I recently had a session with a client who came in to work on her fear of flying. We started taking the fear apart, and within half an hour it was clear that flying was barely in it.

What she was actually dreading was everything around the flight: the alarm at four in the morning, the ride to the airport, the line to check in, the line for security, the line to board, the not knowing how long any of those lines would take. By the time she was in her seat, she had already spent hours in a state she had no name for, and she had been attributing all of it to the airplane itself. Investigating her fear helped us conclude that the original problem wasn't fear of flying but her lack of tolerance for the whole process.

Her fear improved faster than I expected once we separated those things, and that speed is what sent me back to the word tolerance itself.

I enjoy taking apart the terms we use all the time. This time it was tolerance—and what I found is that we use the same term for at least two different processes, two processes that aren't simply variations on the same thing. They run on different machinery, and they cost the system different amounts of energy.

As an example, let's take traffic, since most of us have sat through it at some point.

Picture one driver who is grinding his teeth in rush hour traffic that is going to make him late for work. He's put a good song on, telling himself the music is helping. But it isn't really. If we could measure what's happening, we might see his heart rate up, his attention narrowed, his capacity to think a few........

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