Learning To Stay: Mindful Strategies For Facing Discomfort
“Discomfort is the price of admission for a meaningful life.”
Unpopular opinion, but if you think about it, quite true.
Almost everything worthwhile in life comes after some sort of effort: Starting something new requires handling uncertainty, building a business requires perseverance through failures, leading a team requires facing constant challenges, raising children requires accepting to have your heart live outside of your body permanently (read that again!)
However, in life and at work, many of us, most of the time, tend to avoid discomfort. Huge industries have been built around our profound desire to rid ourselves from pain, whether physical or (perhaps even more importantly) emotional. Anything to numb the pain - alcohol, smoking, food, social media, drugs.
And there are other, more subtle ways we try to escape:
Keeping ourselves constantly busy
Working too much to avoid our emotions
Pretending we can't hear our internal voice that screams “This is not alright”
Avoiding what needs to be dealt with
Taking the easy way out
Not pushing ourselves hard enough
Changing our plans to what's easier
Maybe discomfort is not a problem to avoid, but a signal that some boundary has been crossed or that we're on the edge of creating something that matters.
Below are some strategies, rooted in mindfulness practice, that help when discomfort hits, in leadership and in our personal lives:
Notice your escape routes
Do you change the subject? Comfort yourself with food or doomscrolling? Delay the meeting? Sugarcoat the message? The clearer you become on what your habitual ways to escape are, the easier it will get to catch yourself and adjust course.
Pause and breath
A single breath before speaking, handing a difficult situation or making a hard decision to push through, can be the difference between a reactive comment and a thoughtful one. Just one conscious breath has the power to calibrate the nervous system and allow you to operate with your wise, evolved brain (instead of the primitive one that perceives any difficulty as a threat).
Name it to tame it
“I’m feeling anxious”. “This is uncomfortable”. Naming emotions helps your nervous system settle, so you're not ruled by it.
Stay
Discomfort often makes us disconnect, rushing, checking out, avoiding eye contact or literally fleeing the room. Try staying present with the discomfort and softening your body consciously by relaxing your tense muscles on the face and body.
Diamonds are formed under extreme pressure. Perhaps this is proof that something as valuable and beautiful can emerge from what feels challenging.