Is distress tolerance the skill students need most right now?

You're not imagining it.

Research shows that distress tolerance, the ability to sit with uncomfortable feelings without immediately trying to escape them, is declining, especially among young people. And it makes sense when you think about the biology.

Your muscles get stronger when you stress them, your immune system improves when it encounters germs, and psychological resilience works the same way. You get better at handling difficulty by handling difficulty.

So if you've never really had to sit with boredom because your phone is always right there, or push through confusion without immediately searching up the answer, you're going to struggle with those things. It's not because of some moral failing, but because of how adaptation works.

What makes it more complicated is that we haven't just removed the small, manageable stressors that used to build capacity in kids. We've replaced them with massive chronic ones: constant social comparison, information overload about every terrible thing happening everywhere, economic anxiety that feels completely outside their control.

Our students are stressed, maybe more than ever, but it's the wrong kind of stress. Chronic and overwhelming instead of short and manageable, which means it wears people down instead of building them up.

So what can you actually do?

In my podcast episode on this topic, I share a concept in psychology called stress inoculation. It works the same way vaccines do. You expose someone to a small, manageable dose of a stressor so they build the capacity to handle bigger ones later.

In your classroom, that might look like setting a timer and asking students to work independently for five minutes before they ask for help, then gradually stretching that window. Or, giving them a problem that's just beyond what they think they can do, then walking them through it.

You're not throwing kids into the deep end. You're gradually increasing the challenge while building in support and recovery.

One of the most powerful things you can do is normalize the feeling of not knowing. When students interpret confusion as a sign that something's gone wrong, they bail, but when they can reframe it as a normal part of learning, they stay with it longer.

Something as simple as, "This is the part where it's supposed to feel hard. That uncomfortable feeling is what learning actually feels like," can shift a student from shutdown mode to persistence mode.

You can also help students start noticing the difference between "I can't" and "I don't want to." Sometimes "I can't do this" really does mean "I'm missing the prerequisite skills and I need help," and you need to respond to that. But sometimes it means "This feels uncomfortable and I want it to stop," and that second version is where the growth opportunity lives.

This applies to us as adults, too, by the way. You're chronically overstimulated, emotionally depleted, and then you go home and decompress with your phone the same way your students do. The same biology applies. Where in your own life are you avoiding a manageable discomfort that might actually help you grow?

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Want to learn more, including classroom strategies and how to tell the difference between productive discomfort and the kind that just breaks people down? Check out the full article + podcast:

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Enjoy!

Angela