It’s part of human nature to want to avoid suffering. This is why most people grab an aspirin at the first sign of a headache, or change the subject when a difficult subject is broached.
The problem with running to alleviate discomfort as soon as it appears, however, is that we don’t develop much-needed coping skills or the resilience to handle challenging situations.
Since we’re all going to deal with difficult thoughts, feelings, and choices at some point in life, here are some effective methods to help you work through them rather than running from them when they appear.
How to learn to sit with discomfort instead of running from it:
1. Remove automatic distractions.
People have long distracted themselves with things in order to avoid feeling discomfort. Those distractions often include digital items, books, movies, music, crafts, or gossip down at the local tavern.
They turn to such things to distract themselves from the pain of emotions that threaten to overwhelm them, or to procrastinate about making important decisions or choices that they’d prefer to avoid indefinitely.
If you want to learn how to sit with discomfort instead of running from it, the first thing to do is to eliminate the crutches you usually use to distract yourself.
For example, if you find yourself reaching for your phone whenever you feel anxious or sad, leave it in another room and only allow yourself to check it a few times a day. Or if you’re prone to drowning out your thoughts with the TV, move the remote out of sight.
The idea is to remove those automatic distractions that you reach for, so that you have to make an active choice about whether to pursue them.
Sometimes, that can be enough to allow you to make a more conscious choice about whether to avoid or sit with what you’re experiencing.
2. Practice delaying gratification.
One of the best ways you can build your tolerance for discomfort is to learn how to wait.
It’s something many of us struggle with in this modern era where virtually everything is available on demand, and it has far-reaching consequences for our ability to sit with difficult thoughts, feelings, and choices.
You’ve probably heard of the famous “Stanford Marshmallow Test.” In the 1960s and 70s, Stanford University performed an experiment where a child (usually aged 3 to 5) was seated alone at a table with a single marshmallow on it.
The child was told that if they could wait 15 minutes to eat the treat, they’d be rewarded with another one, so they could enjoy two. Only around 30% of kids made it to the 15-minute mark.
Crucially, the ones who were able to delay their gratification were tracked for several years, and it turned out that they had higher SAT scores, healthier weight and general health, better stress management, and overall life success than their peers.
Now, of course, some people find it harder to control their impulses than others, often for valid neurological reasons, but if you can learn to delay gratification, or find strategies to help you do so, it can pay dividends.
Not only does it help you to tolerate discomfort, but it can help you to regulate your emotions rather than being a slave to them
One way I like to do this is to envision myself as a mental gate warden who looks at sensations like “I’m cold”, “I’m hungry”, etc., and says: “That’s fine: I will respond to this when I choose to, not react blindly to a demand.”
If you can do so, you can sharpen your will and strengthen your resolve instead of rushing to alleviate discomfort as soon as it arises.
3. Seek out discomfort within reasonable parameters.
When I was much younger, I really wanted to spend more time outside so I could experience living closer to nature. Of course, I encountered a very rude awakening when I was sleeping on the earth with nothing but a sleeping bag.
I found it nearly impossible to sleep because it was very cold and uncomfortable, but I stuck with it nonetheless, and now I can sleep on hard, cold ground quite easily.
This isn’t a recommendation for you to do the same, of course. Always take a reasoned assessment of your health and capabilities before seeking out specific types of discomfort.
That said, even if your scope is limited, seek to push yourself and conquer what discomfort you can.
For example, your heart may not be up to a prolonged Wim Hof-style ice bath, but it should be safe for you to challenge yourself and see how long you can hold an ice cube in your bare hand. Or you may be able to challenge yourself to eat bland food for 3 days in a row.
You know yourself best, and you need to ensure whatever you do is safe for you, specifically, but the idea is to seek out a little discomfort so that you can learn to tolerate it under controlled conditions.
4. Set aside time for measured reflection.
Difficult thoughts and emotions aren’t fun to deal with, so many people choose to avoid them whenever possible. This doesn’t allow you to work through and transcend them, however, and they usually come back to bite you when you least want them to.
To avoid that happening, guided self-reflection can allow you to process your feelings and thoughts in a measured way.
Set an intention that every time you encounter a thought or memory that you recoil from, you will observe how you feel and what it means to you instead of shutting it down.
Try to be detached about this, and analyze how the past experience affected you and how your responses to it affected others. If you tend to end up in unproductive thought spirals, you might find journaling helps to break the loops.
By doing this, if you encounter a similar situation in the future, you’ll be able to respond by making better choices.
No one likes to rehash difficult experiences, but our choices going forward are what determine whether we let them crush us or become our greatest teachers.
5. Use humor to transcend discomfort instead of trying to escape it.
One of the most effective ways to become more adept at sitting with discomfort is to use gentle humor to deal with it.
If you can find humor in the situation somehow, it takes the sting out of it. This is as effective for dental appointments as it is for processing a spectacular social faux pas or working through a difficult choice that needs to be made.
You’ve probably noticed that some people use dark humor to deal with death or serious health challenges, or make self-deprecating jokes when they misstep somehow.
As long as it’s not used to completely deny what’s going on, a little humor can allow a person to accept a situation while choosing not to be broken by it.
6. Keep things in perspective by observing the discomfort dispassionately.
Just like the weather, everything passes in its own time.
When you’re enjoying a sunny day at the beach and a cloud obscures the sunshine for a moment, it’s unlikely that you’d try to take action to move it aside.
That would be futile, of course, as it’s too far away to affect. So you simply sit tight and wait for the wind to blow it away. And before you know it, the sun is shining back down on you again.
The same goes for discomfort.
Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Chödrön once said: “Remember that you are the sky. Everything else is just weather.”
This is a good reminder that your true self is as vast and open as the sky, while your feelings, thoughts, and life experiences are like clouds that are just passing through your mind without affecting who you are at the core of your being.
By watching your emotions rather than fighting them — and this includes discomfort — they stop having power over you, therefore causing you far less distress.
7. Make discomfort into a game.
When you experience discomfort, try to turn it into some kind of game rather than resisting it.
For example, a friend of mine was with his dad in Arizona a while back, and they were having a brutal time of it. The air conditioning in their car was broken, so on a whim, they decided to crank the heat on full blast to see how long they could stand it.
When they turned it back off again, the temperature that they had previously experienced was a relief compared to the blazing inferno they’d inflicted upon themselves.
(Note: Please don’t actually do this, as you’ll likely end up with heatstroke.)
The takeaway from this is that you don’t have to be as foolhardy as those two were, but instead try to make a game out of whatever discomfort you’re experiencing. For example, by challenging yourself to sit with an awkward feeling for 60 seconds and then seeing if you beat your own time the next day.
If you can do so, you’ll strengthen your mind and your will through this challenging experience, whilst having a little fun with it at the same time.
8. Lean into the reality of the discomfort instead of being frightened off by your assumptions about it.
By stepping into whatever you fear, or leaning into whatever you think is going to make you uncomfortable, you often realize that your expectation or anticipation was far worse than the reality of the situation.
You may be facing a difficult choice that you have to make, and feel like it’s a monumental issue that’s going to turn your world upside down — especially when you voice it to others.
When it actually happens, however, you realize that the illusion of what you were trying to avoid was much bigger and scarier than the reality of the situation. It wasn’t the thing itself that was causing the discomfort, but your expectations of it.
By embracing and facing reality in all its messy detail, and allowing yourself to be open and vulnerable to it, the fear and discomfort stop having any power over you.
Final thoughts…
It’s a normal, natural human instinct to bring our shields up, distract ourselves, or do everything we can to run away from feelings that cause us discomfort or distress.
That said, real personal growth only occurs when we stop running away and choose to be present and sit with discomfort instead.
Challenging emotions are clear signs for us to lean into discomfort rather than running from it: they show us where we’re stuck and give us the opportunity to push through the muck and step into our power instead.
