We spend an enormous amount of time making ourselves comfortable. We heat our homes when we’re cold, cool them when we’re hot. We take tablets when something hurts, and reach for our phones when we’re bored.
If something leads to anxiety, discomfort, or unhappiness, our learned reaction is to try to remove the feeling.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be comfortable. The problem comes when we start believing that being uncomfortable means something is wrong.
Life is uncomfortable at times.
Additionally, relationships can be uncomfortable, and learning something new can be too.
Being told something we don’t want to hear is a source of discomfort.
Apologising, admitting we were wrong, waiting for something we want, or having a difficult conversation.
One of the most important skills is not avoiding it, but learning to deal with it.
I wonder if our understandable desire to protect ourselves and others from distress is reasonable. Have we begun to confuse discomfort with harm? They are not the same thing. A child who loses a game may be disappointed, but disappointment isn’t harmful. A teenager who isn’t invited to a party may feel rejected, but removing every possibility of rejection won’t prepare them for adult life. An employee receiving respectful feedback may feel uncomfortable, but that feedback may be exactly what helps them grow. The same applies to relationships.
If my partner says something I disagree with, I don’t have to convince them they’re wrong.
Additionally, if they are unhappy with something I’ve done, I don’t have to defend myself before I’ve listened.
I can tolerate the discomfort long enough to become curious.
I can ask, “Tell me more. Why is this important to you?”.
That’s a very different response from trying to erase the distress.
We have far more control over our own behaviour than we have over the world around us.
We can’t guarantee people will like us, agree with us, include us, or behave as we want.
Thus, we can’t arrange life so that we never experience disappointment, frustration, sadness or uncertainty.
What we can do is learn how to respond to those experiences.
Confidence and resilience don’t usually develop before we face something difficult, they develop because we face it. Each time we experience discomfort and discover that we can manage it, we add another little piece of evidence that says, “I can handle this.”
This is particularly important for parents. Moreover, our instinct can be to rescue our children when they are struggling.
Sometimes they genuinely need our help. But often the greatest gift we can give them is our confidence that they can work through the difficulty themselves.
Additionally, we can support without rescuing.
However, the goal isn’t to deliberately make life difficult. Nor is it to ignore genuine distress or harm.
It is simply to recognise that an uncomfortable feeling isn’t necessarily an emergency. Sometimes discomfort is simply the feeling of growing.
Thus, instead of always asking, ‘How can I make this feeling go away?’ A more useful question might be: ‘What can I learn about myself from how I choose to deal with it?”