Building DISTRESS TOLERANCE: How To Stay Present With Hard Feelings & Expand Your Comfort Zone

Summary

This video by Heidi Priebe explores the concept of distress tolerance, a term from dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) used to describe the ability to be present with challenging emotional states to expand one's comfort zone. Heidi clarifies that she isn't a DBT-trained professional, and instead, the video aims to discuss the proactive work one can do to build distress tolerance. She differentiates between discomfort and distress and explains the body's 4F response (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) to perceived threats. By increasing distress tolerance, people can make more conscious choices, stay present with uncomfortable emotions, and avoid being driven by fear of anticipated distress. The video includes personal anecdotes and steps for building distress tolerance, highlighting the importance of experience-based learning to help the body adapt to stressors and increase its range of emotional resilience.

Highlights

• Heidi explains distress tolerance is about staying present with challenging emotional states. 🌊
• Distinction between distress and discomfort is crucial for proactive emotional management. 🔄
• Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses can be overused, leading to unnecessary problems. 🚫
• Personal anecdotes illustrate how avoiding anticipated distress can limit life choices. ✈️
• Heidi talks about using safe environments to build emotional resilience slowly. 🏠

Key Takeaways

• Distress tolerance helps you stay present with challenging emotions and can expand your comfort zone! 🎢
• Understanding the difference between discomfort and distress can empower you to make better choices! 🔍
• The 4F responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) are natural, but can be maladaptive when triggered unnecessarily. 🧠
• Heidi shares personal stories and strategies to build distress tolerance by practicing in safe environments. 🏋️
• Building this skill relies on experiential learning—your body needs to experience safety in distressing situations. 🛡️

Overview

Welcome to an engaging deep dive with Heidi Priebe into the mindful art of distress tolerance—a key part of expanding your comfort zone! 🎨 In this insightful video, Heidi navigates through distress tolerance, a concept rooted in dialectical behavioral therapy (despite not being a DBT pro herself). She helps us differentiate distress from discomfort, showing how knowing one from the other can empower conscious choices and responses.

Heidi shares personal stories, including her fear of flying, illustrating how anticipated distress can hold us back. 🎡 You’ll hear how the body's four instinctive responses—fight, flight, freeze, and fawn—play a significant role and can often misfire, leading us into more issues than resolutions! This talk isn't just theory but laced with relatable experiences and revelations

Through her amusing yet profound anecdotes, Heidi unwraps steps to build distress tolerance—with a focus on cultivating experiences in controlled, supportive environments. 🏋️‍♀️ It’s all about giving the body a newfound sense of safety amidst discomfort. By doing so on the regular, we boost our resilience, gearing up to meet life's emotional rollercoasters with grace and choice! 🎢

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Distress Tolerance and DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) The chapter introduces the concept of distress tolerance within the framework of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). The presenter, Heidi Prib, clarifies that while she is not trained in DBT, the discussion aims to explore the idea of distress tolerance rather than specific DBT skills. The chapter sets the stage for understanding resilience and distress management, providing viewers with foundational knowledge about handling emotional challenges.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Difference Between Distress and Discomfort The chapter discusses the distinction between distress and discomfort and emphasizes the concept of distress tolerance. It highlights that while many online resources and workbooks are available for learning skills to regulate emotions using Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), the focus here will be on understanding and managing distress rather than providing a how-to guide on DBT techniques.
• 01:00 - 01:30: 4F Responses (Fight, Flight, Freeze, Fawn) In this section, the focus is on understanding and improving the ability to be present with challenging emotional states proactively. The key difference between distress and discomfort is highlighted. Discomfort tolerance is discussed as the ability to stay present with difficult or uncomfortable emotions and bodily feelings without reacting negatively.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Repetitive 4F Responses Problems The chapter discusses the 'four F responses' to stress: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Each response is explained: 'fight' involves adrenaline and self-defense, 'flight' involves escaping a situation, 'freeze' involves immobilization and a need to reassess the situation, and 'fawn' was mentioned but not detailed in the provided text.
• 02:00 - 02:30: Defining Distress vs. Discomfort The default behavior of deferring to others' needs can be adaptive in genuinely threatening situations. The body's natural response is to shut down the reasoning part of the mind in favor of instinctual reactions.
• 02:30 - 03:00: Building Distress Tolerance This chapter discusses the concept of distress tolerance and how the 'four F responses' (fight, flight, freeze, and fawn) can sometimes activate in situations where there is no genuine threat. It explains that these responses, when triggered unnecessarily, can create problems such as chronic avoidance or fighting against situations where adaptation would be more beneficial. The focus is on the importance of being present in situations to better cope and deal with challenges directly.
• 03:00 - 03:30: Examples of Distress Tolerance Areas The chapter 'Examples of Distress Tolerance Areas' discusses various emotional states of distress and how they can manifest in our behavior. It introduces the idea of distress as an emotional state that feels intolerable and explores how people might react in such situations. The chapter includes examples such as freezing or shutting down when help is available, or fawning to appease others when it's unnecessary, pointing out that these reactions often occur in situations where a person could instead express genuine preferences safely.
• 03:30 - 04:00: Fear of Distress vs. Actual Distress This chapter discusses the difference between the fear of distress and actual distress. 'Fear of Distress' refers to the emotional discomfort and automatic response (like the 4F responses) that can occur unconsciously. In contrast, 'Actual Distress' is an emotional state that is uncomfortable but manageable, allowing individuals to stay present and make conscious decisions on how to manage the situation, even if it is genuinely bad.
• 04:00 - 04:30: Changing Distress into Discomfort The chapter 'Changing Distress into Discomfort' discusses the difference between distress and discomfort. It highlights that in a state of discomfort, one can still recognize feelings such as being spoken to unpleasantly or feeling pressured. The aim is not to make the intolerable tolerable, but rather to increase one's capacity for conscious choice in specific situations. The chapter suggests building 'muscles' or tolerance in areas that may be causing distress.
• 04:30 - 05:00: Developing Distress Tolerance Strategies The chapter addresses the concept of distress tolerance and the strategies one can develop to improve it. It discusses how people often avoid situations due to fear, even if they believe those situations could be beneficial. Specifically, attachment strategies are used as an example, illustrating how anxiety may cause individuals to cling to unhealthy relationships due to the fear of being alone. Identifying areas where one wants to increase distress tolerance is suggested as a way to begin addressing these fears.
• 05:00 - 05:30: Difference Between Mind and Body Learning The chapter discusses the difference between mind and body learning by addressing how fear and discomfort can trap individuals in undesirable situations. It highlights the importance of transforming distress into manageable discomfort, using an example from the speaker's life when they sought therapy to overcome a fear of flying. The underlying theme is the necessity to embrace discomfort as part of the learning process to overcome fears and improve emotional responses.
• 05:30 - 06:00: Meeting the Body's Needs The chapter discusses the author's personal reflection on fears associated with different modes of transportation. The author admits to not fearing death in general circumstances but having a distinct fear of flying. The fear is not rooted in the prospect of dying in a plane crash, but rather in the imagined experience of realizing the plane is about to crash. This highlights a psychological focus more on the moments leading up to a potential disaster rather than the disaster itself.
• 06:00 - 06:30: Wise Discernment in Distress Tolerance The chapter explores the concept of distress tolerance, focusing on the idea that it's often the anticipation of distress, rather than the distress itself, that people fear. This anticipation of distress can lead to avoidance behaviors, such as the example of not flying due to the imagined distress rather than actual fear of danger. The chapter aims to help readers understand how this fear keeps them stuck in undesirable situations and encourages them to develop wise discernment in dealing with these fears.
• 06:30 - 07:00: Building Distress Tolerance Process This chapter discusses the concept of avoiding distress and its impact on decision-making, such as avoiding flying due to the fear of imagined panic. It highlights a common tendency to remain in negative situations out of fear of the distress associated with change, like the fear of being alone when leaving a bad situation.
• 07:00 - 07:30: Creating Contained Environments The chapter explores the concept of creating contained environments, particularly focusing on individuals with an avoidant attachment style. It challenges the common criticism that avoidants fear commitment, suggesting instead that their hesitation arises from the pressure and nervous system stress associated with relationships. The avoidance is not about the commitment itself but the continuous pressure experienced within relationships.
• 07:30 - 08:00: Step 2: Self-Contained Spaces for Emotions The chapter discusses the concept of self-contained spaces for emotions, focusing on the flight response as a protective mechanism to avoid chronic stress in relationships. It emphasizes the need to transform distress into discomfort and become conscious of bodily responses when experiencing 4F responses.
• 08:00 - 08:30: Step 3: Experiencing Spontaneous Emotion The chapter discusses the skill of staying present and attuned to emotions without automatically trying to escape them. This ability leads to better adaptation to new situations. It highlights methods to improve distress tolerance, such as developing regulation strategies that can be used during moments of distress, which is a focus of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT).
• 08:30 - 09:00: Intentional Work with Distress Tolerance The chapter titled 'Intentional Work with Distress Tolerance' discusses the importance of building distress tolerance outside of moments of actual distress. The author shares their personal experience, stating that trying to cope with distress only during its occurrence hasn't been effective for them. Instead, they found success in developing distress tolerance during calm periods, which provides their body and nervous system a reliable blueprint to handle stress effectively when it arises. The chapter promises to explore strategies to achieve this, guided by three cardinal rules.
• 09:00 - 09:30: Conclusion and Encouragement for Feedback This chapter discusses the importance of understanding the difference between how the brain and the body learn, particularly in the context of distress tolerance. The brain learns by grasping concepts, understanding, and explaining them verbally. In contrast, the body learns through experiences and physical responses. The chapter emphasizes the need to internalize these distinctions to effectively work with distress tolerance.

Building DISTRESS TOLERANCE: How To Stay Present With Hard Feelings & Expand Your Comfort Zone Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Hey guys, I'm Heidi Prib. Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here. For the past month and a half on this channel, we've been talking about resilience. And today in particular, I want to talk about the concept of distress tolerance. Now, this is a term that comes from the field of DBT or dialectical behavioral therapy. And I want to make clear right off the get- go that this is not a field that I am trained in. So, what this video is not going to be about is specific DBT skills. Okay? And the reason this video
• 00:30 - 01:00 is not going to be about that is because there is already a wide plethora of resources available online. So if what you are looking for is skills to help you return to regulation in the moments when you are incredibly disregulated and you want to use DBT to do that, I encourage you to go check out what resources you can find online for that. I know they also have awesome workbooks for it. But what we are going to be talking about today is something slightly different which is using this concept of distress tolerance. So the
• 01:00 - 01:30 ability to be present with challenging emotional states as something that you can work on proactively in order to expand your comfort zone. Now the first thing I want to talk about is the difference between distress and discomfort. When we can tolerate discomfort well, essentially what that means is that we can be present with uncomfortable or hard emotions and feelings in our body that aren't necessarily pleasant without going into
• 01:30 - 02:00 one of our four F responses. So the four F responses are fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Fight is essentially when our bodies are getting pumped with adrenaline and we believe that we have to defend ourselves at any cost. Flight is when we believe that we absolutely must escape a situation, either literally or mentally or emotionally. Freeze is when our systems feel immobilized and like it's not safe to make a move in any direction until we can stop and figure out exactly what's going on. And fawn is a state in which
• 02:00 - 02:30 we are automatically deferring to the wants or needs of other people without being able to access or get clear on what our own are. Now what I want to make clear is that these are all highly adaptive things in the right situations. So in situations where you are genuinely under threat, these are good responses for the body to have because essentially what they do is they shut down that part of the mind that is trying to reason and make sense of the situation and they react based on pure instinct. Again,
• 02:30 - 03:00 this is very useful in the right situations. The problem is that if one of these four F responses repeatedly comes online for us in situations where we are not genuinely under threat, those responses tend to create a lot of problems for us that don't need to exist because maybe we are now chronically avoiding situations that it would be better for us to be present with and deal with head on. Or maybe we are constantly fighting back against things that it would actually be more adaptive
• 03:00 - 03:30 for us to once again just be present and work through calmly. Maybe we are freezing and shutting down in situations where actually help would be available to us if we knew how to look for and source it. Or maybe we're fawning in situations and assuming that we need to appease another person when in fact that person would actually be a safe person for us to express our genuine preferences to. So essentially, I'm defining distress in this video as any emotional state that feels intolerable
• 03:30 - 04:00 for us and flips us into one of those 4F responses unconsciously. And discomfort, I'm defining as an emotional state that is uncomfortable and unpleasant in most cases, but that we are able to stay present with and we are able to make conscious choices around how we want to deal with it. So once again, if you're in a situation that is genuinely bad for you, you can still deal with it from a place of discomfort because when you're
• 04:00 - 04:30 in a state of discomfort, you are still able to recognize things like I don't like the way I'm being spoken to or I feel like a lot of pressure is being applied on me that I don't like. So again, this is not about making the intolerable tolerable. It is about choosing which situations we would like to increase our capacity to have conscious choice around and working specifically on building our muscles in those areas. So some examples of areas where we might want to build up our distress tolerance can essentially be
• 04:30 - 05:00 found in anything that we kind of think would be good for us but that we are very afraid of so we avoid like the plague. So attachment strategies give really good examples of this. If we air more anxious, it might be really hard for us to leave relationships that we know are not working anymore or that are bad for us because we might have a paralyzing fear of being alone and without support. And so you might identify an area where you want to build your distress tolerance. So an area
• 05:00 - 05:30 where you want to transmute that distress into discomfort as learning to be single or to be alone without panicking at the very thought of experiencing that discomfort because it's the fear of the discomfort itself that often keeps us stuck in bad situations. An example of this is I used to be very afraid of flying. And so in my mid20s I went to a therapist to try to start working with this fear. And one of the questions they asked me was,"Well, are you afraid of dying?" And
• 05:30 - 06:00 I thought about it and I went, "You know what? I'm not actually. Every day I get in cars. I know that cars are very liable to crash and I actually don't really have a fear of dying in a car accident. I don't have a fear of dying in a lot of circumstances because I figure that once I'm dead, I won't really know the difference. But I do have a fear of getting on planes." And I realized that what I was actually afraid of was not dying on the plane. It was that I had this idea in my head of what it would feel like to realize my plane was crashing. And I was so afraid of the
• 06:00 - 06:30 distress that I imagined I would feel in that instance that I would avoid flying altogether because the anticipation of that distress was what I was actually afraid of. Okay, so I'm going to break that down again. It's often the fear of being in distress that we are afraid of and that keeps us stuck in bad situations. So when I was unable to get on an airplane, not because I actually thought my life was going to end, but because I knew that from the
• 06:30 - 07:00 moment I booked the flight, I would spend months replaying in my head the 30 to 60 seconds of panic I imagined I would feel as the plane went down. I started wanting to avoid flying altogether because I was so afraid of anticipating distress. And again, we can parallel this to all sorts of things. A lot of us stay in bad situations because we are afraid of the distress that we might encounter if we were to leave them and be forced to deal with things like being on our own. An example from the
• 07:00 - 07:30 more avoidant side of the spectrum. Very often avoidance are criticized for being afraid of commitment. I personally do not believe that anybody is afraid of commitment as a construct. But what's happening for a lot of avoidance is that they recognize on a sematic level that when they get into relationships, they tend to feel a lot of pressure that is taxing on the nervous system. And it's not that they are afraid necessarily of committing to a human being. It's that there is this unconscious fear of having to live perpetually in that state of
• 07:30 - 08:00 distress. And so this flight response, this backing away and not wanting to get too close to people often functions as a protective mechanism for avoiding the chronic stress that comes online when they find themselves in mutually dependent relationships. So there is an unconscious state of distress happening and when we can learn to transform distress into discomfort. So to make conscious for ourselves what the body is responding to in the moments where one of our 4F responses comes online and
• 08:00 - 08:30 then learning to stay present and attuned to that thing without needing to automatically escape that feeling. That's when we develop the skill of adapting ourselves to new situations that we might want to choose to adapt ourselves to. So there are a couple ways of working on distress tolerance. One way is to develop regulation strategies that you can pull out in a moment of distress. And this is what the field of DBT focuses on. I'm just going to be
• 08:30 - 09:00 completely honest and say the reason why I'm making this video is because that just doesn't work for me. It has almost always been very challenging for me to work on distress only in the moments when it's present for me. And it has helped me immensely to work on building my distress tolerance in between moments of distress so that my body and my nervous system had a blueprint it could fall back on in those moments for how to deal with them. So we're going to talk about how to do that. And there are three cardinal rules that I think it's
• 09:00 - 09:30 really important to internalize when we start working with distress tolerance. The first rule is that the body and the brain learn differently. So the brain learns things through grasping concepts. We generally say that we know something or that we understand something when we are able to explain it in words and when we have a kind of clear and coherent idea of it inside of our heads. But this is very differently than how the body learns. The body learns through
• 09:30 - 10:00 experience. So the body knows something is true when it has experienced it and it has formed a memory of that experience that lives again in the nervous system. So a big mistake that a lot of us make when we're trying to work with things like trauma or our physiological preferences is that we think just frontloading our brains with information will get us to the point where our body now trusts that it's safe to behave differently. And what I want to make clear is that I'm not knocking
• 10:00 - 10:30 the conscious way of learning. The mind is very important for things like discernment and figuring out where we even need to do this work in the first place. But the body has to learn through experience. So if we want to build up our distress tolerance, we cannot simply frontload our brain with a bunch of information about triggers and the nervous system and how this all works. We have to actually go put ourselves in situations where we are making the choice to react differently than we have
• 10:30 - 11:00 in the past. And then we have to stay present and associated for long enough that our body is able to log the experience as a memory of a time when we did something and stayed safe. And the thing that's really important to remember here is that we can be in a flight response mentally. So if I have a phobia of flying and I force myself to get on a 100 airplanes, if I am just dissociating through the entire experience, my body is not going to log that flight as a memory of a time when I
• 11:00 - 11:30 was safe because I was not relaxing into the experience and allowing myself to actually log in my body. I am safe here. Okay. Now I want to once again be clear. Safe does not mean I feel good. Safe does not mean I like this environment. Safe just means I am able to relax and be present and at choice about how I'm responding without my life being in danger. So our bodies learn distress tolerance not through the mind but
• 11:30 - 12:00 through the nervous system. And that's just one of the cardinal rules we're going to keep in mind as we talk about how to do the process of building this tolerance. The next cardinal rule is that we have to meet our bodies and our nervous systems where they are at not where we think they should be at otherwise this skill never gets built. So if we think it is absolutely ridiculous that we are afraid of something or if we think that we absolutely should be able to be present
• 12:00 - 12:30 with distress in X Y or Z scenario. If our body does not agree, nothing else matters. Because our body does not trust the conscious mind's judgment. It trusts its own judgment. I can recognize with my conscious mind that flying is statistically not that dangerous. Or that telling someone you're upset with them or that advocating for your needs in a relationship and setting a boundary with someone is probably not that dangerous or that being single is not that dangerous. But we have to meet our
• 12:30 - 13:00 bodies where they are at and where their belief system lies in order to begin working on this. Otherwise, what's going to happen is as soon as you're in a situation where your conscious mind says this is safe and your body says no, it's not, your body is going to hit the override switch on your conscious mind and it is going to react based on instinct. So, we have to be willing to start building distress tolerance. not where we think it's rational to, but by taking cues from our body and the things that we systematically avoid to get
• 13:00 - 13:30 clear on what our bodies believe is safe versus nonsafe and taking that seriously, even if it feels ridiculous to our conscious minds. And the third thing to keep in mind when working on building distress tolerance is that we need to practice wise discernment about what we are adapting ourselves to. So, I can use the skill of distress tolerance to train my nervous system to feel totally zened out when a grizzly bear is attacking me. But if I end up in that situation and practice that skill, I'm
• 13:30 - 14:00 probably going to end up dead. And so, what we want to do here is use the conscious mind to determine for ourselves, what would I like to be more at choice about in my life? What are some areas where I see myself getting triggered and have identified as an area that I would like to be able to handle from a non-triggered state? Not because I want to just take whatever is happening lying down, but because I want to be able to respond from the wisest part of myself. So, this is not about learning to tolerate the intolerable. It
• 14:00 - 14:30 is about learning to be more present with and at choice about all of the circumstances of our lives because we are marrying the cognition of the mind with the wisdom of the nervous system and getting them to start working together. So, we're going to talk a little bit about how to do this. And I want us to think of this as kind of like going to the gym and just building this muscle so that when the time comes to lift up something important, you are pre-trained. You have given your nervous
• 14:30 - 15:00 system enough experiences of sitting with emotions that used to flip you into a distress state in a safe context that you now have bodybased memories of how to be with that distress. And I'll give more examples of what that looks like as we go through. The first step in working with distress tolerance is pinpointing what internal state we are afraid of encountering and then finding environments we can practice being in that state within that are contained.
• 15:00 - 15:30 And what contained means in this context is an environment where you know what is going to happen. So we're going to take this back and move slowly through this. In order to figure out what internal body state you are afraid of, you generally have to look at what you chronically avoid in your life. So this requires us developing an understanding of the fact that what we are afraid of is generally not located inside of the thing that we are avoiding. It is located inside of us. We are afraid of
• 15:30 - 16:00 getting trapped in a physiological state that feels intolerably distressing. So if I imagine myself, let's say being alone or setting a boundary with someone or getting on an airplane, what is it that I'm imagining my physical state would be? My emotional state would be. And that is likely what needs to get worked with, our ability to tolerate that state. And when we can do this, we learn that it's not the things in our environment we're afraid of. It's our
• 16:00 - 16:30 inability to tolerate the feelings that come up in our bodies and our awareness when we interact with those things. And so building distress tolerance is about learning to tolerate those emotions and those physiological experiences well enough to be at choice with how we interact with the object. So again, step one is about figuring out what internal state we are so afraid of encountering that we feel like we don't know how to tolerate and then putting ourselves in
• 16:30 - 17:00 environments that are well contained. So generally what this means is an environment where you have someone like a therapist, a coach, a support group who is able to provide you with a sense of certainty around what will definitely happen if you go into that state. So, an example, I've talked on this channel before about doing the practice of radical honesty in my attachment healing work. And a big part of radical honesty involves learning to stay associated to
• 17:00 - 17:30 anger. So, when you go into a radical honesty workshop, a lot of what happens is that people are encouraged to express anger, but also to stay present with what is happening for them when they are in anger. So, it's not about unleashing on another person and telling them everything you hate about them. It's about noticing I'm really angry and I can tell people that I'm really angry and I'm going to keep my awareness on what is happening for me physiologically. My face is getting
• 17:30 - 18:00 flushed or my hands want to curl into fists or my face is scrunching up in a certain way. Right? And you're encouraged to pay attention to your body and what is happening physiologically when you are in an angry state. and getting routinely coached through a state of anger and learning I can go into anger without being in danger because there was a coach who was there helping me stay present and associated to the moment while I was in anger changed my relationship with it
• 18:00 - 18:30 forever. The same kind of thing happened to me once when I had a very strong abandonment trigger go off. So, I had a situation where in a long-term romantic relationship, I had something happen that hardcore triggered a really deeply buried fear of abandonment. And as soon as this happened, at this point, I was pretty aware of what a trigger felt like in my body. So, I went and I asked my therapist if they would be available for kind of an emergency call. And luckily, they were. And I will never forget
• 18:30 - 19:00 sitting down with my therapist for that session and them saying to me, "Hey, it's really clear to me you're in the middle of a trigger. Do you want to try co-regulating through it and learning that you can come down from this trigger? And I had built enough relational trust with this person to know that they were not going to take advantage of anything I said or did in a triggered state. And my therapist, who also luckily was very traumainformed and very good with somatic modalities, helped me stay very aware of what was
• 19:00 - 19:30 happening in my body and my environment while I was in the trigger as well as while I was coming down from it. And this ability to stay present with where we are, what's going on around us, and what's happening in our bodies as we are working through these distressing states is crucial for giving our bodies the message that we can stay associated and present in these states and still survive them and in a lot of cases end up making better choices because we have
• 19:30 - 20:00 been able to stay present. And so the work on this step actually starts long before the first time a trigger goes off within a contained environment. This step starts when we begin to identify for ourselves environments where it might someday be safe to do that. So for myself, I worked with my therapist for years before I ever came to that therapist in a triggered state and trusted that I would be guided through it effectively. I went to multiple radical honesty workshops and watched
• 20:00 - 20:30 lots of people get coached through anger before my body started to believe this is a safe place to express anger and be held in it. I went to a lot of 12step groups. I used to go to ACA pretty regularly and watched a lot of people do very vulnerable shares and watched how nobody was allowed to ridicule them or even respond to what they were sharing before I felt comfortable practicing sharing more vulnerable things myself. So step one is figuring out where do I
• 20:30 - 21:00 want to build this distress tolerance and where can I find a contained environment that I can go to to practice that skill within. And then we generally have to go put ourselves in that environment and give our bodies proof by watching other people do this or by building a therapeutic relationship that involves trust that when it's time to show up in that state in that environment, we are probably going to be safe. So this is the process of our body
• 21:00 - 21:30 learning to trust certain select environments as safe which builds up to the body trusting the conscious mind in the instances where we go hey I am going to try to go into this emotional state in this context because I've seen what will happen if I do pinpointing the inner state we want to work on finding the environments that can contain them giving our bodies proof by being present in those environments that those things will be contained and then trying it out
• 21:30 - 22:00 for ourselves. That is all step one in learning to build emotional distress tolerance. Step two is designing self-contained spaces for dealing with our challenging emotions. So another example of this is I used to immensely struggle with sadness. My body would automatically regulate me out of the emotion of sadness because again sadness is often about being in despair and being in a state where you are recognizing your own helplessness. which because of my own early patterning was
• 22:00 - 22:30 something my body thought I would die if I were to do. And so at the point in my life where I was doing a lot of this emotional work and working on building up my tolerance to be present with different emotions, I was also going through the breakup of a long-term relationship. And something I noticed one day as I was sitting in my room, I was living in Colorado at the time, was that a song came on that reminded me of my exartner and I felt the tiniest twinge of sadness, which is a feeling that
• 22:30 - 23:00 historically my body would take me immediately out of. I would go right into a mental flight response and start thinking about something really positive and exciting in the future and I would regulate myself out of that state of sadness. And I went, you know what? What if I actually stay with this? What if I give myself five minutes to practice being with this sadness? What if I restart this song that I'm listening to that's reminding me of my ex and actually just try if I can to really sink into that experience and notice
• 23:00 - 23:30 what happens in my body if I just let myself be sad on the condition that when this song is over I'm going to go outside and I'm going to go for a hike because I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was going to feel differently when I was outside hiking and I was getting endorphins pumping through my system and looking at beautiful views. And so I went, what if I created an environment for myself where similar to in a workshop, I knew that after I sunk into this feeling, I was then going to do something that was
• 23:30 - 24:00 going to take me out of it. Because generally my fear of going into feelings of sadness or helplessness were around the fact that I thought they were going to last forever because I didn't know how to take myself out of those states. I had never learned to go into them for long enough to find my way back out. And so I created an experiment where I would listen to the full song, actually try to amplify and really be present with the body sensations of sadness and loss and then take myself out of it
• 24:00 - 24:30 deliberately. And it worked surprisingly well. And so the next day I decided, what if I recreate this on purpose? What if I spend 20 minutes today really trying to be with my experience of loss and pain and sadness? And then I go on a hike. And the reason why that second part is really important was because I was teaching my body, not my mind, my body by giving it a new experience that if you go into sadness, you will come
• 24:30 - 25:00 out of it. And I did this day after day after day for a couple of weeks. And then something really interesting happened to me. One night, I was walking home late at night from my co-working space and I was thinking about another situation in my life. not the breakup, but just another thing that I was going through that felt challenging. And I noticed my body response of sadness spontaneously coming online, which again was almost unheard of for me. And I noticed I was at this very particular choice point because I couldn't take myself hiking if I went into the sadness
• 25:00 - 25:30 afterwards because it was like 10:00 at night. And so I went, I'm just going to try out going into this feeling without knowing when it's going to end. And I'm going to see what happens. And so I walked home and I stayed really present with my physiological state with my heavy eyelids and my limbs that felt heavy and kind of like I was dragging myself through the street. And I allowed myself to go to sleep in that state. And I woke up feeling incredibly renewed,
• 25:30 - 26:00 like I had just had a long cry, even though I hadn't actually cried. But I had learned a really important lesson in my body, which is that sadness passes and it's safe to go into it. And the way I learned that lesson was by designing an experience for myself where it was definitely true and practicing that experience over and over and over again until my body had a memory of it that it could trust. It's not enough to know that sadness ends. We have to give our
• 26:00 - 26:30 bodies the experience of going into sadness and having it end, of going into anger and having it end, of going into aloneeness or even things like true abandonment and recognizing that we do not die by staying associated with that experience until we reach the end of the stress cycle and recognize I am safe. Okay, so this step is all about learning to contain environments for ourselves so
• 26:30 - 27:00 that after we have learned in a safe environment how to practice this skill, we can now start doing it at home. And the third and last step of this process is really just that it is noticing that we are now able to experience more spontaneous emotion and we have a framework for how to be present with those emotions without flipping into one of our four F responses. So again, when I'm sad about something, it doesn't mean that I'm going to allow
• 27:00 - 27:30 the sadness to go on forever. What it means is that I'm going to be present with the sadness. I'm not going to freak out that it's happening in my body, and so I'm actually going to be able to stay on the page with it for long enough to listen to what it is trying to tell me. Often sadness means that there's something we need to let go of, or there's something that's not working for us anymore. And if we never listen to that, we never internalize that. and make the changes that we need to make in our lives. Same goes with anger. Anger
• 27:30 - 28:00 is often a really good indication that we need to be setting a boundary or saying no to something. And if we are never present with anger for long enough to do that, one of two things starts happening. We either live with no boundaries or we start trying to get other people to enforce our boundaries for us and basically start outsourcing all of our self-p protection. So the idea of working intentionally and proactively with distress tolerance is that we have the capacity to recognize what we are avoiding in our external
• 28:00 - 28:30 world. Recognize that what we are actually afraid of is what will happen inside of our own minds, bodies and systems if we encounter that thing. And then we can start working with that feeling in environments that are safe and developmentally appropriate. So again that cardinal rule you have to meet your body where your body is at or else you will overload it and flip into distress. And through that process we can learn to transform distress into discomfort and we can be present enough
• 28:30 - 29:00 with that discomfort to start making wiser choices about how we handle our lives because we are able to actually listen to the wisdom of what our emotions are trying to tell us. All right, this has been a long video, so I'm going to leave it at that for today. But as always, any questions, anything you have coming up for you as you go through this video, please leave them in the comments section below. I love you guys. I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other, and I will
• 29:00 - 29:30 see you back here again really soon. [Music]