Learn and Work Smarter

121. Frustration Tolerance: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Build It

• Katie Azevedo • Episode 121

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Frustration tolerance is one's ability to sustain attention, endurance and emotional composure during frustrating tasks.

While we all get frustrated from time to time, having a low frustration tolerance can have a serious impact on our work, school and personal lives.

In this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I dive deep into frustration tolerance, its connection to ADHD, and how to improve your own frustration tolerance level so you can achieve your goals with less drama.

What You Learn:

  • What frustration tolerance is and why it matters a ton
  • The connection between frustration tolerance and ADHD (we get a little science-y here)
  • The roles that emotional regulation, past experiences and personal narrative play in our ability to handle hard tasks
  • How to make tasks less frustrating in the first place (so you don't hit your max capacity so soon)
  • What to do when you do hit your maximum frustration tolerance and you still have work to do
  • The ultimate mega strategy for improving your frustration tolerance so you can learn and work more peacefully and with way less drama

🔗 Resources Mentioned:


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Hello and welcome to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. This is episode 121. I'm Katie Azevedo, and today we're talking about something a little juicy You probably already know by the title of this episode, but we are diving into frustration tolerance. We're going to cover what it is we, it's a powerful force set, can make or break our chances of reaching our goals. Yes, it is that powerful and what we can do to improve our frustration tolerance so that we can face our work, our goals, our tasks with less drama and more resilience and success. I will be referencing other episodes today that compliment what we're covering, and as always, the links to everything I mentioned will be in the show notes. What does that mean? I have been asked. Well, that means that if you are watching on YouTube that all of the links are in the description box below the video. By the way, if you're over there, please subscribe to the show. If you are listening in a podcast app like Apple Podcasts or maybe Spotify, you can access the show notes just by swiping up in the app while you're listening to the show. And then I always have a full website page devoted to each and every episode where you can find more resources and the links to the video and the links to the podcast app and the audio and the transcripts and all of that is always at learn and work smarter.com/podcast/the episode number. So today that would be Learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/121. Alright, I think we have covered our housekeeping, and now it's time to get into our episode. Grab your pencils if you wanna take notes and let's begin. Okay. To frame this episode, it makes sense to start with a definition of frustration tolerance. Frustration tolerance is one's ability to sustain endurance during exposure to physical, cognitive, or emotional effort. It is the ability to tolerate prolonged discomfort and agitation and the unknown, challenging work, new tasks, and anything that triggers frustration. I wanna paint a picture of what having low frustration tolerance looks like across school and work context. So basically, I'm going to list out some common symptoms, but keep in mind that frustration tolerance is different for everybody because frustration is a feeling and feelings are different for everybody. All right, but generally speaking, here's some of the symptoms of someone who might have a lower frustration tolerance. First high reactivity. This is a hands down, the first symptom or indication that someone is dealing with a low frustration tolerance. They sit down to do a hard thing and immediately there is some kind of reaction. It could be a verbal outburst, maybe a lot of huffing and puffing, maybe walking away from the thing. It could be an internal thing, like maybe an internal defiance, like a hump, like I'm not doing that. Just a rising feeling of agitation, maybe in your chest or in your stomach. Let's say that you're trying out for a baseball team and it's hard and it's a two day tryout, it might mean not showing up day two just because day one was hard. If you are a working professional and you're asked to make a presentation and you have a low frustration tolerance, it might look like turning to your coworker and complaining. It's starting to work on your lab report and then shutting down in frustration because you don't know how to make a, a data table and you don't like that feeling of something being hard or uncertain, and so you walk away from the lab report. The next symptom is missed deadlines. Now, if hard things frustrate us, we don't do them. And if we don't do the things we're supposed to do, then we miss the deadline. And this honestly has consequences that are undeniable for students. It means the grades are impacted At work, you might get a bad work review, it could lead to being fired. Missed deadlines are not a joke. Relationship conflict, particularly with superiors is another one. A lot of students I work with who have a lower frustration tolerance are really quick to blame a teacher or really quick to blame a hard test. So maybe they're learning something that is like legitimately challenging material. Like to their credit, the material is really hard. Like maybe even like AP physics. Hard stuff. If they have a low frustration tolerance, they're going to avoid studying for it, or they're going to use passive study techniques, which are easier and less frustrating. But of course, they don't work. And then when they don't do well on the test, they're quick to say, well, the teacher was mean. The teacher didn't cover that. Maybe the test was too hard. Now at work, it can be complaining about your boss, your manager, your job. We all do that a little bit, but like excessively. It could be blaming coworkers or resenting coworkers for not being asked to do the hard presentation that you were asked to do. It could also look like total avoidance over time. If we are continuously taught through experience that hard things are painful, we're going to come back to this a little bit about what causes frustration tolerance to be low. But if we're constantly going through these experiences that are painful, we are going to learn to avoid them. Like any experience that causes pain, that's just natural. Like if you go back in time, at some point we learn that touching fire hurts. So what do we do? We don't touch fire anymore. That's an extreme example. But somebody with significantly impacted frustration tolerance is not even going to touch something or even step close to a fire, even if it's behind a screen that has the remote potential to be challenging just because they have a flicker of fear that maybe it's going to hurt. And then what happens when we avoid what it is that we are supposed to do? Bad things. Bad reputation. We don't meet our goals. And I'd say that's the biggest one of all, that is the most tragic of them all. Not even our career goals or our academic goals. I mean like kind of like that too. But the personal goals that we have for ourselves. Everything worth achieving takes some effort, right? I think we all agree on that. Otherwise, we'd all be like king or queen of the castle sitting on a pile of treasure. Good things take work and if we avoid doing the work, we're going to end up few good things. Low frustration tolerance also looks like a lack of resourcefulness. So I do have a whole episode on how to be resourceful. That is episode 38. I will leave that linked in all the places, but resourcefulness is a skill that we can develop. It's what sets us apart from the followers, from the people who don't get the promotion from the kids who don't do the homework because they couldn't find the link. But in reality, all they had to do was just like open one more email and there it was. If we don't practice struggling through how to do something, we'll never become resourceful. And if we can't be resourceful, we're always going to be dependent. And I'll bet nobody listening wants that. And then I already mentioned this one too, but bad reputation. Professionally, if we say we're going to do something at a certain time and we don't do the thing that we're going to say by the time we say we're going to do it, that's the fastest way to have a bad reputation. And probably walk ourselves right out the door. Students, same thing. So obviously I have only named just a couple consequences here of low frustration tolerance, but they're significant, and I already mentioned not achieving our own personal goals is probably the most significant of all. But think about how this compounds over a lifetime. If somebody is so adverse to challenge that they never undertake something different than what they're currently doing in this moment, they will literally stay stuck forever. So if there's one takeaway you get from this entire episode, maybe it's not that, you know, low frustration tolerance gives you bad grades, it will or won't get you the promotion. It won't, but let the big takeaway be that it just leads to having a personally unfulfilled life. Nobody wants that. Now, I am going to switch gears now. I painted the picture of doom and gloom, but don't worry. There is hope, I promise you. But I am going to switch gears now and talk about ADHD. There is a high correlation between low frustration tolerance and ADHD. So if you're listening right now, when you have ADHD, lean in. We are going to talk about multiple factors that contribute to one's low frustration tolerance today, because it's definitely a multifactor cocktail. But I wanna start with ADHD because ADHD is the result of neurobiological and neurochemical differences in the brain, like literally scientifically. Factually. A DHD brains are different than non ADHD brains, especially in the prefrontal cortex. The Prefrontal cortex is kind of like the Grand Central Station. I've heard it described that way for executive functions like time management and task management, task completion, focus planning, emotional regulation. So that's why someone with A DHD tends to have weaker executive functions, 'cause that prefrontal cortex is operating differently. Now, if somebody has atypical functioning in the prefrontal cortex, they're going to have executive function deficits, which we can address with skills. That's what we do here, but they're also likely to have lower frustration tolerance. Additionally, dopamine plays a key role here. People with A DHD have a dysregulation of dopamine and the channels that dopamine travels through. People with low frustration tolerance also have a dysregulation of dopamine pathways. Dopamine is that. Feel good chemical. It's required for emotional regulation, and we need a steady and consistent stream of dopamine to feel good about effort. When we're regulated and we have a consistently flowing source of dopamine and a fully operating prefrontal cortex, we can understand that hard things are just simply hard. And we can often find enjoyment in that effort leading to a higher frustration tolerance. It's not that the things aren't frustrating, but we can tolerate them more. deficits in the prefrontal cortex operating system, and atypical dopamine pathways make it difficult for someone to sustain effort on challenging tasks because that effort itself is not rewarding. In fact, it can become almost too much, and sometimes I've heard it described as being almost physically painful. So there's really a lot going on behind the curtain here. Now, I do wanna cover some other reasons that some people have low frustration tolerance, because even people without a DHD can have low frustration tolerance. Okay? So it's definitely not just an A DHD thing. Now, first thing is past experiences. So every single experience we counter, both good and bad, affects us in some way. It teaches us something about our world, about ourselves, and hopefully all of my listeners have had lives full of good experiences. But my guess is that none of us live in castles in the clouds. So anytime we've experienced a negative consequence as a result of effort. We slowly and gradually begin to interpret the effort itself as painful In reality, the effort isn't painful. It may have a consequence or, um, a, a result that's painful, and maybe that effort led to an undesired outcome, like maybe somebody criticizing us or what we perceived as a failure. That's painful. But the, the effort itself, the initial effort doesn't cause pain. An example, maybe a little kid tried out for a soccer team and worked his hard out and he didn't make the team and his parents were disappointed. Now, time lapse over a few years, if that same kid has more experiences like that, maybe they studied for a test and didn't get a good grade. Maybe they were vulnerable and shared something honestly with, you know, a friend and they were reprimanded for it. Or that person, that friend turned around and told somebody else, right? Broke their trust. All of those are the kinds of experiences that are telling this poor kid, Hey, hard work hurts. Don't do it. Now, I'm going to give you a very concrete example that I've been seeing more and more lately as AI has entered the education space, and of course the professional space too. So I'm going to give you an academic example, but this applies to the workforce as well. The moment we don't know something, or the moment we don't have the answer, we can AI it, I see students do this all of the time. They don't know how to start their essay, so they use AI path of least resistance. They don't even allow themselves to experience discomfort for even a second. It's like, oh no, this math problem is hard. For one second, I gotta use ai. Oh no, I have to read this short story. Oh, no, that's hard. Let me AI it. And so they're denying themselves the valuable practice of doing hard things, or not even hard, but doing things that are non-preferred. And so when they have to do those math problems on a test without access to ai, it's too much. Not even do they not know the content, but that frustration, they feel that, ah, this is so hard. They, their frustration tolerance is so low by the time they even show up to the test. When they have to write an in-class essay without access to ai, it's too much. They literally cannot tolerate the discomfort, the frustration, and the not knowing, and that's self-inflicted because they're purposely denying themselves the opportunity to get better at doing hard things. It's like a kid Never showing up to a single practice ever, and then wondering why he played horrible in the game, but then blaming the coach for benching him. We can see the absurdity in that, right? It is the same absurdity when students use AI on pretty low lift tasks like homework, because the high lift tasks, the one with the high risk and the greater impact and the bigger consequences, the tests, the exams, the standardized tests, the interviews, their performance reviews, their actual job later on in their career. That's when the true consequence of all these little shortcuts around minor frustrations is really going to show up down the road. And, oh man, do I just wanna shake every kid, every student out there right now who doesn't get that? I wanna shake that into them. Nonviolently. The consequence is down the road. Now, anything we learn, we can unlearn. Hear me loud and clear on that. Anything we have learned, good or bad, we can unlearn. And if we learned something in the first place and it wasn't the right thing to learn, or maybe it served us at one time, but now it doesn't, we can learn something new to replace it. That is like the magic of the human brain. So just because anyone listening today has had past experiences that have drilled down the message that hard work is uncomfortable, I want you to know that you can unlearn that. Frustration tolerance is something that we can build. That is the entire point of this episode of this show actually. Can you imagine if this whole episode was like, Hey, frustration tolerance is like really bad. There's nothing you can do about it. Here's how it can destroy your life. Thanks for listening to my show. Of course not. Now another factor that contributes to low frustration tolerance that can be attributed to past negative experiences is our inner narratives about our confidence in ourselves. Somebody with a strong, uplifting inner narrative and confidence is going to have a higher frustration tolerance. And someone with the opposite of that is going to have a low frustration tolerance. If somebody is constantly berating and criticizing themselves and has really strong perfectionist tendencies, you know the expression, we're our own worst critic. Okay, well that applies to all of us to some degree, but taken to the extreme, if somebody is criticizing themselves in their own head all day long. That's going to eventually have a large scope, negative impact. And without question, frustration, tolerance is going to be in the line of fire. Now, let's talk about confidence. If somebody doesn't have strong confidence in one area, so let's say socially. We have a middle school or high school, or even a college student who, for whatever reason hasn't yet found their people, has tried to introduce themselves, to insert themselves socially, maybe is missing some skills, maybe just hasn't found the right people yet, whatever, that's going to take a hit on their confidence now, even though that confidence hit is only happening in the social setting. Confidence doesn't respect context. And so over time, a person with low social confidence may start to experience decreased confidence in other areas. And what happens when we don't have confidence? We don't believe in ourselves. And what happens when we don't believe in ourselves? We don't think we can do hard things. And what happens when we don't think we can do hard things? things that are even nominally hard, feel impossible. Okay. Two more key factors that contribute to someone's low frustration tolerance. Moving on to emotional regulation. I talked about this at the top of the episode a little bit with the A DHD, but if we can't regulate our emotions, if we don't have this self-awareness and the metacognition to say, this is what I'm feeling. I am feeling something intense. I am getting angry, I am getting sad, I am getting frustrated. I am getting overwhelmed. If we don't have the ability to even know what is happening in our own, in our, in our psyche, in our mind, and in our body, then we're going to get frustrated really quickly and we're not even going to know why. I also said at the top of this episode that a DHD and emotional regulation go hand in hand. Again, it's all connected to the parts of the brain that govern the two, but even people without A DHD can struggle with emotional regulation. I know a handful. And so if someone hasn't reached the point in their emotional education yet where they can identify what they're feeling, know how to stop it, know how to channel it, then those emotions will win every time. And the minute something gets hard, that emotion is going to show up as a 10 out of 10 and basically tell the person you can't do this. And then lastly, lack of practice. If someone doesn't have experience doing hard things, they're probably not going to get that good at doing hard things. Let me reframe this. I have never played the cello. That probably means I am not currently good at playing the cello. So if I were to sit down and play the cello, it would be very hard and it would come out caly. But if I practiced playing the cello every single day, despite it being hard, if I knew that the hardness of it wasn't going to actually kill me. Pretty soon, it wouldn't be that hard, and I would be good at the cello. If somebody is only ever living in their zone of comfort, only ever doing things that make them feel safe and secure, and they're never being exposed to anything outside that comfort zone that challenges them, that pushes back on their skill, then anytime they even peak outside that comfort zone, they're going to hit frustration. Exposure to hard things makes it easier to be exposed to hard things, which in turn makes it easier to do hard things. Before I get into the strategies to improve our frustration tolerance, I want to get into some of the things that come on the other side of improving our frustration tolerance. I think I've made the case that having low frustration tolerance is not a good situation at all, and now and in the future, but the inverse is also true. So there is hope. I promise you. Improving our frustration tolerance can lead to incredibly beautiful things. First, we reach our goals. Most of our goals are going to involve doing hard things. And if we can sustain our endurance and our emotional regulation and our grit while doing hard things, we'll be able to do them, which means that we'll be able to reach our goals and be satisfied. We improve our confidence. Someone asks us to do a hard thing and we're like, yeah, I got it. We don't shy away from calculated risks and adventures and things that we haven't done before, just because we have the confidence in ourselves that we can do hard things. Not that it won't be hard, of course, it'll be hard. Doing hard things will always be hard, but we can still do them. A healthy frustration tolerance reminds us of this truth. We'll also improve our reputation at school, at work, in our personal lives will become known as the person who does what they say they're going to do when they say they're going to do it. This is so important. We'll become trustworthy and people will have faith in us. And it's not that having low frustration tolerance means that we're not trustworthy. Not at all, but someone who consistently doesn't do what they say they're going to do when they say they're going to do it, gives the impression that they're not trustworthy. Even if you have all the good intentions of the world, you said you were going to deliver something, it's not delivered. Again, academic, personal, professional context across all contexts. But having a strong frustration tolerance, being able to endure challenge and uncertainty enables us to do what we say we're going to do when we say we're going to do it. And that improves our reputation and trustworthiness. Also timeliness. Someone with high frustration tolerance will initiate tasks in a timely way. Because they said to themselves, yeah, this is going to be hard and I can do it, so I might as well start now. And then when it got hard, they stayed in it where they used some of the strategies that I'm going to talk about in just a minute so that they could stay in it, or so that they could take a break if they needed to, and then get back in the saddle. And so the things were done on time. People with a high frustration tolerance tend to live more exciting lives. They're able to do more experience more, both personally and professionally and academically and with other people. They'll be open to trying new things. They're cool with seeing where things go if things don't work out, and they know how to get back up if they don't. I have an episode called How to Fail. That is episode 84. It's one of my top episodes. I really liked recording that episode. I talked a lot of, like some personal things in there in that I share strategies for reducing the chances of failure, but the majority of that episode is full of strategies to use after something doesn't go as planned. People with high frustration tolerance, know what those strategies are. And I'll leave the episode linked below. And then finally, the greatest positive impact I think, of having a high frustration tolerance is peace. There's so much less drama. There's so much less blame and huffing and puffing, and conflict. am not talking about getting to the point where things aren't hard, not my angle here, things will always be hard, but people with a high frustration tolerance handle hard things the same way they would handle something less challenging. They have that same inner state if they were writing an easy email versus if they were asked to create a presentation for 500 people. It's just one foot in front of the other. Knowing frustration isn't deadly. More peace, less drama. All right. Now we're going to get to the part of the episode where I share some strategies for how to improve our frustration tolerance, because again, the whole point of these episodes is to invite listeners to figure out what's in their control and what's not in their control, and to pull the levers that we can pull so that we can learn and work smarter. I am going to start with some strategies that make a task less frustrating to begin with, and then we're going to move to some tips for staying aid it when we're starting to get frustrated during a task. And then we will conclude with the ultimate mega strategy that is the mother of them all real fast. A related resource, if you wanna go deeper on actually how to do hard things, I covered that in episode 64. It's called How to Do Hard Things. I will link it below. Okay. Strategies that make a task less frustrating to begin with. Number one, seek clarity. When we don't understand what we're doing, we are going to feel frustrated. Sometimes we indeed just have to dive in and figure it out as we go. But seeking even just a little bit of clarity about what it is that we're about to sit down to do can improve our experience because it is going to make the task less frustrating to start with. For example, I will have students get so frustrated with an essay that they have to write. They avoid starting it. There is a lot of drama, a lot of huffing and puffing, and the essay is hard. And this is literally all before they've even started. But when we sit down, we open up the portal, we open up the assignment, we read the rubric, we look at the prompt, sometimes they're like, oh, it's, it's only that. Like that's not as bad as I thought. So sometimes getting clarity means for students actually clicking on the assignment and getting the scope of what it involves, because things that we don't know are so much scarier and frustrating than things we do know. Seeking clarity might mean asking somebody for help, Googling something, looking for examples. We don't need 100% clarity before we begin something, but even just understanding the very next step or the gist of what we're doing can make a task feel less frustrating. Number two, break large tasks into smaller steps. Making one slide for your upcoming presentation is a lot less frustrating than making 30 slides. Outlining an essay is a lot less frustrating than writing the whole thing in one sitting. Breaking things down into smaller steps is helpful for two reasons. Number one, it lowers the size and the scope of the task that you're working on. So again, one slide instead of 30, but it also reduces the amount of time that you're. Doing something frustrating in one sitting, for example, making that one slide, I don't know. It might take you 10 minutes. Even if it's frustrating and hard, it is only 10 minutes like you're, you're not going to die. Maybe that's the limit of your frustration tolerance for now. We can grow it, but for now, let's say it's 10 minutes. We're going to aim to get that higher than that, but working on something hard for 10 minutes while you can maintain emotional regulation, that is going to increase the chance because you're emotionally regulated and you haven't hit that frustration tolerance capacity yet, that's going to increase the chance that you're going to be able to rally for another 10 minute chunk of that frustrating task, which is maybe to make another slide and then take a break, and then you do another one and another one and another one. Because you're never pushing your frustration to the max Third, create a low frustration environment. When our external conditions are common supportive, our internal conditions are more likely to be that way as well. This is a strategy that I have to remind myself a lot of. I am, um, I become irritable and highly reactive, hangry. We might say, if I'm hungry, if I'm thirsty, if I haven't got my workout in that day, if like, my clothes are itchy, if like, you know, the, the external situation that we're in, if that's not smooth and calm for me. Then I tend to get more frustrated even if on, on things that are completely unrelated. So before we sit down to do a frustrating task, make sure you're not exhausted, you're not wired with some weird, chaotic energy. You're not starving or thirsty, or thinking about a thousand other things. Make sure you're comfortable. So wearing the right clothes, you're the right body temperature. Your sitting position if you're sitting is appropriate and not Uncomfortable. Optimizing our external environment doesn't make the task in front of us any easier, but it increases our frustration tolerance for doing the thing in the first place. Now the fourth strategy to make a task less frustrating in the first place is to use body doubling. I have an entire episode about body doubling and how to do it. That is episode 55, but it's a super powerful strategy, especially if you have a DHD. Essentially, body doubling is when we work alongside someone else who is also working on something and psychologically, something cool happens with the mirror. Neurons in our brain and we kind of tap into the energy and the focus of the other person who's working beside us. Again, it's a really powerful strategy, especially if you have a DHD. I recommend that you check out that episode when you're done here. And then fifth and finally, my favorite one of all. Develop your skills. Everything is more frustrating when we don't have skills. If we have time management skills, we start projects on time and give ourselves enough space to even identify if a project is frustrating. And because we started early enough, we can handle that frustration and have the time to work through it. We don't have to sit down and create 30 slides the night before a meeting, or we don't have to sit down and write the entire essay the night before it's due because our time management skills enabled us to start well in advance. Project management is another skill that improves our tolerance for frustrating things. I keep saying break the project into, you know, smaller pieces, but do you even know how to do that? Like how do you break it down? Into what size pieces? How do you track what you've done and what you still have to complete? How do you make sure you complete each step so that you meet the ultimate deadline? That is all under the larger skill of project management. I teach that skill explicitly as well as time management in my program, school Habits, university. Organization is another skill that improves our frustration tolerance because when we're organized, we know where things are, we can access our resources, and we're not overwhelmed with all of our notes and all of our emails and all of the files and all of the things, and we can focus a hundred percent on the task that we're supposed to be doing. Now, let's say that, follow me here, let's say that you have a hard task to tackle. Maybe it's a paper, a project, a presentation, whatever. And let's say that you have a frustration tolerance of a 10, like that's the max. Okay? And let's say that everything that's frustrating costs a point. Well, if we are pressed for time because we procrastinated, then we're down maybe an eight. Eight points left to put toward the task. If we don't have project management skills, we don't know how to break the task into smaller, more manageable pieces, maybe we're down to six points to put toward the task. Let's say that we're exhausted from pulling it all nighter the night before because we were working on something else that we procrastinated on. Maybe that's down another point. We're disorganized. We can't find our materials or our notes Don't even make sense. Okay, now we're down. I've lost track of the math, but we're down another few points. So now what I, I think we're at a a three before we even start the task. Now, of course the task is going to feel really hard because we're walking into it with only three little points. With like the lowest frustration tolerance possible. We used it all up on all of the other things before we even began. So of course we're going to feel frustrated and throw our hands in the air because again, we used all our frustration points on all of the other things that we actually had complete control over before we even started. But if we had time and task management skills, if we had a handle on organization, then you could actually just put all the energy into the thing that we needed to do. And if it got frustrating, we could handle that frustration for a lot longer. All right. Now I'm going to share three strategies you can use when you feel your frustration rising during a task. So maybe you felt good starting. You had clarity. You weren't exhausted. You weren't hungry. You did all the things right, but now you're getting frustrated with the work. And you're like two minutes away from throwing in a towel because maybe the thing you're working on, like genuinely is really frustrating. I get it. First we name it. Strategy number one, name it. Naming what we're feeling is always the first strategy to being able to get a grip on it and make a choice about what to do with that feeling. So when we start to feel frustrated, whatever that feels like to you. Sweaty, angry, overheated, snippy. Maybe you feel it in your chest. Maybe you feel it in your, in your stomach. If you're sitting at the computer, maybe you start rage clicking huffing and puffing. You're feeling the drama escalate. I want you to stop and say, I'm getting frustrated. I am reaching the edge of my frustration tolerance. Now naming it doesn't, you know, immediately make it go away, but without question, it is the first step. It also helps frame the moment as something legitimate that you're experiencing. Instead of saying things like, oh, I don't know why this project is so hard, or, I don't know why the teacher assigned so much work. I don't know why my boss called this meeting in the first place. We have the self-awareness to say something about this is frustrating to me. No judgment there, right? In my capacity for handling that frustration is getting full. Next we have to use emotional regulation strategies. So any strategies at all that are known to regulate our nervous system on the spot are going to be helpful for increasing frustration tolerance in the moment. So what do I mean by emotional regulation strategies? I actually talked a little bit about this already in a recent episode about test anxiety. I forget what episode number that is 'cause it just occurred to me now to reference that one. I'll leave it linked to below. But definitely breathing. And I talked about this strategy in that episode as well, but I like to recommend box breathing. So you inhale for four counts. You hold your breath at the top for four counts. You exhale for four counts, and you hold on empty for four counts. Using grounding techniques. So running through your five senses and naming, you know, all the things that we can perceive with our five senses. Taking a short break and going outside, as my son calls it, touching grass. Hey, I think there is something to that. You can also do some research on reframing techniques. That's a huge topic for a different episode. I don't have time to cover all of that here, but there are some good cognitive strategies for how to reframe what we're experiencing, not gaslighting ourselves, but for example, one strategy I personally find helpful is to say, okay, how would someone else view what I'm experiencing. So we take ourselves out of it and we say, okay. Someone observing objectively would say, what about the situation? And even just practicing that mental framework can help us regulate our emotions. And then finally have a recovery plan. We're going to get frustrated because we're human beings and chances are if you're a student or professional, you are going to end up having to do hard things. And we all have a frustration tolerance maximum, and we all reach it at some point. So this is not about never hitting that max, but it's about what to do when we hit that max. Awareness and emotional regulation can keep us from hitting that max when we're getting close. But what happens when we do hit it? What is the recovery plan? What happens when we have an overreaction? What happens when we do hit our capacity? What happens next? You gotta have a plan. Otherwise, we'll just abandon the project. We won't do what we say we're going to do when we say we're going to do it, and we're going to strengthen the wrong narrative about ourselves. You going to end up strengthening the narrative that you can't do hard things, that life is unfair, that other people have it easier, that I can't do this, and that is not the story we wanna be telling ourselves. So maybe your recovery plan is every time you hit your frustration tolerance max, you step away from the project for 24 hours like no questions asked. Maybe your recovery plan involves a 15 minute walk. Maybe your recovery plan involves looping in a trusted person to do a body doubling session with you. Maybe your recovery plan involves not touching that project just for the rest of the day. Maybe it involves a meditation, going for a run. Whatever it is, it's gotta be something other than whatever it is that you've likely been currently doing. Okay, and then finally, the ultimate mega mother strategy of them all is wait for it. This is the one thing that outshines all of the tips that I share today, and that is to do more uncomfortable things. If your frustration tolerance is low, meaning that you reach your emotional and cognitive capacity, after just a few minutes of doing a hard task, the only way to change that situation for good is to do more hard tasks. The more hard conversations we have, the easier hard conversations will be. The more we take challenging courses, the easier challenging courses will be. The more we present in front of others, the easier presenting in front of others will be. Not right away, not even overnight. But if we acknowledge our frustration with the task itself, if we name it and say, this is hard for me right now and I want to run away from it or quit it, or cop out news AI when I know the shortcut will burn me later. The more we lean into the frustration and stay in it, the stronger we'll become, and the higher our frustration tolerance will be. Whether it is playing the cello or writing essays, or drafting product proposals or running or whatever it is. We get better at things the more we do them. And that means staying the course when things feel hard. Because like all feelings, frustration is simply a passing emotion. Like we let it come in, we name it, we let it hang for a bit inside our chest if we need it to, but then we keep doing the thing while it's hanging out there. The frustration will pass as all emotions do. Okay. My friends. That brings us to the end of the episode today. We covered what frustration tolerance is. Its connection to ADHD, how a low frustration tolerance makes work in school a lot more difficult and dramatic than it needs to be. How having a higher frustration tolerance reduces that drama and allows us to just do the work. And then we covered five tips for making tasks less frustrating to begin with. Three tips to use in the moment when that frustration hits and the mega strategy of them all, which is to do more uncomfortable things. Come find me on Instagram at school habits. Keep showing up. Keep doing the hard work, keep asking the hard questions, and never stop learning.

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Katie Azevedo

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