🔦 Why You Need to Seek Discomfort
The psychological side of "no pain, no gain"
Personal growth is an essential part of living a fulfilling life. Purpose and progress come from learning more, experiencing more, and achieving more. It’s unpleasant to feel as though you’re stuck at a plateau and losing your sense of ambition or motivation.
But nobody said growth is easy. Anxiety and discomfort are a very natural part of testing yourself, and testing yourself is a very natural part of growth. So whenever you’re faced with a challenge that might help you take a step up in life—perhaps studying a difficult topic, performing in front of an audience, or taking a major career leap—you’ll occasionally find yourself in the throes of negative emotion.
In July 2021, I wrote about the counterproductive nature of attempting to avoid or suppress negative emotions. The more you try to push them away, the more they seem to invade your mind and scare you away from challenges. As I explained at the time, developing a sense of acceptance and mindfulness around uncomfortable feelings is one way to make them feel more comfortable. But newly published research is suggesting a more direct and extreme approach may be just as effective: actively seeking out discomfort as the goal.
🔌 The productive power of seeking discomfort
In a paper published in March 2022, researchers investigated what would happen if they set people an unusual goal during several different tasks: “go out there and do things that make you feel uncomfortable”.
For their first experiment, they recruited students at a world-renowned improv comedy school based in Chicago—a theatre troupe known as The Second City. In total, 557 people from 55 beginner classes agreed to take part in the study. They assigned each student to one of two conditions, and gave each of them a specific set of instructions:
Experimental “seek discomfort” condition: “Your goal for the next exercise is to feel awkward and uncomfortable. Feeling uncomfortable is a sign that the exercise is working… your goal is to push past your comfort zone and put yourself in situations that make you feel awkward and uncomfortable.”
Control condition: “Your goal for the next exercise is to feel yourself developing new skills. Developing new skills is a sign that the exercise is working… your goal is to push yourself to develop new skills and feel yourself improving.”
The main difference between the two conditions was that the experimental group were explicitly asked to find and embrace moments of discomfort. If they ever felt awkward or anxious during the improv class, that was a sign of success.
Researchers who were blinded to the conditions analyzed each participant’s behavior during a task known as the “Give Focus” exercise. This task required all students to stand frozen in a room, except for one designated person who could move around the room and improvise freely. That person could “keep the focus” as long as they pleased and could pass it on to another person whenever they felt like it. It’s a task that puts people right at the center of attention, and it can feel awkward and embarrassing for beginners.
The data showed that people in the experimental condition—those who were told to seek discomfort—spent significantly longer keeping focus than people in the control condition did. On average across several waves of the experiment, control participants showed off their improv skills for 8-9 seconds while experimental participants showed off their improv skills for 12-13 seconds.
According to researcher ratings, people who were told to seek discomfort were also confident enough to take more risks during the exercise. They were more likely to perform an unusual action and push behavioral boundaries while they had their brief moment in the spotlight. Perhaps most importantly, they also felt they achieved more personal growth from the exercise overall.
In another experiment, the researchers asked a group of 265 participants to complete a more topical task. Each participant had to study six news article summaries and rate how much they wanted to read the full articles. Three of those articles were related to innocuous topics like the finalists in a wildlife photography competition, while the other three were related to a recent trauma we’re all still trying to get over: COVID-19.
Similar to the previous study, people who were told to seek and embrace discomfort felt more motivated to improve their knowledge around COVID-19 (compared to a control group who were simply told to “learn what’s new”). The “seek discomfort” instructions made no difference to the more innocuous news topics since those articles produced no feelings of anxiety. The effect works when you’re trying to achieve something outside your comfort zone.
The researchers also tested whether they could boost people’s receptiveness to opposing political views. They asked a sample of almost 600 Americans for their political affiliations and then gave them the same “seek discomfort” or “learn what’s new” instructions from the previous experiment. After these instructions, they offered participants controversial opinion articles from the New York Times and Fox News and tested their openness to reading them.
Unsurprisingly, people reported feeling less comfortable about reading opinion pieces from opposing viewpoints. Importantly though, people who were tasked with seeking discomfort were more open to welcoming that discomfort and learning about conflicting opinions. It didn’t matter whether they were Democrats or Republicans; both sides were more willing to open themselves up to inflammatory opinions in order to better inform and strengthen their own beliefs.
Overall, across various experimental contexts, people benefited more from challenging exercises when they were prepared with a discomfort-seeking mindset. A simple shift in perspective can make all the difference between shying away from a challenge and investing in personal growth.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
Actively seek discomfort: When faced with a difficult task, start by telling yourself “my goal today is to feel awkwardness and embrace discomfort”. Some of life’s most crucial and rewarding challenges inevitably require you to overcome moments of fear and anxiety. Trying to prevent anxious situations from scaring you away is great. But it’s even better to actively chase down and grab those opportunities.
Use discomfort as a marker of progress: Discomfort and anxiety are very clear emotional signals, so if you’re seeking them out, you’ll know when you find them. If you’re seeking something less concrete such as “personal flourishing” or “skill development”, you might find it hard to notice smaller steps of progress along the way. A cardinal rule of good goal-setting is to make sure you select goals and metrics that make it easy to track incremental successes. A vague goal such as “build confidence for public speaking” is tough to measure and tough to achieve. A specific and tangible goal such as “get butterflies in my stomach by performing at the next open mic event” makes it obvious when you’re winning.
Find what makes you bristle: Finding what “makes you tick” is a good way to locate and commit to your passions. But finding what makes you anxious and irritated is a highly underrated exercise for expanding your knowledge and even understanding yourself better. When you listen to people you disagree with or study the details of a worrying world event, there’s a chance to widen the mental lens you see the world through. Why read about what you already know when you can read about what’s outside your current worldview?
💡 A final quote
“Men often make up in wrath what they want in reason.”
~ William R. Alger (1822-1905)
❤️ If you enjoyed this, please share it with a few friends. If you’re new here, sign up below or visit erman.substack.com
📬 I love to hear from readers. Leave a comment on this post or feel free to email me your questions.
👋 Until next time,
Erman Misirlisoy, PhD