Seeking Discomfort to Seek Comfort
I know it’s going to sound counterintuitive, but you should try to seek discomfort. Doing hard things every day actually makes your life easier. I know how it’s sounds, but it’s true.
Pursuing experiences that challenge you actually generate positive experiences in the long run compared to seeking comfortable and pleasurable experiences.
Fair warning — I’ve started working out since March, so a couple of my examples will be related to that.
For example — Working out regularly is hard, making time for a workout is even challenging, and don’t even start me on eating healthy. But if you do seek these tough experiences- you not only get an incredible physique, a healthy and fit body but a whole lot of confidence, which will serve you in the long run. Now compare this to seeking comfortable experiences- staying in your cozy bedsheet instead of sweating it in the gym and eating that pizza you could have avoided. Imagine your long term scenario- I don’t even need to describe it.
It is valid for everything. Want only to avoid fights in your relationship to experience the good moments? You will probably lack trust and respect in that relation. But on the other hand, the pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships.
To try to avoid pain is the best way to receive pain. Again, I know it’s counterintuitive. But what if you stopped thinking about pain and started to seek discomfort.
Hell think about it- if you’re able to not give a shit about pain- you’re practically unstoppable. And by pain, I don’t just mean physical pain. Pain is failure and rejection and loss. No matter what you do, life is a series of problems and challenges. It is irrespective of your situation. Rich people have rich people problems, and poor people have poor people problems. People without friends suffer because they have no friends, and people with friends suffer because of their friends. You know it makes sense, even if it sounds weird.
Conclusion:
So what you can do is to Choose your problems and Solve them. Happiness comes from solving problems.
Think about the last challenge that you faced and what you felt at that time. Probably stress and anxiety about how you’re going to do it, and if you can even do it in the first place. Now think about when you did complete it.
You probably felt an incredible feeling of joy and pride. Our mind is wired that way- we get a release of dopamine by solving problems and not running away from them — unless running away is the solution (I’ll talk about it some other time).
Solving problems is not enough — you also need to know what problem to solve. See, problems don’t get erased- that’s a rule. But you can always exchange them. Choose better problems in a pool of problems is the key.
I got obese and wanted to solve my health problem. But this created new problems — going to the gym and following a routine, eating healthy, and skipping momos. But these were better problems than being obese and having the health problems associated with it.
As previously mentioned- the key to being happy is solving problems. Not any problems but better problems that you choose.
