You can sit with hunger and discomfort without reacting. What does this tolerance feel like?
The Short Answer
Tolerance doesn’t mean ignoring hunger or white-knuckling through discomfort. It means being able to observe the sensation without immediately acting on it — creating a gap between stimulus and response. In that gap, you get to choose.
Something to Sit With
The next time hunger arrives, try not responding for a few minutes. Not to prove anything. Not to test yourself. Just to notice what happens when you observe rather than react.
What does the hunger do? Does it intensify? Subside? Change character? Does it occupy less space when you stop fighting it?
This is what tolerance feels like: not the absence of sensation, but the presence of choice.
Learn More
Why Tolerance Matters.
Distress tolerance — the capacity to withstand negative emotional or physical states without reacting impulsively — is one of the core skills in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT).[1] Among nearly four thousand university students surveyed in a single sitting, lower distress tolerance went with more emotional eating and more loss-of-control eating.[1] The mechanism isn’t complicated: when discomfort feels unbearable, the brain looks for the fastest exit. Food is often nearby.
But the relationship may run deeper than impulse control. A 2021 study in Eating Behaviors found that distress tolerance moderated the link between difficulty regulating emotions and swings in mood — lower tolerance strengthened that link, higher tolerance weakened it.[1] Eating sat further down the modeled path rather than at the point the moderation was measured, and everyone was questioned in a single sitting, so this is people differing from one another rather than a buffer caught in the act. The authors put it as findings that suggest an influence which may in turn affect loss-of-control eating.[1]
This isn’t about having superhuman willpower. It’s about expanding the window between “I feel something” and “I must do something about it right now.”
What Tolerance Actually Feels Like.
The sensation is noticed, not obeyed. Hunger registers as information: There’s a signal here. But there’s no compulsion to act immediately. You can observe it the way you might observe rain — it’s happening, and you’re aware of it, but you don’t need to do anything about it this instant.
There’s space around the discomfort. The feeling doesn’t consume the whole field of awareness. It’s present, but so are you. So is everything else — the task you’re working on, the conversation you’re having, the walk you’re taking.
The urgency is recognized as manufactured. Most hunger isn’t an emergency — hunger explains only about a third of the variance in whether someone eats at all.[2] The tolerant eater knows this viscerally, not just intellectually. The body’s alarm system is noted but not mistaken for an actual alarm.
Curiosity replaces reactivity. Instead of Make this stop, there’s room for What is this, exactly? Is it physical hunger? Boredom? Stress wearing a hunger mask? The tolerant eater has time to ask because they’re not already moving toward the kitchen.
Building Tolerance Through Interoceptive Awareness.
Interoception is how clearly you can read what’s happening inside you. A 2023 randomized trial tested whether mindfulness training improves it — and whether that carries through into eating.
It clearly improved the reading. People got measurably better at reading their own signals.[3]
Whether they then ate better is not clear, and the trial says so. Across everyone in the trial, the change in eating could as easily have been chance. It did show up in one group: the people whose eating was furthest from the target to begin with.[3] The awareness is the established part; what people do with it seems to depend on how far they had to travel.
The link to tolerance is this page’s reasoning rather than the trial’s: you can’t sit with a sensation you can’t clearly perceive, so noticing comes first — telling genuine hunger from anxiety, fatigue, or habit.
A network analysis identified specific bridges between mindfulness and interoceptive awareness.[3] Among them: noticing how food and drink affect thoughts and bodily sensations, and the ability to notice and let go of distressing thoughts. These aren’t abstract skills — they’re trainable.
The Limits of Tolerance.
There’s an important caveat. Some people have too much distress tolerance — they endure discomfort for so long that they disconnect from their body’s legitimate signals. This can happen in restrictive eating, where, on restraint theory’s account, cognitive rules take the place of physiological cues rather than working alongside them.[4] A network study found several interoceptive-awareness items bridging to eating-disorder symptoms, including feeling that your body is a safe place, trust or mistrust of body sensations, and ignoring physical tension or discomfort, with no significant difference among the top three.[3] For these individuals, the work isn’t building more tolerance but learning to respond appropriately to genuine needs.
Healthy tolerance is the ability to feel discomfort without being controlled by it, while still honoring what the body actually needs.
Further reading:
- Linehan MM, DBT Skills Training Manual[5], Second Edition (2015) — Chapter on Distress Tolerance
- Simons JS & Gaher RM, “The Distress Tolerance Scale: Development and validation of a self-report measure”[6] — Motivation and Emotion, 2005
- Burr EK et al., “Ability to Tolerate Distress Moderates the Indirect Relationship between Emotion Regulation Difficulties and Loss-of-Control Over Eating via Affective Lability”[7] — Eating Behaviors, 2021
- Loucks EB et al., “Adapted Mindfulness Training for Interoception and Adherence to the DASH Diet: A Phase 2 Randomized Clinical Trial”[8] — JAMA Network Open, 2023
- Brown TA et al., “Body Mistrust Bridges Interoceptive Awareness and Eating Disorder Symptoms”[9] — Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2020
- Mehling WE et al., “Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness”[10] — PLOS ONE, 2012
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