Distress Tolerance: The Mental Skill We're All Losing (And Teaching Our Kids to Lose Too)

Why our phones have become weapons of mass distraction—and what neuroscience tells us about building resilience instead

"It's easier to roll down a hill than run up it."

That phrase popped into my head when I was running up a very steep hill.

My lab does a hill workout every week. At 7:30am (usually on a Wednesday), we gather at Brown University's School of Public Health and warm up by jogging over to a hill next to campus that isn't that long, but is very steep. With each repeat, we practice being present–with discomfort.

The Distraction Epidemic

Have you ever driven up to a stoplight at night on a busy street and looked around, only to see every driver's crotch is glowing blue or white? Can you remember the last time someone in front or behind you in the grocery store line made more than brief eye contact before staring back down at their phone? Has the world come to the point where we can't wait 30 seconds for a red light to turn green, or to even glance at the tabloid headlines in the checkout aisle that are designed to grab your attention (let alone, take a second to smile at each other)?

Over the years, I've observed that with tech at our fingertips, more and more people turn to distraction when something uncomfortable is happening. This can include needing to make a tough decision, feeling lonely, or even being bored (for 30 seconds). Cornel West talks about our phones as being "weapons of mass distraction." He nailed it.

In an age where attention is the economy, this really concerns me: not only are adults falling into this easy but unhelpful habit, but they're modeling this type of distraction instead of what scientists and therapists call distress tolerance to their kids. We're literally teaching the next generation that the moment something feels difficult or uncomfortable, the solution is to reach for a device.

When faced with the choice between the steep climb of sitting with discomfort and the easy slide toward our digital distractions, we're collectively choosing to roll down the hill.

Why Distress Tolerance Matters More Than Ever

To me, distress tolerance is one of the most important mental skills that anyone can learn—adult or child. Learning to be with difficult emotions is one of the most important life skills we can acquire because it helps us with so many things. Here are a few of the "top hits" that I see in my clinic:

-Dealing with personal hardship

-Managing a challenging work environment (or co-worker)

-Leaning into difficult tasks instead of shrinking away from them

-Stepping forward and getting our todo list done, instead of procrastinating

Each of these requires us to run uphill—to lean into difficulty rather than let gravity pull us toward the path of least resistance.

The Neuroscience of Avoiding Discomfort

Our brains haven't evolved much since caveperson days, when relief from discomfort was often a matter of life and death. If you felt the burning sensation of touching a hot coal, you pulled your hand away fast. If you felt the gnawing of hunger, you went out to find food. Simple trigger-behavior-reward loops that kept us alive.

Fast-forward to today, and that same ancient wiring gets hijacked every time we feel bored, anxious, or lonely and reach for our phones. See notification, dopamine kicks in saying "who texted me?" Check your phone to scratch that itch (see my previous article about "The Dopamine Myth for more on this itchy feeling). Feel uncomfortable emotion, scroll Instagram, feel temporary relief. Bored? Check your newsfeed, and get yet another dopamine buzz when you see something surprising or salicitous. You get the idea.

Our old brains can't tell the difference between a saber-toothed tiger and an awkward silence in a conversation: both trigger the same "do something, anything" response.

The problem? Unlike our ancestors, the "threats" we face today—difficult conversations, challenging decisions, uncomfortable emotions—actually require us to sit still and think, not immediately react. But our reward-based learning system has been co-opted by tech companies who've figured out exactly how to trigger that relief-seeking behavior.

Ironically, that co-opted dopamine is driving us to do, when instead, we should be learning to be, be with ourselves.

Our ancient survival wiring is designed to roll us downhill, away from anything that feels uncomfortable. But modern life requires us to run uphill, to stay present with difficulty long enough to learn to respond wisely.

What We're Really Teaching Our Kids (And Ourselves)

From an early age, kids learn the most by watching what their parents do. Here's where it gets more complicated than simple modeling. What do kids see their parents do all of the time now? They watch us reach for our phones the moment things get uncomfortable, and they learn that this is how adults handle difficult feelings. But they're not just copying—they're getting their own direct neurochemical hits from these devices.

When a teenager feels frustrated with homework and switches to TikTok, their brain releases the same dopamine that kept their ancestors alive. They're not just learning a behavior; they're laying down neural pathways that once said "DANGER, DANGER! Run away!!" but now say "Don't worry, escape from discomfort is only a click away." Each time they do this, the pathway gets stronger.

Remember the accidentally not-so-redacted Attorney Generals' lawsuit against TikTok? TikTok had figured out the exact number of videos it took to form a habit: 260. Since TikTok videos can be as short as 8 seconds and are played in rapid-fire succession (automatically), investigators found that "in under 35 minutes, an average user is likely to become addicted to the platform."

What I've noticed in my clinic and lab's research is that many of us are using distraction as our own distress tolerance strategy. We're anxious, overwhelmed, undersupported, and reaching for the only coping mechanism we know. Babies have pacifiers that we put in their mouths as a (temporary) soothing mechanism. Adults are modeling the age-appropriate, socially-accepted pacifier: a rectangular pacifier held a few inches from their face, stroked by thumb or index finger.

We're teaching our children that the hill is too steep, that rolling downhill toward distraction is not just acceptable but necessary. Meanwhile, they're missing out on building the mental muscles that come from learning to run uphill, and discovering the joy of the hero’s journey.

The Real Cost: From Personal to Political

The inability to sit with uncertainty and discomfort doesn't just mess with our personal lives, it's now shaping our entire culture. People who can't tolerate the anxiety of not knowing tend to gravitate toward simple (and oversimplified) explanations. Complexity feels bad; certainty feels good. Uncertainty is the Devil. This shows up everywhere from conspiracy theories to political polarization.

Here's what I've found fascinating from observing patterns in how people respond to uncertainty: the brain that can't sit with the discomfort of "I don't know" or "this is complicated" will often jump to almost any answer over no answer. And the faster, the better. The relief of certainty becomes its own addiction, even when that certainty has no foundation beyond a loud voice (often backed up by a chorus of followers). If your brain just jumped to a conclusion that this is a Red or Blue thing, you've just fallen into the certainty trap. Wanting the discomfort of uncertainty to go away has no color. It's a human thing.

On a personal level, constant distraction keeps us stuck in what we can think of as "emotional infancy." Stuck in the endless scroll, we never learn that we can survive uncomfortable feelings, so we never develop confidence in our ability to handle life's inevitable difficulties. Every challenge becomes a crisis because we've never practiced being uncomfortable. Forget peanuts, distress has become the new allergen in today's world.

Where's my phone?

A society that consistently chooses to roll downhill when faced with complexity, nuance, or uncertainty loses its capacity for critical thinking. We trade the hard climb toward understanding for the easy roll into oversimplified answers.

How Scientists Measure Distress Tolerance

How bad has this gotten? The research is pretty eye-opening. Before we talk about building distress tolerance as a skill, it's worth knowing how researchers actually study it. Scientists have gotten pretty creative in figuring out how to measure someone's ability to stick with discomfort in laboratory settings.

One of the most straightforward is the breath-holding task: literally how long someone can hold their breath when asked to hold it as long as possible. Researchers have also used cold pressor tasks, where people keep their hand in ice-cold water for as long as they can stand it. There's the frustrating mirror-tracing task, where you have to trace a star while only looking at your hand in a mirror (Try it. It's, well, distressing), and computerized tasks where you solve increasingly difficult problems with distracting noises playing.

Perhaps most telling is a 2014 study from the University of Virginia where researchers asked people to sit alone in a room for 15 minutes with nothing to do but think. That's right, no phones, books, or any other distractions. Most participants found this simple task unpleasant and difficult. But here's the kicker: when given the option to give themselves a mild electric shock instead of continuing to sit quietly, 67% of men and 25% of women chose to shock themselves rather than be alone with their thoughts. One participant shocked himself 190 times during the 15-minute period.

Yes, you are reading this correctly. Fifteen years ago, we scientists had to develop distress tolerance tasks. Now, all you have to do is take someone's phone away from them.

What is probably not shocking at all is that people's performance on these seemingly unrelated tasks actually predicts real-world outcomes: how likely they are to drop out of addiction treatment, stick with difficult therapy, or persist through challenging life circumstances.

These studies reveal just how far we'll go to avoid running uphill. When faced with the mental challenge of sitting quietly with our thoughts, we'd literally rather roll down toward physical pain than stay present with psychological discomfort.

So, what to do?

Building Distress Tolerance: A Practical Approach

The good news is that distress tolerance is a skill, not a fixed trait. That means that it can be learned. And like any skill, it gets stronger with practice. But here's the thing most people get wrong: you don't build distress tolerance by white-knuckling through misery. That's just teaching your brain that discomfort is something to endure, not something you can actually work with.

Instead, over the past several decades, my labs studies and my clinical work have shown that we can learn what turns out to be a 3-step method. I've written about this in previous articles, so I'll sum up how to use it to build your distress tolerance skills here.

Being a cyclist, I call it the three gears of awareness. First gear is simply noticing when you're uncomfortable instead of immediately reaching for distraction. "Oh, I'm feeling anxious about this presentation." Second gear is exploring the results of the old habit (e.g. distraction), by getting curious about what you actually get from procrastinating, which usually comes in some flavor of brief relief (from distraction) + more anxiety, stress etc.

Third gear is the key: finding something more rewarding than escape. This is where curiosity becomes your superpower. Instead of "I hate feeling anxious," you shift to "Hmm, what does anxiety actually feel like in my chest right now?" And with this you discover that sensations are simply (possibly uncomfortable) sensations. They come and go, as long as you don't push them away. This is the shift from "DO SOMETHING!" to learning to be with whatever sensations arise.

In my first book, The Craving Mind, I wrote about a patient who came into my office in full distress mode, blurting out "Doc, I feel like my head will explode if I don't smoke!" I won't go into the full story of how we did a distress tolerance practice, right then and there, but suffice it to say, his head didn't explode, and he learned that he could be with discomfort (and use these tools to quit smoking!).

He learned to shift from doing something to distract himself, to being with himself (and his feelings). Shifting from doing to being. That's huge.

That shift from resistance to curiosity changes everything, because curiosity feels better than anxiety. It's what I call a bigger better offer—a reward that's actually more satisfying than distraction.

To be clear, I'm talking about curiosity here as the BBO. It isn't going to magically make discomfort feel comfortable. But it will make it more tolerable. And importantly, curiosity will help train us that discomfort may not be as bad as our minds (and TikTok) have made it out to be.

Building distress tolerance is like training for hill repeats. Each time we choose curiosity over distraction, we're strengthening our capacity to run uphill rather than rolling down toward the easy escape.

The Bigger Better Offer: Curiosity Over Distraction

Here's what I've learned from scanning people's brains while they practice mindfulness: curiosity about difficult emotions actually quiets activity in neural networks that get activated when we're caught up in a craving, or worried about something. When someone shifts from "I'm anxious and I hate it" to "I'm curious about what anxiety feels like," we can literally see their brain activity change.

The contracted, closed-down feeling of anxiety starts to shift toward something more open and spacious. And here's the kicker: that open, curious state feels better than the temporary relief you get from checking your phone. It's a genuine, bona fide, bigger better offer.

This isn't just feel-good philosophy. My lab has found that people who learn to get curious about their cravings are five times more likely to quit smoking than those using traditional willpower-based approaches. When you can be genuinely interested in what discomfort feels like, rather than immediately trying to make it go away, you discover something remarkable: you're much stronger than you thought you were. Sink your brain into that!

The goal isn't to become someone who enjoys suffering. It's to become someone who doesn't need to immediately escape every uncomfortable moment. Someone who can sit in that awkward pause in conversation, feel the uncertainty of a difficult decision, or experience loneliness without immediately reaching for a digital fix.

Yes, instead of running away from discomfort, we can lean in and learn from it. What we used to resist, we can turn into resistance training. Mental weights that we can do reps with to make us stronger and more resilient.

As Marcus Aurelius put it, "what stands in the way, becomes the way."

That's the skill our kids need to see us practicing. Not perfect distress tolerance, but the willingness to try sitting with discomfort for just a few seconds longer than feels comfortable. Because in those few extra seconds, something pretty amazing happens—we discover we're more resilient than our phones led us to believe.

Curiosity transforms the steep uphill climb of discomfort into a journey of discovery. Instead of rolling away from difficult feelings, we learn to run toward them with genuine interest, building strength with every step.

Each week without fail, I’m exhausted, in a good way, after running hills with my lab. But that smile from doing something hard, together, stays with me the rest of the day.

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P. S. I want to invite my Substack readers to learn about a new program I’m developing based on everything that I’ve learned in the lab and the clinic about anxiety and habits over the past decade. It's called Going Beyond Anxiety, and I'll personally be taking a small group through a 3-month journey. Learn more at www.goingbeyondanxiety.com.

Judson Brewer MD PhD is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. He is a professor at Brown University and co-founder of MindshiftRecovery.org which provides free support for people with any type of addiction. He is the author of Unwinding Anxiety (NYTimes bestseller), The Craving Mind, The Hunger Habit and The Unwinding Anxiety Workbook. If you’re curious to learn more, you can find additional resources at drjud.com.

Copyright © 2025, Judson Brewer, MD, PhD. All rights reserved.

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