How Easily Do Your Feathers Get Ruffled?
It also involves making it through an emotional incident without making it worse.
Everyone experiences a wide variety of stress in life.
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The stronger these emotions are, the more difficult they can be to control.
Poor Distress Tolerance
It can be challenging to identify the specific emotions you’re experiencing.
This can make them feel even more frightening, unpredictable, and out of your control.
Biological Influences
Distress tolerance may have biological influences.
Research also indicates that babies are born with a particulartemperamentwhich is hard-wired and with them at birth.
Temperament is a strong predictor of personality traits that develop down the road.
This doesn’t mean those skills cannot be developedbut it might take longer or require more effort.
These automatic thoughts arecognitive distortions, which everyone has to some degree.
Such distress-laden beliefs can lead to escape behaviors such as withdrawal, avoidance, and sometimes self-harm.
Distress tolerance techniques that may be helpful include distraction, self-soothing, radical acceptance, and more.
Learning distress tolerance skills can help you get through emotional crises and bring more enjoyment into your life.
Distraction
Distraction can be a very effective way of taking action to increase your distress tolerance.
It involves using various methods to take your mind off your feelings of distress.
It can be a good tool for weighing the short-term and long-term consequences of an action.
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Some of these forms of therapy are discussed in the next section.
It is another form of CBT that involves gradual exposure to physical sensations associated with threats or stress.
Stress can cause physical sensations that influence how people think about and respond to stressors.
By eliciting these sensations, people can work to identify the unhelpful thoughts and actions associated with these feelings.
Final Thoughts
Everyone has some stress, and we learn ways to manage stressors throughout our lives.
Researchers continue to learn more about how distress tolerance develops and contributes to the etiology of different mental disorders.
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