When your partner leaves dishes in the sink for the third day in a row, what happens inside you?
Maybe your chest tightens. Maybe your mind starts building a case: They never help. They don’t respect my time. If they cared, they’d just put the dish in the dishwasher.
You could say something, you could leave it, you could passive-aggressively bang around the kitchen. Or you could do what today’s most popular advice tells you to do: accept their behavior and focus on yourself.
Great advice—in theory.
But how exactly do you do that when every cell in your body is screaming to fix, control, or at least have a pointed conversation about respect and basic household responsibilities?
This is a hot topic lately. Every time I post about it on Instagram or discuss it in my emails, I get responses. Let’s unpack it.
There’s distress in acceptance
There’s a skill that comes before acceptance, before focusing on yourself, before you can genuinely allow people to be who they are. It’s a skill most people don’t have, which is why the advice to “just accept it” lands flat.
That skill is distress tolerance.
You need to be able to tolerate the discomfort of not jumping in, not managing the situation, not trying to change someone else’s behavior. It’s the emotional discomfort you’re going to feel from NOT doing the behavior. The more distress tolerant you are, the easier it is to choose a new behavior, the easier it is to let them.
This is why I say we don’t talk about this enough.
When you think “I’m nervous” or “I’m scared,” you’re feeling discomfort. Distress tolerance is the belief that we can’t handle being scared, so we avoid it, and our resistance happens so fast, we don’t even notice it. You likely have never realized how uncomfortable you actually feel when you don’t behave in a way you’re used to behaving. When we become aware of our discomfort, we can choose differently (this takes a lot of time and practice).
We want to start noticing it, so we can choose differently.
Discomfort can be intense, which we don’t want to underestimate. When someone you care about makes a choice you don’t agree with, your brain sounds the alarm. When your friend keeps dating the same type of person who treats them poorly, you feel it physically.
Let’s say your teenager makes what looks like a terrible decision. As a mom, you may panic. Your whole body activates. If you’re distress intolerant, you may catastrophize the situation and then react to your fears and worries, which are heightened by the adrenaline.
Your nervous system can’t tell the difference between “my kid is making a bad choice” and “there’s actual danger here.” Both trigger the same response. Your job is teaching your body that discomfort isn’t the same as danger.
Why this is so hard
My son has a very different approach to job hunting than I do. I talk about this in my second book.
During college breaks, his strategy was to ask his sisters if they could hook him up with a position where they worked. And, as he always reminds me, it worked every time and took little effort.
But on day two of his breaks, if I came home from work and he was sitting on the couch watching TV (and he always was), my whole demeanor would change. My tone got faster and more clipped as I launched into interrogation mode: “Did you sit on the couch all day? Did you even look for a job?”
I wasn’t reacting to the situation. I was reacting to my fear that he’d never get a job, that this would somehow translate to living in my basement forever, that I was failing him by not pushing harder.
The escalation was on me.
I was fighting reality in a very unproductive way, and my behavior was pissing him off, which made him shut down and communicate less with me. He also felt like I didn’t trust him or care what he thought.
There were real consequences. Instead of connecting us, my behavior created disconnection.
The reality is that my son’s style is different from mine. I don’t have to like it to accept it as reality. Fighting reality was making us both suffer.
The skill that makes the let them acceptance possible
When you’re uncomfortable, your default is probably to make that discomfort go away. You fix, you control, you solve, you intervene. But here’s what happens: when you treat your internal experience as a problem that must be solved, that experience only gets stronger and more persistent.
This is where the PAUSE process helps. It’s how you build your capacity to tolerate what’s hard, so you can act based on your values instead of your anxiety.
Pause. Stop before acting. Take some breaths. You’re not trying to calm down or feel better. You’re just stopping the momentum toward automatic reaction.
Assess. Are you in danger or just uncomfortable? Unless you’re actually in danger, remind yourself that discomfort is not the same as danger. Your body’s alarm system is misfiring.
Unclench. Drop your shoulders, lengthen your exhales, relax your jaw. You’re not forcing calm. You’re sending signals to your nervous system that you’re not under threat.
Soften. Stop fighting the discomfort. Every instinct tells you to make it go away, but fighting it makes it stronger. Practice being okay with the moment even though you don’t like it.
Engage. Redirect your attention toward what matters, regardless of how you feel or what thoughts are in your head. You feel anxious, and you respond calmly. You feel like controlling, and you stay in your lane.
What this looks like when someone else’s behavior bothers you
Back to those dishes in the sink.
Old pattern: You see the dishes, feel that spike of irritation, and either say something passive-aggressive or stew in resentment the rest of the evening.
New pattern with PAUSE:
You see the dishes. You feel that familiar surge.
You pause. Take two breaths.
You assess. Am I in danger? No. I’m annoyed, but nobody’s life is at stake.
You unclench, drop your shoulders, let your jaw relax.
You soften. You acknowledge you’re frustrated. I can be frustrated and still respond how I want to.
You engage, either having a calm, direct conversation (“Hey, can you handle the dishes tonight?”) or deciding it’s not worth addressing and move on with your evening. Either way, you’re choosing based on what matters to you, not reacting to your discomfort.
Your partner might still leave dishes tomorrow, leaving you still feeling frustrated. But you’ve responded based on your values instead of your nervous system.
Building distress tolerance skills take time
This takes practice. Start with something easier. My favorite example is to tell people not to grab your phone at a red light. When you’re standing in a checkout line, just stand there. When someone you love is upset, resist the urge to swoop in and make it better immediately.
Gradually increase your dose of discomfort. Think of it like micro-dosing. If you accidentally dose too high, you’ll be outside your tolerance window too soon and won’t learn that you can co-exist with uncomfortable feelings. If that happens, scale back.
The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is consistency, repetition, and loads of patience as you build your confidence.
How to let them (without losing yourself)
You can’t genuinely allow people to be who they are until you can tolerate how that makes you feel. Acceptance without distress tolerance is just gritting your teeth and white-knuckling through resentment.
When you build your capacity to stay with discomfort without reacting, everything shifts. You stop trying to manage other people’s choices. You focus on your own responses, creating space between their behavior and your reaction.
You still have boundaries and preferences. You still get to make requests and have direct conversations. You’re just doing it from a place of intentional choice, not from a place of trying to escape your own discomfort.
Some days, unclenching your jaw might be enough. Other days, you’ll need the entire PAUSE process plus every ounce of willpower to keep yourself from jumping in. That’s normal.
This isn’t about becoming a pushover or pretending you don’t care. It’s about getting better at feeling what you feel without being controlled by it. Because when you can tolerate your own discomfort, you free yourself and everyone around you.
