How To Embrace Discomfort (And Why It’s Good For Us)
Learning how to embrace discomfort may initially sound unusual, but it can be really beneficial for promoting better mental health. As the old saying goes: ‘Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.’ To live a full and meaningful life, we need to learn how to embrace discomfort. This is because, sure as gravity, what is rewarding and meaningful in life will involve uncomfortable feelings at some stage. For example:
- Getting fit
- Raising a family
- Pursuing a new romantic relationship
- Starting a business
- Taking up a new hobby
- Ending a relationship that no longer serves you
- Interviewing for that job you really want
- Travelling to exciting places
- Campaigning for issues that matter to you
- Caring for loved ones with health problems
- Healing past pain through therapy
All these things are meaningful. But is it possible to do any of them without experiencing discomfort? Unless you’re some breed of superhuman or just totally unaware of your human frailties, no! Living a life of meaning and purpose means bumping up against our window of tolerance – or ‘comfort zone’.
Because here’s the thing: The more we give in to discomfort, the smaller our comfort zone gets. Conversely, the better we get at confronting discomfort, the bigger our comfort zone gets. And the more our horizons expand.
Cocooning and Netflix bingeing has its place in life, but it is not a place of meaning and purpose. For those goodies, we need to learn how to embrace discomfort.
Learning how to embrace discomfort is necessary for good mental health
“Graded and safe exposure to a part of the stressor under expert and professional guidance is widely recognised as a key component in managing anxiety,” says Dr Manan Thakrar, Consultant Psychiatrist. “It is natural to want to avoid triggers, especially when they cause distress. However, consistently avoiding these triggers, while providing short-term relief, can sometimes make anxiety more persistent over time. The more we avoid confronting our fears, the more they can grow in intensity, making them harder to manage later on. By gradually and safely facing what makes us anxious, we can diminish the power those fears hold and build greater resilience in the long run. This approach encourages us to develop healthier coping mechanisms and fosters a sense of control over our anxiety.
“This is a key principle of evidence-based therapies like cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). We can identify the things that trigger our discomfort and learn to confront those things in a manageable way. And in the long run this will make us stronger, less afraid and ultimately freer.”
Uncomfortable feelings can become a bogey man that we run from. But by avoiding our grief, past trauma or pain, perhaps burying it with workaholism, overeating, scrolling or Netflix bingeing, or even toxic positivity (are you really always ‘great’?), we drive it down deeper and it gets harder to deal with.
Learning how to embrace discomfort is necessary for growth, good mental health and a meaningful life. Read on for 8 ways to embrace discomfort.
8 ways to embrace discomfort
How do you push through uncomfortable feelings? What do you use to cope when you’re feeling uncomfortable? Try these 8 ways to embrace discomfort.
1. Trim down the toxic positivity
Yes things could be worse, yeah you’ve much to be grateful for – blah blah blah. But sometimes keeping legitimate grief or pain away with a barrage of ‘I’m fines’ and positive affirmations actually encourages neurosis and intrusive negative thoughts. Paradoxically, if you let the tears or the anger come for a moment, they will pass over much more quickly, leaving you space to experience some genuine joy! So if you’ve been tacking over tears with toxic positivity, take a break and let the tears come.
2. Lean in to the physical feelings
One of the best ways to learn how to embrace discomfort is to lean into the sensations in your body. Emotions are physical. And very often, when faced with a strong emotion we consider to be ‘negative’ (such as sadness or anger) our mind rushes in to rescue us with a barrage of analyses and ruminations. Which usually only extends the suffering and makes us feel worse.
So instead of narrativizing your emotions (why you feel sad, what so and so did, what could go wrong, etc), physicalise your feelings. Turn your awareness to your body and explore how the emotions feel. Where in your body is the emotion? Is your stomach churning? Is your chest tight? If this feeling had a colour, what would that colour be? Does it move in waves? Is it heavy or light? Imagine your breath filling the place where those emotions are in your body.
Resisting discomfort only empowers it. Learn how to embrace discomfort by observing it in your body. In this way, you free yourself from analysis and rumination, becoming instead a mindful observer who is unafraid of the discomfort. Try it – you’ll be surprised how freeing it can be.
3. Connect with your Inner Observer
This relates to what we covered in number 2 – observing your discomfort without judging and trying to rationalise it. While we can do this for the physical discomfort we feel from emotions like sadness, anxiety or anger, we can also practice mindful observation of the racing thoughts that might accompany these emotions (particularly before we’ve gotten practiced at number 2 on the list).
Very often, when faced with a wave of worries, negative scenarios or intrusive thoughts, we get further into them. We unintentionally empower them by trying to stop them. Perhaps by telling ourselves ‘stop worrying, you shouldn’t worry’ or seeking reassurance from others. This often makes the rumination worse in the long run.
Imagine your thoughts are a flowing river. You can’t stop the river, right? And getting into the river, holding your arms out to try to push it back, is only going to get you soaked and exhausted because you’re fighting the tide. Try this instead:
Sit on the riverbank and just watch the river – your thoughts – go by. They’re just thoughts – they’re not you. You are not your thoughts, you are not the river, you’re the watcher sitting on the riverbank.
There are many helpful meditations to help you craft this practice and it can be as simple as a 10 minute YouTube exercise.
4. Choose your hard
It’s a cliché, but life is going to be difficult either way. Avoiding your feelings, turning away from discomfort feels easier in the short-term because that sense of urgency in our bodies (the racing heartbeat, the churning stomach) goes away. But in the longer term, running from discomfort is hard because our comfort zone gets smaller and smaller. And if we avoid legitimate feelings (say, grief after losing someone), it tends to metastasise into neurosis, dysfunction, or bad habits. So while ‘choose your hard’ has become a bit of a motivational speaker cliché, it comes from a place of realism. Either avoidance or confrontation will be hard in their ways but the second path, the path of learning how to embrace discomfort, will lead to growth, courage, greater opportunities and emotional range and depth. An expanded life!
5. Seek out manageable discomfort
Think for a moment of your tolerance to discomfort as a muscle. The more we work our muscles in safe ways, the stronger they become, right? On the other hand, if we don’t use our muscles, they atrophy.
Our tolerance for discomfort and uncertainty (which are inescapable when pursuing all rewarding and meaningful things) is a muscle. So look for ways to build your discomfort muscle.
For example, if you’re incredibly shy but want to be able to do public speaking, could you start by recounting more jokes to groups of your friends, getting more comfortable with having all eyes on you? If you’re afraid to be noticed, could you start by wearing a bright colour? In practices like cognitive behavioural therapy, there are all sorts of tools to help you get more ‘comfortable being uncomfortable’.
To learn how to embrace discomfort, we need to actually seek it out. But the good news is we can start small.
6. Zoom out
When faced with something that triggers discomfort, our fight or flight response may be triggered, activating our sympathetic nervous system. Our pulse speeds up, our pupils may dilate – we feel a sense of urgency in our bodies that can seem all-encompassing. At this point, our focus can narrow, both physically and mentally, to the immediate ‘threat’ in front of us – which is often the discomfort itself! At this point, we probably just want the discomfort to stop, and we can forget why we are in the triggering situation to begin with. But instead of succumbing to the narrow focus of the immediate situation and ‘threat’, try to raise your consciousness to a more bird’s eye view (you might even wish to visualise this). What is the broader focus, the bigger meaning, the deeper purpose, the more long-term goal here? Yes you feel uncomfortable now, but what do you stand to gain by holding your ground and facing the fear? When have you faced adversity in the past and triumphed? How did you feel when you were on the other side?
7. Ground yourself
If you’re an anxious person, a great way to learn how to embrace discomfort is to practise some effective grounding techniques. These can help to steady you in the present moment when discomfort triggers your fight or flight response and you start to panic or dissociate. These kinds of grounding techniques are about getting you back into the time and space you are in now. For example you might try the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique:
Take a look around. Identify 5 things that you can see. Touch four things around you. Notice three things that you can hear (perhaps the sound of the birds, a car engine, someone on the phone on the street). Name two smells around you (perhaps flowers, a duvet cover, or coffee). Identify one thing that you can taste.
In this way, you can come back into the present moment and back into your body. You’ve confronted the discomfort and withstood it. Well done, you!
8. Get therapy
An effective way to learn how to embrace discomfort is with an experienced therapist who employs evidence-based methods to help you grow. Remember, effective therapy is not just about identifying our fears, it’s about overcoming them. Yes, learning how to embrace discomfort can be hard at times, but effective therapy has its own tools and ‘cheat sheets’. And you’ll have an expert to walk the path with you as you grow and change into your best self.
If you’ve been struggling with the bogey man of discomfort, you don’t have to let it win. The London Psychiatry Centre is home to some of the UK’s finest therapists and mental health experts. We can offer video or telephone consultations from anywhere in the UK. To find out how we can help, get in touch today:
