I heard this uncredited quote today:
"A person's worth is strongly correlated with the number of uncomfortable conversations they are willing to have" and this quote made me think about discomfort. 1/?
"A person's worth is strongly correlated with the number of uncomfortable conversations they are willing to have" and this quote made me think about discomfort. 1/?
One lesson that life (and my excellent therapist) is teaching me at the moment is to nudge my thinking of experiences as good and bad and instead think in terms of comfort and discomfort. The distinction is subtle but incredibly powerful. 2/?
Bad is something that is wrong. Something that should be worked against, that should be removed. This is sometimes an appropriate way to think about a small number of things in your life, but I have tended to conflate this with discomfort. 3/?
Almost everything worthwhile has a significant amount of discomfort associated with it. We feel discomfort when we work hard on worthwhile things and when we grow as partners, engineers, team members,human beings etc. 4/?
My therapist has this exercise for me to willfully expose myself to small discomforts duting my everyday life and be very observant of the feeling - staying in it. The purpose is to exercise the mental muscle that allows you to deal with discomfort. 5/?
This, over time, allows you to move the feelings of discomfort from the category of "pain" into a more "neutral" category, allowing you to view the discomfort more as a neural console.warn() rather than a console.error(), or maybe even just a console.log(). 6/?
Discomfort is not to be fought. Neither is it an annoyinh wasp to be ignored. It is one of the many friends inside your head that wants the best for you, and that constantly spams you with advice, that is there for your consideration. 7/?
The advice not always useful, or constructive, but always well-meaning. Reframing discomfort as neutral information instead of an horrible alarm har enormous mood implications, as demonstrated by another exercise: 8/?
Try pinching your own arm as hard as you can. The pain is clear, but perfectly bearable. Now imagine being pinched at half that strength, but by someone else, and maybe even surprising you. Imagine that you had said "don't pinch me" and they then pinch you again anyway. 9/?
The lesson for me is that you should be extremely conservative with how many things you frame as "bad" because whenever you do, reality will feel slightly more wrong, and require your attention and energy to change it. 10/?
Life, especially a life fully lived, equals lots of discomfort, so make discomfort not your annoying cousin, but your friend and ally. 11/11
