What are distress tolerance skills?

At some point in our lives, we all have to cope with distress and pain. Either it can be
physical, like a bee sting or a broken arm, or it can be emotional, like sadness or anger.
In both cases, the pain is often unavoidable and unpredictable. You can’t always
anticipate when the bee will sting you or when something will make you sad. Often, the
best you can do is to use the coping skills that you have and hope that they work. But
for some people, emotional and physical pain feels more intense and occurs more
frequently than it does for other people. Their distress comes on more quickly and feels
like an overwhelming tidal wave. Often, these situations feel like they’ll never end, and
the people experiencing them don’t know how to cope with the severity of their pain. For
the purposes of this course, we’ll call this problem overwhelming emotions. (But
remember, emotional and physical pain often occur together.) People struggling with
overwhelming emotions often deal with their pain in very unhealthy, very unsuccessful
ways because they don’t know what else to do. This is understandable. When a person
is in emotional pain, it’s hard to be rational and to think of a good solution. Nevertheless,
many of the coping strategies used by people with overwhelming emotions only serve to
make their problems worse.