You Should Be Uncomfortable
Why Sitting With Distress Is Everything
Jamie Mercado, MSW, LCSW
In my work, I hear some version of this sentence almost every week: "I just want to feel okay again." It's such a human wish. Nobody signs up for anxiety, grief, anger, or the pit in our stomachs that shows up before a hard conversation. Our instinct is to make it stop — to distract, numb, avoid, fix, or flee.
But here's something I've come to believe deeply after years of clinical work: our relationship with discomfort matters more than the discomfort itself.
Why We’re Wired to Avoid Distress
Avoidance is not a character flaw- it’s biology doing its job a little too well. Our nervous systems have evolved to treat emotional pain as a threat signal, the same that once kept us away from predators. The problem is that modern discomfort- that email from our boss, a fight with a significant other, or a different viewpoint- does not require the same response as a threat to our survival. And yet, the alarm bells ring just as loudly.
So, as a result, we have developed shortcuts. We doom scroll. We overwork. We snap at the people closest to us. We avoid the doctor’s appointment, the hard conversations, the grief. Each shortcut buys temporary relief, but often costs us more in the long run.
What Distress Tolerance Actually Means
Distress tolerance, a concept that is central to Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), is not about liking discomfort or pushing through suffering. It is the capacity to experience difficult emotions without needing to immediately escape, suppress, or act on them.
While this sounds simple, it is not easy. But it is learnable- and it is one of the most protective psychological skills a person can build.
Here’s the distinction to remember: pain is unavoidable- loss, disappointment, conflict, and uncertainty are part of being a human. Suffering, however, is frequently what happens when we fight against the pain, deny it, or make it mean something catastrophic about ourselves. Distress tolerance is not about eliminating the pain. It is about controlling our responses and not making the pain worse.
The Benefits of Being Uncomfortable- Backed by Research
It breaks the avoidance cycle. Every time we avoid something unpleasant, we teach our brains that the discomfort was, in fact, dangerous. This makes the next encounter with it feel even scarier. Tolerating distress, even for a brief moment, teaches our nervous system the opposite: I can feel this and survive it. This is how anxiety, in particular, loses its grip on us.
It builds genuine self-trust. Confidence is not built by thriving- it is built by watching yourself struggle and come out on the other side. People who develop distress tolerance often describe a quiet shift from “I can’t handle this” to “I know I can handle hard things.” That knowledge does not come from comfort- it comes from evidence.
It improves decision-making. Some of our worst decisions are made in moments of unbearable emotion- that text sent in anger, the relationship ended in panic, the impulsive quitting of a job. When we are able to tolerate the wave of feeling without being crushed by it, we buy ourselves the seconds or hours needed to respond mindfully instead of reacting impulsively.
It deepens relationships. Intimacy, in any relationship, requires discomfort. Couples and friendships often struggle not because conflict exists, but because one or both people cannot tolerate the discomfort of conflict long enough to move through it. Distress tolerance is what allows repair to happen in place of rupture.
It’s a prerequisite for growth. Nearly all things meaningful- starting a business, healing from trauma, becoming a parent, ending an unhealthy pattern- asks us to be able to walk through discomfort, rather than around it. Growth does not often happen in the absence of distress.
How to Practice Distress Tolerance
Building distress tolerance does not mean roughing it through every hard feeling alone. Here are tools that I often work through with clients:
Naming the wave. Emotions are physiological events that have a beginning, peak, and end. They usually resolve within minutes if we do not feed them with catastrophic thinking. Simply noting “this is a wave of anxiety, it will rise and pass” can be grounding.
The pause before the reaction. When an emotion is noticed, try to pause for 30 seconds before reacting.
Self-soothing does not require an escape. Grounding through the five senses, paced breathing, or movement can lower the emotional intensity without requiring avoidance of the difficult issue entirely.
Radical acceptance (my personal favorite). Not approval, not resignation- simply acknowledging “this is what is happening right now” instead of expending energy to fight reality itself.
Starting small. Tolerance is built the exact same way physical stamina is: gradually. Starting to practice with manageable discomfort (like a hard conversation, a delayed reward) builds the capacity for bigger challenges later.
A Gentle Warning
None of this means that discomfort should be sought out for its own sake, or that all pain should be endured silently. Some distress signals are a genuine need for change, support, or safety- and distress tolerance is not a substitute for addressing real problems, setting boundaries, or seeking help when something is genuinely unsafe or unsustainable. The goal is not stoic endurance. It is discernment: learning which discomfort is asking to be tolerated and which is asking to be changed.
The Takeaway
We tend to believe that to measure a good life is by the absence of hard feelings. But a more sustainable, and realistic, measure might be this: how much discomfort can I stay present with before I need to escape it? The wider a window becomes, the more freedom that we have.
Discomfort is not the enemy of a good life. More often than not, it's the doorway to one.