No one wants to remain in fight-or-flight. Take slow, deep breaths. Take steps that return your body to the present, like walking outside to feel the sun on your skin. Engage the senses by noting what you can smell or feel. Take a hot bath, or put on relaxing music.
There are times for fight or flight (or my personal specialty: freeze), but the fight-or-flight system is sometimes activated in non-life-threatening situations, like a geometry test. Or a dance recital.
My mom tells the story of my first dance recital. Knowing who I am today, it does not surprise me that I didn’t want to go on stage in front of dozens of people at age 4. If memory and the photos serve me well, I had on a pale pink leotard and some shade of yellow (butterfly?) wings for the dance I needed to perform.
I stomped my ballet shoes and cried. I tried to refuse to go on stage.
My mom had someone tell her that it would damage me to make me perform at the recital, but my mom believed I could do it. She must have known, back then in 1979, about distress tolerance and teaching me to face hard things and tolerate uncomfortable feelings. I am scowling in every photo from that recital, but I did it, and I survived it.
And the next time I faced something that scared me, I knew that I could do it, and that I would survive it, too. And that is one of the best lessons we can teach our children.
Leyro, Teresa M.; Zvolensky, Michael J.; Bernstein, Amit (2016-11-17). “Distress Tolerance and Psychopathological Symptoms and Disorders: A Review of the Empirical Literature among Adults.” Psychological Bulletin. 136(4):576-600. doi:10.1037/a0019712, ISSN 0033-2909; PMC 2891552; PMID 20565169,
The advice and opinions herein are by no means meant to be a substitute for professional medical advice. Please contact your personal physician, mental health provider or health care professional for medical advice. Opinions are my own.