Trying to help people increase their frustration tolerance is popular now among psychologists. I could have used more frustration tolerance this past week when I dealt with various technical and other problems as I tried to assign final grades for the term.

Trying to help people who experience chronic pain to increase their pain tolerance is also big in the field of psychology. Many individuals live from pain pill to pain pill, year after year.

Sometimes using pain pills such as fentanyl, which is 50 times as powerful as heroin, causes a fatal overdose. Still, it is hard for psychologists to help individuals with their pain because many of them insist that their problem is not in their head.

Two of my psychology students are studying hunger tolerance. They want to determine how to increase it in the hope of helping individuals control their weight.

Why do we humans have problems tolerating this and that? One reason is that evolution has wired us to have strong negative emotions when something harmful happens to us. Our ancestors had strong negative emotions when their goals were blocked, for instance by someone stealing their axe. That axe could be the difference between surviving and dying.

Pain sends us a message: stop doing that! If we do not stop, we may end up terribly injured. One fellow I evaluated years ago was born with no sense of pain. He would lean on a finger, break it, and never know he was hurt. The injuries turned to gangrene or some other problem, leading him to have over 50 amputations. When I saw him, he had left a head, a torso, half of one arm, and one side of his nose.

Hunger used to be a crucial message for humans: eat soon. Starvation loomed — perhaps only a week or so away.  For us in Australia, hunger no longer carries a death threat, but we can react as if it does.

Is it possible to increase tolerance of frustration, pain, and hunger? One secret may exist in how we think. I once had a dental procedure that was unexpectedly followed by days of pain. I finally called the dentist and set an appointment for him to check what was wrong. My pain decreased by 90% by the time I hung up the phone — because I felt safe then.

More recently I learned to tolerate late-evening hunger while trying to lose two kilograms. Again, thinking was crucial. Hunger leads to thoughts, which lead to eating (or not).

Now if I could just increase frustration tolerance, I would feel happy. Maybe I will tell myself in the future that impediments are part of life and that the strongest response is to work calmly to overcome them.

In what realm of life could you use increased tolerance?

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