How Distress Tolerance Fits Into DBT and Everyday Life
Distress tolerance is a skill many people are never taught. Instead, they grow up avoiding discomfort or reacting impulsively to escape it. The problem is that life guarantees emotional pain. You cannot prevent sadness, anxiety, loss, or frustration, but you can learn to relate to those feelings in a way that protects your values and your peace of mind.
What Is Distress Tolerance?
Distress tolerance refers to your capacity to cope with intense emotional states in a way that reduces harm. It means sitting with discomfort long enough to make wise decisions, rather than reacting from panic or avoidance. This skill helps during both big and small moments. Waiting for medical results, sitting in traffic before an important interview, getting ghosted after a vulnerable conversation, all of these moments involve distress. Tolerance is what gets you through without spiraling or lashing out.
Many people confuse tolerance with passivity. They assume it means doing nothing. But true distress tolerance is active. It means feeling the discomfort and responding in a way that respects both the moment and the self. It often includes grounding, breathing, temporary distraction, and self-talk strategies that create internal space.
Why Distress Tolerance Matters
Without the ability to tolerate distress, you are more likely to react impulsively. That can look like yelling, quitting, drinking, overeating, ghosting, or any number of behaviors that provide short-term relief but long-term consequences. These patterns are not evidence of weakness. They are often what people learned in order to survive when they had no better options.
Learning distress tolerance gives you new options. It helps you build emotional strength the same way exercise builds physical strength. You start by holding a little discomfort. Then a little more. Eventually, situations that used to overwhelm you start to feel more manageable.
Distress tolerance is not about ignoring your feelings. It is about respecting your emotions while still acting in ways that align with who you want to be.
What Is DBT?
Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, is a form of therapy that was originally developed for people experiencing intense emotional pain, especially those with borderline personality disorder. Over time, it has proven useful for anyone who struggles with emotional regulation, impulsivity, and high sensitivity.
DBT combines cognitive-behavioral techniques with mindfulness principles. It teaches four core skill areas: mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, emotion regulation, and distress tolerance. Each skill supports the others, but distress tolerance is especially important because it helps people stay grounded when their emotions feel too big to manage.
DBT does not tell you to suppress or avoid your emotions. It teaches you how to ride them out without falling apart or hurting yourself or others. It treats emotional pain as real and valid, while also providing practical tools to navigate it.
How DBT Builds Distress Tolerance
DBT offers a variety of tools that help build distress tolerance. These tools can be broken down into two categories: crisis survival strategies and reality acceptance skills.
Crisis survival strategies are used when the situation cannot be changed and your emotions are at a breaking point. These include:
- Distraction: Engaging your attention elsewhere until the emotion eases
- Self-soothing: Using your senses to calm your nervous system
- Improving the moment: Using imagery, prayer, or music to reduce the intensity of the emotion
Reality acceptance skills involve accepting the situation for what it is, rather than fighting it mentally. This includes radical acceptance, which means fully acknowledging the truth of a situation in order to stop adding suffering on top of pain.
These tools do not make emotions disappear; they create enough space so you can get through the moment without sabotaging yourself.
Real-Life Examples of Distress Tolerance in Action
A teenager learns that her friends went to a party without her. She feels rejected and unwanted. Her impulse is to text a string of angry messages or start spreading rumors. Instead, she uses her DBT tools. She steps outside, breathes the cold air, and puts in her headphones. She listens to a song that always steadies her and reminds herself, “This hurts, but it will pass.”
A man gets laid off from his job. Panic rises in his chest. His instinct is to drink to numb it. But he has been working with a therapist. He remembers the ice cube trick. He holds a frozen cube in his hand and focuses on the sensation. The shock breaks his spiraling thoughts, and he is able to call a friend instead.
A woman is dealing with a breakup she did not expect. Her ex has already started dating someone new. She wants to scroll through their social media feed and compare everything. Instead, she chooses to go for a run, then journals for ten minutes. She reminds herself that healing takes time and that her pain is valid, but temporary.
A student fails an exam and feels like a total failure. Shame floods her thoughts. She uses the STOP skill from DBT:
- Stop
- Take a step back
- Observe
- Proceed mindfully
She steps outside the classroom, splashes water on her face, and tells herself, “This grade hurts, but it does not define me.”
A parent is overwhelmed after a long day. One child is crying, another is yelling. He feels the urge to scream. Instead, he sits on the bathroom floor, focuses on five things he can see, four he can touch, three he can hear, two he can smell, and one he can taste. It gives him a few moments to re-center and return with more patience.
These are not dramatic transformations. They are moments of choosing resilience. Each time someone uses distress tolerance instead of reacting impulsively, they reinforce a new pathway in the brain.
Distress Tolerance Is a Practice
It is not a switch you flip, it is a skill you build. Some days it will feel easier, but other days you may forget or resist using the tools. That does not mean you are failing. It means you are human.
The point is to keep practicing. Over time, these strategies become second nature. You begin to trust yourself to handle hard things without unraveling. That trust is part of what heals emotional wounds.
DBT teaches you to expect discomfort without fearing it. Distress tolerance becomes the bridge between feeling overwhelmed and responding with intention.
Support Makes It Easier
Learning distress tolerance skills is easier with support. A therapist trained in DBT can walk you through the tools, help you troubleshoot, and encourage you when things feel heavy. They can also help you identify which techniques work best for your unique personality and challenges.
Support groups, friends, and trusted community members also help. When someone believes in your capacity to cope, it can be easier to believe it yourself.
You do not have to white-knuckle your way through emotional pain. You can learn to hold it in a way that leaves room for hope, growth, and connection.
You Can Build This Skill
COPE Psychological Center teaches practical DBT skills to help you handle emotional storms. You don’t need to tough it out alone. Reach out today and begin learning how to face life with more steadiness and strength.