Taming our Pain
Discomfort is the currency of improvement.
Choosing pain makes it bearable. It loses its power to hurt you. You become its master not victim. Pain is coming anyway. Don’t get a shield. Get a saddle. Tame it.
Derek Sivers
We spend our lives avoiding pain.
Every decision and every action is designed to dodge discomfort. We evolved to avoid pain to stay alive, but avoiding the pain of the 21st century is no longer necessary.
In fact, it does more harm than good.
When we live in constant avoidance of pain, pain runs our lives. Our ancestors played defense against pain so they didn’t starve or freeze to death, but when pain runs our lives today, we’re merely playing defense against discomfort and inconvenience.
The worst part is the more we try to avoid pain, the more severe it is when it finally catches up to us.
No matter how hard we try pain can’t be avoided, but if we choose to embrace it, it loses its power over us.
Cost of Avoidance
When we avoid pain, we skip opportunities that might be uncomfortable, we shy away from challenging conversations, and we procrastinate on projects that seem daunting.
In the short term, we’re saving ourselves from discomfort and failure, but in the long term, we’re robbing ourselves of opportunity and making the pain we endure more severe.
When we spend our energy hiding from anything that threatens our comfort zone we give pain an enormous amount of power.
It becomes a looming force that inevitably breaks through our defenses. Because we've spent so much energy running away from it, when it finally catches up to us, it feels unbearable and debilitating.
Avoiding pain doesn’t save us from it; it only delays it, making it that much worse when it arrives.
Taming Pain
Despite our tendency to avoid pain, we know it’s necessary.
Without pain, there is no progress, no growth, nothing worthwhile.
Instead of letting our fear of pain control us, we should embrace it. Instead of using our energy to avoid it, we should use our energy to live with it and learn to manage it.
If we embrace pain we create a huge advantage for ourselves: we become more resilient and more capable of enduring the hard things that make us better.
It becomes a cost of progress—an unavoidable price we willingly pay for growth. Discomfort is the currency of improvement.
We can choose to embrace pain, diminish its impact, and progress forward or we can choose to avoid pain, strengthen its consequences, and be held back.
When we reframe pain not as a consequence to avoid, but as a sign of growth, it becomes our ally. The more we embrace it, the more manageable it becomes. As our comfort with discomfort grows, so do our opportunities to become a bit better each day.
Prompts
What type of pain are you most uncomfortable with?
In which area of your life do you have an above-average pain tolerance?
Where do you need to embrace pain and how will you do it?
Deep Dive
A wonderfully contradictory little book examining the value of embracing opposing philosophies.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.
Kevin