Getting Comfortable with Discomfort

Because the Unavoidable Can Become Your Superpower

When I was in college, I had what some might call a brutal strategy for making sure I got all of my work done on time. I treated any break in my schoolwork – meals, relaxation, even trips to the bathroom – as a reward to be earned by hitting a certain milestone in my work. I would have to wait until I finished a certain number of homework problems, a page of writing, or completed a project or assignment before I would allow myself to break focus, no matter how bored or unmotivated I felt.

Now, before you report me to the authorities for being a danger to myself, please realize that I never put myself in harm’s way. Waiting a few hours to eat or finishing a paragraph before taking a bathroom break was not a big deal. Plus, I always selected my stopping point relative to the urgency of my needs. The idea was to push myself a little farther, not to become subservient to my responsibilities. In the end, I learned something far more valuable from this practice than from the assignments it helped me complete. I had no idea at the time, but I was teaching myself to sit with discomfort.

Every time I sat down to work, there were millions of thoughts floating around my head. Let alone the interruptions of my own thoughts, there were bodily urges – get your head out of the gutter, I mean fatigue, hunger, etcetera – digital distractions, and pets wanting to play or be fed. Don’t get me started on the people. They can be the most distracting of all. It’s like the whole world was conspiring to prevent me from getting my work done, giving me plenty of excuses to decide that I wasn’t comfortable working at that moment.

Why Would I Want To Be Uncomfortable On Purpose?

I want to be very clear on one thing:

Any tool of self-discipline can become toxic if taken to its extreme.

Part of the lesson I strive to teach is self-awareness and experimentation. Know where your weaknesses and strengths lie, work on only what you can handle. Push yourself, but recognize when you need to ease up.

The thing is, my comfort didn’t matter. Not then, not now, and not even in high school which is when I actually may have started this practice. I can’t quite remember. Comfort didn’t matter to me, and certainly not to the rest of the world. I was willing to endure more discomfort while I was focused on my schoolwork because I had learned that if I did so, I would get it over with and be able to spend more time doing whatever it was that 17 through 23 year-old Jenn actually wanted to do.

I learned to endure both the discomfort of resisting the urges to stop working, as well as the feeling of boredom, confusion, and mental strain that went along with the work I was doing. The more I did this, the easier it became to push back against both the feeling of discomfort and any unwanted urges, giving me better discipline and self-control.

What you might not realize is that self-control works like a muscle – something that you can train and strengthen over time. You can “work out” your self control by doing things that you don’t necessarily want to do, such as homework, going for a run, doing the dishes, washing your laundry, and having dinner with your spouse’s parents, but it can be hard to force yourself to do those things enough to notice it strengthening your discipline muscle. Another alternative that you might not be aware of is to build the same type of resilience by allowing yourself to sit with discomfort, rather than trying to eliminate it as soon as you notice it. Depending on the case, existing in an uncomfortable situation can be easier than putting effort into something you don’t want to do.

The technique of sitting with discomfort has been touted by so many specialists on mental well-being and anxiety – Dr Julie Smith, Dr Russel Kennedy, Dr Paul Conti, and Dr Wendy Suzuki, to name a few. I can tell you for now that sitting with discomfort comes highly recommended by experts at the forward edge of the study of physiology and mental health.

The process of sitting with discomfort is simple. The next time you notice yourself feeling a little cold, don’t get a sweater or blanket. Don’t touch the thermostat. Accept being cold, and let yourself get used to the feeling. This works for being a little too warm as well.

If you decide to sit down and watch TV, try sitting on the floor, rather than the cushioned couch. Give yourself a time limit, starting with around 30 minutes before you can relocate, and consider increasing this requirement as you acclimate to further discomfort. If 30 minutes is really too much, start with 10 or 15 minutes and work your way up. Remember that the value comes from being a little uncomfortable and being okay with it, resisting the urge to correct your situation.

Eat a food that you don’t really like the taste of, and I mean eat it slowly, not gulp it down like it’s medicine before you can taste it. Observe the taste, contemplate it, and allow yourself to accept that even though it’s not ideal, it won’t kill you. Make sure that food isn’t actually something that’s going to kill you, like spoiled chicken or a Carolina Reaper pepper.

Another way you can consistently work discomfort, or at least delay of urges into your routine is to consider a daily fasting habit. There is a lot of evidence of the health benefits of short-term fasting, such as flattening blood sugar spikes, reducing inflammation, encouraging cell turnover, and maintaining a healthy weight, but more on that in another article. The reason I bring it up now is that it allows you to practice discomfort by resisting the urge to eat as soon as you’re hungry.

I don’t know how many times I need to say this, so I’ll preface again – the goal is not to starve yourself or limit yourself to the point of self-harm. Make sure you eat enough to sustain you over the course of the day. Fasting is just about moving the times that you eat during the day, not limiting your total food intake.

I find that a 16:8 fast, meaning a 16-hour fasting window and 8-hour eating window is doable for most people. If that is too big of a jump from your current schedule, consider starting with a rule like “no eating within 4 hours of sleep” then gradually delay your first meal of the day later until you’ve closed the window. There are still benefits even of a 10 or 12 hour fast, if you are starting as a snackaholic

You could even wear something a little ridiculous to a public place – nothing inappropriate of course. Something like a funny hat or shirt with a gaudy pattern would do. When you feel the discomfort of being looked at – of assuming that you’re being judged by every single eye around you, resist the urge to run home and change your clothes. Sit with the feeling that everyone is looking at you, and accept it.

It’s quite possible that it’s all in your head, but even if it’s not, what do you care if the soccer moms and high school kids walking in and out of Kroger don’t like your outfit? Does their opinion have even a minuscule impact on your life? Let their potential judgment be the fires that baptize you, transforming you into someone who no longer feels the weight of other people’s thoughts – real or imagined. Oddly enough, the times when I wear something a little experimental are often when I get the most compliments on my outfit. Maybe you’ll learn that you can actually pull off the outfit in the back of your closet that you bought and never dared to wear.

To summarize: Anything works, as long as it makes you mild-to-moderately uncomfortable. Assuming you are able to sit with it without risking any immediate harm, practicing it on a regular basis will help you build your mental tolerance, strengthening your “muscle” of self-control.

Identify the Source of Your Discomfort

I’ll base what comes next on the example of the outrageous outfit and the feeling of embarrassment, anxiety, or judgment by others, but this applies to any situation in which you feel discomfort.

Instead of trying to guess what passersby might be thinking, focus on your own body. What sensations do you feel that signify the anxiety and embarrassment of wearing your ugly Christmas sweater to the grocery store in May? Is it in your chest, back, or throat? Does it feel hot or cold, or maybe a buzzing or vibrating sensation. Is it itchy? – no, not the ugly sweater; I mean the sensation.

Can you place your hands on the part of your body that reacts, feel it, and breathe into the feeling? This is a technique Dr. Russell Kennedy, a doctor and anxiety specialist focusing on childhood trauma, calls finding the “alarm” in your body. He has treated patients by helping them to identify the physical sensation of anxiety or alarm, and using the body to calm the mind, rather than using the mind by trying to explain away or justify the anxiety with methods such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

Dr. Kennedy speculates that CBT can be effective at bringing down anxiety temporarily, but that many patients came to him after having spent years and thousands of dollars on CBT, only to have their anxiety return much worse at a later date. He explains that when we feel anxiety, it’s natural for our minds to search our current surroundings for a danger that explains the feeling, but that in his experience the anxiety is actually originating from the body.

The sensation we feel comes from the amygdala, our brain’s fight-or-flight center, producing hormones that raise our heart rate and increase our stress. Our minds might rationalize the situation, thinking, “my boss shops at this store, and if he sees me I’ll be the laughing stock of the office”. The reality may be that we were raised by a very critical mother, and she once scolded us harshly for trying to go to school in what she considered to be a mismatched outfit. If we learn while young that it’s not safe to risk the judgment of others, that fear will remain decades later. The amygdala, like the elephant, does not forget.

CBT teaches you to argue with your inner voice, persuading away the negative thoughts. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help with the root cause of learned anxiety that remains in the body. That fear will continue to resurface even if you can logically argue away every concern about running into your boss and being fired over a sweater. In truth, your fear was never really about the sweater, that’s just the current trigger bringing back stored emotions. In order to become well for the long term, it’s necessary to work on both.

The strategy of finding the representation of discomfort in your body and attuning to it doesn’t work only for anxiety, but can also work for cravings, urges, distractions, and fears. If you find yourself wanting to check your phone, that is likely not caused by a past trauma, but rather trained into us by a lifetime of responding to digital distractions. Still, when you feel that urge, try to pause and observe it, rather immediately fighting it. Are you wanting to check your phone because there is some kind of news you are waiting for, or is the urge really just to get away from the task in front of you?

Becoming familiar with the sensations in your body caused by boredom, stress, and fatigue can help to react appropriately when those urges present, dealing with the root cause of the problem. This is often more effective than trying brute-force, through strength of willpower alone, to resist the urge to check your phone, bite your nails, or go get a snack. However, there are some situations in which the root cause might not be clear, or may not be something you are currently equipped to resolve. If this is the case, it’s better to train your mind to be generally more resistant to stress and urges so that you are able to cope with whatever hits you.

Beyond Discomfort, Sitting with Fear and Pain

So far, we’ve focused on mostly mild discomfort, but these principles apply to even our greater obstacles, pain and fear. Discomfort and pain are the same thing, just at different points on the scale. Someone who has spent more time enduring discomfort in their life, intentionally or not, will be less disturbed by either.

I’m sure you’ve heard of exposure therapy, which can be used in extreme circumstances to help people acclimate to even their most debilitating fears. They may be exposed to spiders, heights, public speaking, or water in a way that forces them to confront their fear and reduce their sensitivity to it. These exposures should – of course – not be life-threatening. Enduring, or “sitting with” fears in this way raises your tolerance for the individual fear, and for doing things that scare you in general. This technique is certainly an option, and is similar to the concept of “getting comfortable with discomfort,” but true exposure therapy may be much more extreme, expensive, and may require the help of a professional to guide you. Please don’t do anything to induce a full-blown panic attack, especially without someone nearby to monitor and help you.

What I propose instead, is building a generalized tolerance for resisting any urge or craving you have, whether it be to chow down on Pringles or to run screaming out of a crowded room. This technique specifically comes from an interview with Dr Julie Smith, on the podcast Feel Better, Live More – one of my favorites. She talks about becoming your own therapist by learning to recognize the feeling of different mental states and practicing self-control by acting opposite to your urges when the stakes are low, so that you’re ready when the stakes are high and you don’t have a choice.

Dr. Smith remembers a time when, as children, she and her sister would compete with each other over self control. Each girl would place a Polo mint – one of those circular white hard mints that look like lifesavers – on her tongue. The first to crunch down on the mint, rather than letting it slowly melt away, would lose. She remembered that practice so fondly that even in her adult life, she would do the same thing, trying to resist the urge to crunch the mint even without her sister nearby to triumph over.

She finds that in the course of her life, small practices to build tolerance have allowed her to face much more intense challenges, such as her fear of heights. On a holiday trip with her two children, she recounts visiting The Frame in Dubai, a skyscraper in the shape of a massive vertical picture frame 50 stories tall. In this building, one of the main  attractions is a glass floor on a high level, allowing visitors to look directly down and experience a little taste of controlled vertigo. She is aware of her own fear of heights, and under normal circumstances wouldn’t in a million years have paid an entrance fee to be tortured like this, but she didn’t want to pass on that fear to her children, so she rode the elevator up dozens of floors to the long glass hallway almost 500 feet in the sky.

View through the glass floor, The Frame, Dubai

Upon entering the floor, she felt the familiar sensation of fear welling up in her throat, wanting nothing more but to rush across to the down elevator and make it safely to the ground, but she resists. Through years of training with the mints, she had honed a skill for recognizing an intense desire and wrangling it back under control. She is able to push the feeling down, just like the urge to bite the mint. The fear isn’t completely gone, but she is able to manage it. She recounts this anecdote as a way of explaining the progress gained by testing herself in safe and unimportant situations. After all, you don’t test your parachute when you’ve already jumped out of the plane.

This recommendation mirrors what I’ve heard from numerous psychologists and specialists who deal with anxiety. The way to alleviate feelings of unwarranted fear and panic is not to put yourself directly in the situation you are afraid of, but to build a habit of acting opposite to many of your lower level fears and urges, working up to a controlled version of your phobia over an extended time. These instances of lesser intensity will be the perfect practice, allowing you to notice the feeling of craving or anxiety, then sit with it until it passes.

When the process starts – for both urges and fears – the sensation rises in intensity, more potent by the second until it peaks at an almost unbearable level. Perhaps at another point in time, the subject would be able to acknowledge at a conscious level that they are in no physical danger. Yet in that moment, they may feel the drive to literally run from the situation. In the case of a craving, this may be the feeling that if you don’t smoke a cigarette right now you will literally die.

Breathing Through Your Discomfort

During the actual experience of anxiety or discomfort, it can help to focus on your surroundings, rather than your thoughts. This practice is called grounding, and helps you to shift your attention away from the runaway sensation of dread by helping you to stay present in reality. What sounds do you hear? What are five things you can see? What colors, smells or sensations are noticeable around you? What are the other people around you doing? Moving yourself into the present with mindfulness techniques can help overcome the pressure of your conditioned response, allowing you to wait a short time until the reaction to the stimulus passes.

Another strategy that is suggested by Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and podcaster on health and science, is to control your breathing. His number one suggestion for intense anxiety is to use a calming breath called the “physiological sigh”. This technique activates your parasympathetic nervous system, slowing your heart rate and producing an overall soothing effect.

The sigh is performed by taking in two breaths through the nose – the first a long breath that fills the lungs to capacity, and the second a quick, forceful inbreath that inflates them just a little bit more – followed by a long, slow breath out through the mouth to completely empty your lungs. Some proponents of the physiological sigh even recommend making a hissing sound through your teeth during the out-breath, creating a sound and physical sensation that you’ll associate with the calm mindset you are summoning.

Much like the parachute mentioned above, the sigh is not something you want to practice only when you are in distress. Try it out at home when you are calm, or in mildly anxious situations so that you’re armed with a powerful tool, rather than an experiment when a real need arises.

Most people give in to the feeling of their fear or craving early on, but if you can last through its peak using these tools, the feeling will start to fade. Think of it like getting into a hot tub and feeling the momentary pain that sets you thinking, “Wow, they really weren’t kidding about ‘hot’ this time” followed by the gradual reduction of discomfort as the heat settles into your skin and starts to feel relaxing. While a fear or craving may not be “relaxing” per say, it will become bearable as you resist the urge and observe it rather than reacting to it.

More importantly, you will know that you’ve succeeded, and your restraint will be bolstered for the next time it’s needed. Sometimes, you may still fail, but over time you’ll gain more control over your urges and fears. This gradual approach is certainly not as effective as quitting cold turkey – and if you are capable of that, you’re a god among men, and I salute you – but for the common man, small steps to improvement will ultimately breed success.

Final Thoughts

I wanted to talk about so much more in this article, such as how sitting with discomfort aligns with stoicism, meditation, and yoga. If you are familiar with these practices, you may see the link, but I think it’s worth discussing further. In this case though, I feel I’ve covered so much that I need to wrap up here, and leave you with an experiment to try and some advice worth sharing.

So, make a point to expose yourself intentionally to both physical and emotional discomforts, and see how it impacts your tolerance. Sit on the floor, allow yourself to be bored, face a problem as soon as you notice yourself dreading it, eat a food you don’t like, stare down a spider and observe all its creepy crawly bits. If that one feels a little specific, it’s because I had to catch an upsettingly large spider in my kitchen this morning and it’s still on my mind.

Perhaps, your biggest fear is failure. Risk failure. It’s much better to make an attempt and learn from your failure than to fear failure so much that you never try. Even if you do fail, treat it as an opportunity to become more resilient. Get right back up and try again.

In the same way that you can build resilience by exposing yourself to discomfort, you can strengthen your resistance to give in to urges or cravings. Find small things in your life that you feel compelled to do – biting down on a mint, scratching an itch, looking at your phone – and fight back against them. Resist them little by little, starting with “I’ll do it in 10 minutes instead of now” and ending with “I’ll do it whenever I feel like, but I never feel I need to anymore”. Over time, your discipline for these small things will build and prepare you for the hard conversations, the public speaking, the airplane flights despite a fear of heights, and the world travel with a fear of meeting new people.