The better you get at avoiding the things you don’t want to experience—things like uncertainty, risk, or conflict, for example—the less tolerance you have for them.
The less tolerance you have for discomfort, the more susceptible you are to being discomfited. By setting yourself up to be more sensitive to discomfort, you’re less able to respond to it when it does arise. Deep down, you know it’s bound to arise sooner or later, in spite of your best efforts to prevent it. And that awareness often leads to worry or stress: discomfort about potential sources of discomfort.
In addition, the process of trying to avoid discomfort leads to a diminished sense of personal agency: you effectively disempower yourself. You also significantly shrink your playing field and your possibilities by creating unnecessary constraints. You put yourself inside your own continually shrinking box.
Even worse, from the perspective of living a satisfying and meaningful life and making a difference in the world, your focus is entirely on you. But that focus of attention isn’t positive or productive. It doesn’t help you identify what you want because it’s focused on what you don’t want. It doesn’t lead to greater self-awareness or self-reflection. It doesn’t improve your ability to regulate your emotional state. It doesn’t even make you feel a whole lot better.
Red Alert! Danger Ahead, Captain!
Eventually, your desire to avoid experiencing certain emotions turns into a need to avoid them. Your brain starts to see discomfort as an actual threat to your survival.
Shields Up!
It becomes hyper-aware, continually scanning you and your environment in order to warn you of any potential instance of discomfort. At that point, you are no longer avoiding discomfort; you are being run by trying to avoid it. Discomfort has you. That may sound extreme. Unfortunately it’s neither extreme nor uncommon.
Changing the status quo requires identifying juicy desired outcomes. Pursuing juicy desired outcomes involves stepping into the uncertainty known as liminal space, which automatically includes the potential for risk, conflict, and many other forms of discomfort. That’s because possibility and uncertainty are mutually INclusive: you can’t have one without the other.
If you’re unwilling to be disturbed or discomfited now in order to get something you really want later, you’re stuck with your current status quo—no matter how dissatisfied with it you may be—and at the effect of your circumstances. The only change you will experience is change that comes from the outside, change that happens to you, which is of course a significant source of potential discomfort (which you are less and less prepared to respond to effectively).
Call it a treadmill; call it a hamster wheel; call it a vicious cycle. Whatever you call it, it’s a system that involves exerting a lot of effort, energy, and attention to keep you from stopping, getting off, or striking out in a different direction. Striving to avoid discomfort is one of the things that keep you stuck in place.
Surfing Discomfort
The counterintuitive way to get the upper hand on discomfort is not to avoid it but to learn to tolerate it and accept it as part of the process of identifying and pursuing what you really want.
You might even consider welcoming it or actively seeking it out. The greater tolerance you have for discomfort, the less power it will have over you and the less susceptible you will be to it.
Remember that transformational change itself is a major disturbance. If that’s what you’re after, you can count on experiencing some surprises along the way, both pleasant and not-so-pleasant. You can also count on the fact that liminal space will not be comfortable.
But do you really want to be defeated—or admit defeat before you even begin—just so you can try to avoid discomfort? What a sad, unsatisfying, and uninspiring epitaph that would be!