Personal Experiment 3: Learning to be Comfortable with Discomfort (Physical Pain Edition)

Xue Zing
6 min readJul 6, 2021
Image by Nikko Macaspac from Unsplash

I was exposed to this phrase one day back around my university days while reading and fumbling around the Internet.

The concept was a weird one.

Learning how to deal with discomfort.

Just like how firemen train for emergency situations, we can condition and learn how we react to uncomfortable situations.

I realized that in the future, there will definitely be some parts of life that will cause me discomfort, whether that be little or great.

I figured I might as well start preparing for it now.

I combined this idea with another concept called exposure therapy, which basically was used by people to overcome their phobias via incremental exposures to the fear.

I figured I could learn it by exposing myself to incremental stages of discomfort.

Thus, began another experiment of mine.

Goal setting

This experiment was rather vague. It was hard to measure discomfort.

I decided to narrow down discomfort to just pain, most people are uncomfortable with the slightest pain, especially if they expect it.

--

--

Xue Zing
Xue Zing

Written by Xue Zing

Writing about thought provokers that go against conventional self-help