Affect Tolerance: What Is It, And Why Does It Matter For Your Mental Health?
If there were just one idea you could latch onto when thinking about mental health, “affect tolerance” would take you a long way. I’m not saying it’s the single most important component to mental health, but it’s up there. Before explaining why this idea is so important, let’s first define some terms.
Simply put, affect is your feeling-state—or your feeling-experience in a given moment. While it may be splitting hairs to distinguish affect from emotion, we might think of affect as less personal than emotion; that is, it’s the experience of emotion. While we often use the word “mental health,” our experience of emotion isn’t located somewhere inside of our head or thoughts only. Rather, emotion also includes a bodily experience or an embodied experience. We might call this experience our affectual state.
Now that we’ve got that definition out of the way let’s talk about the idea of affect tolerance. What’s so important about tolerating our embodied emotional experience? Let me give you a concrete example. Everyone knows about the idea of anger management, but what really is the inability to manage anger? If we can not tolerate the embodied experience of being angry, we will likely need to compensate for this somehow. That is, if we can not tolerate the affect of anger, we are going to have to get rid of it somehow.
Most often, we think of people needing anger management when they have an issue with controlling outbursts of anger. They can not tolerate the affect of anger inside themselves, and therefore they express it in ways that are verbally or physically harmful to themselves or others. This is a pretty concrete example of a negative outcome of low affect tolerance.
Another option is that one could suppress or deny their anger. A seemingly good choice, for a period; however, it just so happens that suppressed feelings and feeling-states don’t just disappear into thin air. While we may think this option is “better” than outbursts of anger, both of these approaches come with the potential for severely negative outcomes from a mental health perspective. I won’t go into all the problems that suppressed feelings can cause, but let’s just say they are too many to count.
But affect tolerance does not just apply to anger. It also applies to our ability to tolerate the experience of feelings of sadness, jealousy, shame, fear, and really any emotion. If we cannot tolerate the felt sense of these feelings, then we have to try to get rid of them somehow either by transforming them into something else, acting them out, or suppressing them. Often (but not ALL the time) this difficulty in tolerating affect can then start to show up as one or more mental health symptoms. For example, if I can not tolerate my feelings of sadness, maybe I start to feel anxious whenever something reminds me of my sadness. Over time, my unexpressed sadness might build up so that more and more things remind me of it, and thus more and more, I feel anxious. Then bang, a therapist might say I have an “Anxiety Disorder.” But really, what I have is difficulty tolerating my feeling-state of sadness.
The prior example is very simplified. I’m not saying things are always that straight forward. However, I am saying that without the ability to tolerate our affect, we are more likely to experience mental health symptoms. Therefore learning to tolerate our affect can be thought of as a primary goal in therapy work. The good news is that it is a very learnable skill.
Before ending the article, I’d like to give you some tips and tools to better develop your affect tolerance. I’d also like to point out some behaviors that can negatively impact affect tolerance and contribute to issues for you now or down the road.
Activities That Support Affect Tolerance:
Mindfulness Meditation- You probably guessed this one if you read this far. Mindfulness is all the rage in mental health, and there is a good reason for that. In Mindfulness practice, we begin to learn how to observe our thoughts and feelings without reacting to them. This effectively helps us develop the skill to tolerate our feeling-states.
Journaling- When we journal we express our thoughts and feelings and can see them in front of us. Over time this process can allow us to accept our feelings as they are without acting them out or shutting them out.
Drawing- You do not have to be an artist in order for drawing to be helpful. I know I’m not. However, drawing or coloring touches into the right side of our brains which is thought to be the side connected with our emotions. Even if we just choose a color to represent our affect state and start scribbling that color, we give ourselves an opportunity to develop a tolerance for and express that affect state.
Therapy- One goal of therapy is about learning the skill to tolerate our affect. Most therapists have developed this skill through their own therapy process, or through sitting with other folks for countless hours as they express their feeling-states. When looking for a therapist, try to find one that helps you feel at ease in sharing your feeling-states, no matter what they are.
Activities That Do NOT Support Affect Tolerance
Substance Use- Any substance use that alters our mood in a significant way can negatively impact our ability to tolerate affect— especially if it is habitual use. This really deserves a longer post, but in essence, even if I don’t use alcohol or marijuana or something else because I WANT my anger or sadness to go away, the process of getting high or taking the edge off does change my feeling-state from one state to another. If this is repeated over time, I may become LESS tolerant of my feeling-states because I’ve learned that I can change my mood almost instantly with little effort. The problem is not only can I start to depend on the substance to tolerate my affect even if I don’t intend to, but if you take away the substance I haven’t practiced other skills for affect tolerance, thus I will have start from square one every time…
Raging, Blaming, or Shaming Others- Sometimes people think that the opposite of suppression is to unapologetically let their anger and hostility out onto others. This may allow them to experience some temporary relief, as they have discharged their intense feeling-state. However, this is NOT what is meant by affect tolerance… rather it indicates an inability to tolerate affect. As we do this, we may become accustomed to managing our feeling-states by placing them onto others. However, the end result is that we will experience MORE conflict in our relationships, more pain, and less peace of mind. These are the opposite outcomes of true affect tolerance.
Disavowing, Suppressing, Denying Our Feelings- Disavowing means that we say that we don’t feel some way when we actually do. Suppression is when we “stuff,” our feelings away, hide them, or deny that they exist. These are all indicative of an underdeveloped ability to tolerate affect. While these may function as a short-term coping strategy, in the long term they could contribute to mental health symptoms, unsatisfying relationships, and/or poor self-esteem.
Conclusion: This article is an introduction to the idea of affect tolerance and its importance to all of our mental health. Developing affect tolerance is a consistent practice that is very attainable for most people. It isn’t always easy, however, and it takes work. But the reward is worth it as we start to notice ourselves feeling more at ease with our feelings, ourselves, and able to talk about our emotions more readily in our relationships.