**Building DISTRESS TOLERANCE: How To Stay Present With Hard Feelings & Expand Your Comfort Zone — Transcript & Summary | SozAI**
Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/building-distress-tolerance-stay-present-hard-feelings-expand-comfort-z/

Heidi Priebe explains distress tolerance as staying present with hard emotions to expand comfort zones, distinguishing distress from discomfort and the four F responses.

## Key Takeaways

- Distress tolerance is about transforming intolerable distress into manageable discomfort so you can make conscious choices.
- Much of avoidance is driven by fear of anticipated distress, not the feared event itself.
- The body learns safety through lived experience, not just intellectual insight, so gradual exposure is essential.
- Choose specific areas of life to build distress tolerance, where avoidance is limiting you.

## What the video covers

- Distress tolerance is a DBT concept, but this video focuses on using it proactively to expand one's comfort zone rather than on DBT crisis skills.
- Discomfort is an unpleasant emotional state one can stay present with and make conscious choices about; distress is an intolerable state that triggers unconscious survival responses.
- The four F responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) are adaptive in genuine threats but cause problems when triggered in situations that are not actually dangerous.
- Avoidance of situations is often driven by fear of anticipated distress rather than the feared outcome itself, illustrated by the speaker's fear of flying.
- Attachment patterns such as anxious attachment can keep people stuck in bad relationships out of fear of the distress of being alone.
- Avoidant attachment is reframed: people are not really afraid of commitment, but of chronic stress from the pressure of mutually dependent relationships.
- The body and brain learn differently; conceptual understanding alone does not change the body's response, which requires repeated experiences of felt safety.
- Building distress tolerance is compared to going to the gym: gradually exposing yourself to manageable discomfort builds the capacity to stay present.
- Sadness can be tolerated by learning that it passes and carries information about what needs to be let go of.
- Becoming at choice with difficult emotions, rather than eliminating them, is the goal.

## Chapters

1. 00:00 Introduction and scope of the video
2. 01:50 Distress vs. discomfort and the four F responses
3. 03:45 Examples of avoidance and fear of distress
4. 05:30 Why the body and brain learn differently
5. 09:00 Building distress tolerance like a muscle
6. 12:00 Personal examples of working with triggers
7. 16:30 Working with sadness and helplessness
8. 21:00 Closing reflections on letting go and change

Answers

## Questions about this video

What is the difference between distress and discomfort according to the speaker?

Distress is an emotional state that feels intolerable and unconsciously flips us into a four F response. Discomfort is unpleasant but can be stayed present with, allowing conscious choices about how to respond.

Why does the speaker say she avoided flying?

She discovered that her fear was not of dying in a plane crash but of the distress she anticipated feeling during the crash. Anticipating that distress for months led her to avoid flying altogether.

How can someone build their distress tolerance according to the video?

By gradually and repeatedly exposing themselves to manageable discomfort in chosen areas, staying present and regulated, so the body learns through experience that the situation is safe. Intellectual understanding alone is not enough.

## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00

Speaker A

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

00:12

Speaker A

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

00:26

Speaker A

going to be about is specific DBT skills. Okay? And the reason this video 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

00:39

Speaker A

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.

00:50

Speaker A

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 ability to be present with challenging emotional states as something that you

01:05

Speaker A

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

01:23

Speaker A

uncomfortable or hard emotions and feelings in our body that aren't necessarily pleasant without going into 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

01:40

Speaker A

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.

01:51

Speaker A

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 we are automatically deferring to the

02:03

Speaker A

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.

02:15

Speaker A

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

02:28

Speaker A

react based on pure instinct. Again, 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

02:43

Speaker A

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

02:56

Speaker A

constantly fighting back against things that it would actually be more adaptive 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

03:12

Speaker A

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

03:29

Speaker A

emotional state that feels intolerable 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

03:45

Speaker A

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

03:58

Speaker A

place of discomfort because when you're 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

04:11

Speaker A

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

04:27

Speaker A

where we might want to build up our distress tolerance can essentially be 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

04:39

Speaker A

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

04:54

Speaker A

without support. And so you might identify an area where you want to build your distress tolerance. So an area 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

05:11

Speaker A

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

05:26

Speaker A

to start working with this fear. And one of the questions they asked me was,"Well, are you afraid of dying?" And 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

05:37

Speaker A

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

05:48

Speaker A

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

06:00

Speaker A

was crashing. And I was so afraid of the 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

06:15

Speaker A

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

06:28

Speaker A

actually thought my life was going to end, but because I knew that from the 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

06:41

Speaker A

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

06:55

Speaker A

might encounter if we were to leave them and be forced to deal with things like being on our own. An example from the more avoidant side of the spectrum. Very often avoidance are criticized for being afraid of commitment. I personally do

07:08

Speaker A

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

07:21

Speaker A

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 distress. And so this flight response,

07:36

Speaker A

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

07:50

Speaker A

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 then learning to stay present and

08:04

Speaker A

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

08:21

Speaker A

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 completely honest and say the reason why I'm making this video is because that

08:34

Speaker A

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

08:48

Speaker A

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

09:00

Speaker A

three cardinal rules that I think it's really important to internalize when we start working with distress tolerance.

09:06

Speaker A

The first rule is that the body and the brain learn differently. So the brain learns things through grasping concepts.

09:15

Speaker A

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

09:27

Speaker A

is very differently than how the body learns. The body learns through 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

09:45

Speaker 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

09:57

Speaker A

to behave differently. And what I want to make clear is that I'm not knocking 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

10:10

Speaker A

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.

10:24

Speaker A

We have to actually go put ourselves in situations where we are making the choice to react differently than we have in the past. And then we have to stay present and associated for long enough that our body is able to log the

10:38

Speaker A

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

10:52

Speaker A

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 was safe because I was not relaxing into the experience and allowing myself to

11:06

Speaker A

actually log in my body. I am safe here. Okay. Now I want to once again be clear.

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Speaker A

Safe does not mean I feel good. Safe does not mean I like this environment.

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Speaker A

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 through the nervous system. And that's

11:33

Speaker A

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

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Speaker A

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

12:01

Speaker A

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

12:16

Speaker A

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

12:31

Speaker A

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

12:43

Speaker A

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

12:56

Speaker A

taking cues from our body and the things that we systematically avoid to get 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

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Speaker A

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

13:24

Speaker A

totally zened out when a grizzly bear is attacking me. But if I end up in that situation and practice that skill, I'm probably going to end up dead. And so, what we want to do here is use the

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Speaker A

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

13:48

Speaker A

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

14:01

Speaker A

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

14:15

Speaker A

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

14:26

Speaker A

lift up something important, you are pre-trained. You have given your nervous 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

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Speaker A

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

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Speaker A

environments we can practice being in that state within that are contained. 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.

15:10

Speaker A

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

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Speaker A

is generally not located inside of the thing that we are avoiding. It is located inside of us. We are afraid of getting trapped in a physiological state that feels intolerably distressing. So if I imagine myself, let's say being

15:39

Speaker A

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.

15:50

Speaker A

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 inability to tolerate the feelings that

16:04

Speaker A

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

16:22

Speaker A

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 environments that are well contained. So generally what this means is an

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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

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Speaker A

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 anger. So, when you go into a radical honesty workshop, a lot of what happens

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Speaker A

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

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Speaker A

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 flushed or my hands want to curl into

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Speaker A

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.

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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

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changed my relationship with it 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

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Speaker A

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

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kind of an emergency call. And luckily, they were. And I will never forget 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

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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

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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 happening in my body and my environment while I was in the trigger as well as

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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

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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 been able to stay present. And so the work on this step actually starts long

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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

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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 lots of people get coached through anger before my body started to believe this

20:07

Speaker A

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

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Speaker A

nobody was allowed to ridicule them or even respond to what they were sharing before I felt comfortable practicing sharing more vulnerable things myself.

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So step one is figuring out where do I 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

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Speaker A

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

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Speaker A

safe. So this is the process of our body 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

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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

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will be contained and then trying it out 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

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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

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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

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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

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and I felt the tiniest twinge of sadness, which is a feeling that 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

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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

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that's reminding me of my ex and actually just try if I can to really sink into that experience and notice 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

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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

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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 going to take me out of it. Because

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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.

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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

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body sensations of sadness and loss and then take myself out of it 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

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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

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body by giving it a new experience that if you go into sadness, you will come 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

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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

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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 afterwards because it was like 10:00 at

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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

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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, like I had just had a long cry, even

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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

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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 bodies the experience of going into

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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

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stress cycle and recognize I am safe. Okay, so this step is all about learning to contain environments for ourselves so that after we have learned in a safe environment how to practice this skill, we can now start doing it at home. And

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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

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of our four F responses. So again, when I'm sad about something, it doesn't mean that I'm going to allow 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

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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.

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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

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our lives. Same goes with anger. Anger 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

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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

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that we have the capacity to recognize what we are avoiding in our external 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

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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

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distress. And through that process we can learn to transform distress into discomfort and we can be present enough 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

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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

28:54

Speaker A

them in the comments section below. I love you guys. I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other, and I will see you back here again really soon.

29:03

Speaker A

[Music]

Topics: distress tolerance DBT emotional regulation four F responses fight flight freeze fawn attachment styles comfort zone nervous system resilience Heidi Priebe

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