Most of us seem to have a low tolerance for discomfort. You have grown to feel that you shouldn’t have to endure any emotional anguish. As a result, any circumstance that can cause uneasy feelings is now perceived as overwhelming, abnormal, and needing to be corrected.
What is discomfort?
Being uncomfortable is feeling unpleasant, awkward, and unhappy about a particular disposition. You assume something is wrong when you are forced outside of your comfort zone, experience anything other than happiness, or need to make an effort to feel okay.
In general, it is assumed that if you feel uncomfortable, you are being harmed and that someone else is typically to blame. So you’ve developed the idea that anything that makes you think of difficulties or unhappiness needs to be corrected immediately so that you never have to feel that way again.
You need to be able to feel uncomfortable sometimes
One of the most significant experiences you have as a human is discomfort. By experiencing painful circumstances, you are addressing an emotion that, although not simple or enjoyable, is essential to your well-being. Life is uncomfortable, to put it as simply as possible. Rejecting that fundamental fact will only increase your discomfort.
Some discomfort will occur no matter how efficiently you manage your life. Therefore, situations that make you uncomfortable, alienated, unprepared, or incompetent are always present. The misguided conviction that you can’t handle suffering or that it will ruin you grows stronger the more you want to shield yourself from it. As a result, you are less equipped to handle it when it does occur, which is frequently in life.
Humans are capable of enduring significant discomfort
You can endure discomfort and remain healthy in the midst of it. It will constrain you less as you become accustomed to it — and more comfortable with it. In addition, you’ll get better at handling it.
Your emotional resilience is being destroyed by your attempts to make the discomfort disappear and construct a life in which pain never occurs. This circumstance also undermines your confidence in yourself, your capacity to manage challenging emotions, and your understanding that such experiences are transient.
Because experiencing discomfort will always be a part of your life, you need to be able to control your emotions. All endeavors requiring new challenges involve suffering, whether learning a new skill or developing your mind and body.
Instead of perceiving this common, unavoidable human experience as a problem, you would be better served learning to accept discomfort rather than striving to remove, lessen, or change any encounter that might set it off. Instead of denouncing discomfort, you should develop and hone the tools necessary to handle it with more skill, awareness, and self-compassion.
You start learning to manage discomfort once it is experienced
In trying times, you learn the abilities required to look after yourself and return to normal. One of the most significant lessons you can ever learn is how to develop compassion and empathy for yourself.
The ability to develop, progress, and grow stronger and more resilient comes from experiencing discomfort. Uncomfortable situations have the potential to transform you and propel your growth, and it brings out your enormous capacity for coping with and surviving them.
The problem isn’t discomfort. You are much more resilient than you give yourself credit for, and uncomfortableness only makes you more resilient. Even if you never leave the house, you must be able to deal with difficult emotions if you want to survive in this world.
Consider leaning into your discomfort and perhaps even looking forward to it the next time you feel uneasy or are going to enter a setting where this feeling may be generated. Consider the experience a test you can pass without altering or improving it.
The more comfortable you are with discomfort, the better equipped you are for whatever life unfolds in front of you.
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