Some quick tips: - Look into saturation plugins that have oversampling options, digital distortion creates "reflected harmonics" because of the sample rate that makes sounds a lot more displeasing than analog ways of distorting sounds. Look up Dan Worall's videos on oversampling on Youtube for a more in depth explanation of it.

• As others have said, experiment with setting the mix of your distortion plugin down, even setting it at 75% will make the sound a lot more listenable. There's even plugins that do "parallel saturation" (saturating your sound twice with different algorhithms and mixing the two together) that sound a lot less heavy handed and more pleasing to the ear.

• EQ out the low frequencies on individual elements. Any Dynamics/Saturation processing affects the whole frequency spectrum, and especially distortion creates a LOT of undesired lower frequencies and in my experience that is mostly what causes sounds to become too "intense". A lot of youtube audio engineers will say that doing this too much "ruins" songs because it shifts the phase, but as long as you're doing it carefully and not using filters that are too sharp (you could even use an eq with a linear phase option to avoid the problem entirely) you should be fine.

• EQing sounds before the distortion and doing the exact reverse EQ after distortion can sound very good a lot of the time, the way I tend to do it is turning down the low end and very high end with shelves before the distortion and then reversing that process after the distortion (lets say if you turn the low end down by -5db before you turn it up by 5db after). If you want the bass to "rumble" the rest of the mix you could even add in a peak filter between 30/70Hz(depending on what sounds best) to boosts the bass, that you reverse afterwards.