The Two-Way Growth of Emotional Capacity

Most people think of emotional resilience as just the ability to handle difficult emotions. But emotional tolerance is like a rubber band—the more you stretch in one direction, the more capacity you have in the other.

Feeling More Discomfort Allows You to Feel More Joy

When we avoid pain, we also shut down our ability to feel deep joy, love, and excitement. If you numb your sadness, you also numb your happiness. If you suppress fear, you also limit your ability to feel true freedom and exhilaration.

Your Emotional Range Expands in Both Directions

Think of your emotional tolerance as a spectrum: On one side, there’s grief, pain, sadness, and fear. On the other, there’s happiness, love, pleasure, and excitement. If you only allow yourself to feel “safe” emotions in the middle, your range stays small. But if you stretch your ability to sit with discomfort, your capacity for joy and pleasure grows just as much.

Why Deep Joy Can Feel Uncomfortable

Many people don’t realize that feeling good can be just as intense as feeling bad. Ever notice how overwhelming love can be? Or how hard it is to fully accept success and happiness without self-sabotaging? If you haven’t built tolerance for intensity, even positive emotions can feel unsafe. Expanding emotional tolerance means being able to hold both deep sadness and deep joy—without fear.

Understanding Tolerance Through Breathwork and Cold Exposure

Now, let’s think of growing our emotional tolerance in terms of learning to hold our breath or endure a cold plunge. When you practice holding your breath longer (even though it’s uncomfortable), you increase your lung capacity. When you expose yourself to cold water and stay with the discomfort, your nervous system learns to handle stress without shutting down. The same goes for emotions: the more you allow yourself to feel intense sadness, fear, or vulnerability, the more you can also handle intense joy, love, and fulfillment.

The Takeaway

Your emotional muscle grows in both directions. The more you practice tolerating discomfort, the more space you create for life’s most beautiful emotions—deep love, joy, passion, and fulfillment. BUT this needs to happen slowly and with awareness of our current capacity for discomfort. It’s important to not push ourselves past our limits to the point where we fall back into numbness or dissociation. A great way to do this is to recognize what sensations occur in the body when you try to stick with an uncomfortable feeling for too long. Do you get hot? Do you get cold? Does your body tingle? Do you feel overly angry or frustrated? Do you get tired?These might be signals that you are stretching too far and need a break. Just like at the gym, where we learn to lift heavy weights in small increments, we need to take breaks to rest and integrate.

Overall, the act of being willing to sit with your emotions, instead of resisting them, expands your ability to hold it all. And that my friends, is where real emotional freedom lies.

Happy healing,

Teal

Journal Prompt: Expanding Emotional Capacity

Take a few moments to reflect on your emotional range. Answer these questions in your journal:

1. What emotions do I feel most comfortable with?

   • Are there certain emotions I allow myself to fully experience, like joy or sadness?

2. What emotions do I tend to avoid or suppress?

   • Do I resist feeling fear, grief, excitement, or even deep happiness?

3. Think of a recent moment of discomfort.

   • What happened? How did I respond? Did I distract myself or allow myself to fully feel it?

4. Think of a recent moment of joy or excitement.

   • Did I embrace it fully, or did I feel the need to pull back or downplay it?

5. How can I practice sitting with emotions instead of resisting them?

   • Write one small action you can take today to expand your emotional capacity.

Exercise: Expanding Emotional Tolerance with Breathwork

This simple breathwork practice helps you build emotional tolerance and regulate your nervous system:

1. Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed.

2. Close your eyes and take a deep inhale through your nose for four counts.

3. Hold the breath at the top for four counts—notice any discomfort or restlessness.

4. Slowly exhale through your mouth for six counts.

5. Pause at the bottom of the exhale for four counts—observe how your body reacts.

6. Repeat this for 5-10 minutes, gradually allowing yourself to sit with any emotional discomfort that arises.

Afterward, journal about how you felt during the breath holds. Did you notice resistance? Did emotions surface? The more you practice, the more you’ll build tolerance for both discomfort and joy.