A few months ago, my daughter was learning to ride her bike without stabilisers. I watched as her frustration built at the lack of progress until she finally said "This is too hard!" And gave up for the day.

The next day, I got frustrated at something and snapped "This is so annoying!". That's when I realised my daughter was learning how to handle frustration from me. And I wasn't setting a great example.

Most challenges in life can be solved simply through persevering through frustration long enough to see that first spark of a breakthrough. Once you see that breakthrough, you're motivated to keep going.

But most people can't tolerate the frustration long enough, so they give up.

Frustration tolerance is your ability to surf through that frustration. The higher your tolerance, the more frustration you can tolerate. The longer you can stick with that feeling of frustration and see your way to the end goal.

If you're like me and struggle with frustration, don't worry. Your frustration tolerance is a skill you can develop.

It's something I'm learning to develop.

I've noticed that sometimes I can deal with my frustration the wrong way. And I'm conscious that my daughter will learn the behaviours I model.

If I'm modelling the wrong way of dealing with my frustration, then my daughter's learning the wrong way to deal with her frustration.

So I've done some research on how to develop my frustration tolerance.

According to Dr Becky, author of Good Inside, Here's 3 ways to improve your frustration tolerance:

1. Deep Breaths

Frustration puts your nervous system on edge.

Your brain interprets frustration as a threat. This activates your stress response, resulting in a tense nervous system. This all lowers your ability to tolerate frustration. You become easily irritated or angry.

Deep breaths increase your frustration tolerance through calming the nervous system. A deep slow breath tells your nervous system it's safe. It calms down.

When your system is calm you're able to deal with more frustration.

How I'm applying this:

When I feel frustration building, I pause and take a deep slow breath. Then I continue with what I'm doing.

2. Mantras

Mantras help to distract the mind from irrational, emotional thoughts.

These thoughts can come from an overwhelmed nervous system. A mantra helps by moving your focus away from the emotional thoughts towards positive affirmations. These help to build a sense of control and resilience that leads to a calmer nervous system.

How I'm applying this:

A mantra I'm using when feeling frustrated is "I can deal with discomfort".

3. Focus on Coping, Not Success

Struggling with a challenge leads to frustration. Your body interprets frustration as an obstacle to succeeding over the challenge. This makes it think it's a threat to you, which activates the stress response, like I mentioned above. You can change this by reframing what success is.

Focus on the process, not the goal.

See sticking with it as a marker of success. This helps your body become comfortable with frustration. It stops seeing it as a threat, and instead sees it as something you need to go through to overcome a challenge.

How I'm applying this:

When I'm struggling with a challenge and getting frustrated, I'm reminding myself that sticking with it for as long as I can is the goal. What I'm finding is even just 5 minutes of sticking with it can help me push through feelings of frustration and start to see some progress.

The best gift I can gift my daughter isn't a life free from frustration. It's giving her the tools to deal with it.

I'm practicing what I've learnt so I can improve my frustration tolerance. In doing so, I hope I can model the right behaviour for my daughter so she learns how to deal with her frustration the right way.

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