Life is a mixed bag of good days and challenging days. At times, a situation, event, or interaction with another person leaves us in an uncomfortable or distressing emotional state.
Emotions—especially negative ones—can come on strong. How well we can navigate often deeply upsetting and distressing states—like anger, sadness, and fear—can have a profound and lasting impact on our sense of psychological safety and well-being in the world, our self-esteem, and our resilience, our ability to recover and thrive in the face of adversity.
What distress tolerance is
We all know of people who exhibit no signs of stress, remain calm in the face of crisis, and seem impermeable and unbreakable in any situation. Likewise, we likely know of people who exhibit a fragility, and seem easily upset, worried, or derailed by even a small setback, or a less-than-desirable outcome. In short, some people seem able to tolerate anything, while others seem to fall apart in the face of the slightest adversity.
Distress tolerance (DT), in a nutshell, is the ability to cope with and manage negative emotions. According to numerous studies, high levels of distress tolerance is strongly linked to positive physical and mental health outcomes. How we react and respond to uncomfortable emotional states is to some extent, learned behavior. As children, we watch and learn how our role models—our parents, siblings, caregivers, and extended family members act and react to adversity, bad news, setbacks, and loss. Their behaviors, to a large extent, create our early childhood blueprints. Along with these blueprints, our life experiences—both positive and negative—contribute to our ability to tolerate, respond to, and navigate adversity.
The slippery slope of avoidance
While negative emotions are part of the fabric of life, the desire to minimize, avoid, or even ignore anxiety, sadness, or anger is understandable, and not unusual. We avoid, suppress, and numb our negative emotional states in many ways, with alcohol, drugs, binge-eating comfort foods, shopping, gambling, pornography, gaming, and other avoidance behaviors that can lead to substance abuse disorders, and negative financial and personal outcomes.
What’s more, avoiding, numbing, and suppressing, rather than processing our negative emotions, can lead us into a state of fear and dread, with a tremendous load of emotional debris. The greater the load of our emotional debris, the more vulnerable we are to depression, anxiety disorders, and other serious mental health issues.
What happens when we allow ourselves to sit with negative emotions
When we sit with and ride out negative emotional states, we allow ourselves opportunities to explore and process our emotions. Processing emotions involves acknowledging them and exploring what emotions lie beneath blanket or secondary emotions, like anger, and the negative thoughts and self-limiting beliefs that fuel fear, sadness, and self-doubt.
When we allow ourselves to process our negative emotions, we increase our ability to regulate emotions and respond, rather than react to distressing events, situations, or interactions. What’s more, when we ride out uncomfortable emotions, we learn that what goes up will eventually come down, including the negative emotions and physiological symptoms. By riding out negative emotions, we create a positive memory and become more self-aware and confident. It increases self-confidence boosts self-esteem, bolsters resilience, and strengthens our distress tolerance.
Seven steps to riding out negative emotions
When it comes to riding out negative emotional states, the key is experiencing the empowering lesson that what goes up, must come down. Practicing these steps will help strengthen your distress tolerance and build resilience.
1. Acknowledge and identify how you are feeling and what physiological and mental health symptoms are present.
2. Make a conscious choice to sit with, stay present in, and pay attention to, rather than ignore, avoid, or numb your uncomfortable emotional state.
3. Focus on your breath. Take deep, nourishing breaths. While doing so, bring in grounding practices, like connecting with your senses of touch, sight, smell, hearing and sound. The goal of this step is to slow down, become a little more grounded, and thus aware of what you are experiencing in the moment.
4. Tune in to how your negative emotions shows up in your body. (Anger, for example, often triggers a rise in heart rate and body temperature). Sadness can manifest as a heaviness in the pit of the stomach, tension, or aching muscles. Fear can show up as shortness of breath, shaking, nausea, or sweating.
5. Pay attention to and acknowledge the ruminating negative thoughts that fuel your negative emotional state.
6. Challenge these negative thoughts. Stand up for yourself, and replace these thoughts with more accurate and supportive ones. (For example, how likely is the thought that a situation is absolutely hopeless, completely accurate?)
7. Notice how your physical symptoms and ruminating intrusive thoughts—and your negative emotional state—begin to subside with time.
With these steps, you can successfully ride out and process negative emotions. What’s more, you will begin to create positive memories, build resilience, believe in your skill set to cope well, and strengthen your distress tolerance.
