It’s huckleberry season in the Cascades, which means hikers like me are gorging themselves on an overabundance of tasty berries. But these delicious treats aren’t available to just anyone. They’re not near the parking lot of any trailhead. The best berries grow at elevations of around 5,000 feet, so you have to earn them with time, sweat, and discomfort. As is often the case in life, pain is the price of admission.
Many of the best things in life can only be acquired through discomfort. Whether you’re pursuing a university diploma, the view from the top of a mountain, a thriving business, a music career, or having children, you’ll have to deal with pain, annoyance, and hard work to get what you want. This is why I believe that training your ability to tolerate discomfort is a critical part of becoming better.
Discomfort training can come in a variety of forms, and you’re probably already engaged in several. When viewed as mental training, mundane activities like going to the gym, waiting in traffic, or dealing with the noisy construction across the street become more tolerable and genuinely beneficial to your mental toughness. This week, try recognizing all the times life serves up opportunities to train your capacity for discomfort, and see if that helps you view them in a more positive light.
You can also deliberately choose to put yourself through discomfort for the purpose of training. The most common example is taking cold showers. A cold shower is uncomfortable, especially in the winter, especially if you live somewhere where the tap water is cold. You almost never feel like doing it. But when you turn that knob and blast yourself with cold water and then stand there taking it, you’re proving to yourself, through self-perception, that you are perfectly capable of doing things you don’t feel like doing. You are perfectly capable of handling discomfort.
Many people report that a cold shower is like a warm-up exercise for their willpower muscle. Later in the day, when they have something important to do that they’re tempted to procrastinate on, they choose the uncomfortable option: doing the work. Because they’ve already proven to themselves that they can handle one type of discomfort – blasting themselves with cold water – they have less difficulty facing other, more important types of discomfort.
Another example is boredom. The ability to handle boredom is vital for many things, ranging from finishing creative projects to staying sane in a 40-minute TSA line. And it’s an ability that is increasingly absent in modern humans. In order to avoid the discomfort of being bored, we routinely fill every little gap in our days with digital stimulation. So if boredom makes you uncomfortable, deliberately train up your ability to handle it by spending more time in airplane mode, spending less time watching shows and scrolling through social media, and making more time for silence. Add this to the list of benefits of meditating: It forces you to just sit there doing nothing, which trains your brain to handle boredom better. After a year of meditating, I realized that I was much better at tolerating boredom and, as a result, I was much more patient.
Life will never cease to serve up discomfort, and the things we want most will always require that we pay a price in pain or struggle or irritation, so deliberately training your capacity to handle discomfort is a wise thing to do.