The Power of Pain

Books Referenced

Habits of a Happy Brain - Loretta Breuning

Discomfort can drive you or crush you depending on your relationship with it.

When we feel pain or discomfort, we react in one of two ways, both of which involve taking action.

The first option is to hide and escape the discomfort.

But this reaction often holds us back and keeps us stuck in our current situation.

The second option is to rise and overcome the pain.

This response is the one that pushes us through fear and to new heights.

Of our two options only one helps us perform better, but it can be difficult to face our fear and step toward pain.

In this article I’ll share with you how to change your perspective on discomfort, embrace it, and leverage it to enhance your performance.

Varieties of Pain

Pain and discomfort come in many forms.

(Side note: I will use pain and discomfort interchangeably. For our purposes, they are one in the same and are just on either end of the intensity spectrum.)

Broadly speaking, there are two types of pain we experience:

The first is physical pain.

This any discomfort that comes from physical sensations, whether it be a small rock in your shoe, to stubbing a toe or breaking a bone. I would also qualify hunger and thirst as types of physical pain.

The second form of pain is mental.

Mental discomfort can show up as anxiety, stress, worry, fear, etc.

Both forms of pain can hold us back.

For example, avoiding the physical pain of pushing yourself in the gym will limit your physical development.

As the saying goes, “no pain, no gain.”

And this is also true for our mental development.

Learning new skills is hard and frustrating. Frustration is mental discomfort. In order to learn and hone skills, we have to push past the frustration and give our minds quality reps.

It has been said before and is worth repeating: do hard things. When we do hard things, we get a lot of benefits:

• We step outside our comfort zone. All growth happens outside the comfort zone.
• We discover what we are capable of.
• We develop discipline.

Don’t all of these sound great?

Well, if the results of pushing past discomfort are all great, why don’t more people do it? And how can you do more of it?

We will get to that…

But before we can talk about how to lean into discomfort, we first need to talk about why we avoid it.

The answer is actually quite simple.

It is because we are hard-wired to avoid it.

Avoiding Pain

We are wired to survive.

That means we know how to avoid things that might kill us.

That sounds great, right? People wound not survive very long if they went around picking up every snake they ever saw.

Just as we have happy chemicals in our brains (Like dopamine and serotonin) to push us toward rewarding behavior, we have unhappy chemicals which help us avoid threats.

Loretta Breuning writes in her book Habits of a Happy Brain, “Unhappy chemicals are nature’s security alarm.”

When we recognize a threat to our survival, our brain kicks off a hormone cascade which eventually releases cortisol.

Cortisol and its pre-release hormones, paired with our fight or flight hormones, are what create the feelings of stress, fear, and anxiety.

So, imagine you are hiking in the Washington Cascades, alone, and sasquatch jumps out of the bushes and screams at you.

Your brain detects this as a threat and reacts by triggering the fight or flight response as well as the cortisol cascade.

We are immediately moved to action, feel fear, and sprint away.

OR… if you were backed against a wall, you might step up to fight.

Remember, these are our two options:

• Escape the pain by running away
• Overcome the pain by facing what is in front of you and handling it.

I use the sasquatch example because it is unrealistic.

In reality, we face pain daily. And that pain is largely influenced by our perceptions.

Pain and Perceptions

Have you ever needed to have a difficult conversation with someone, but you avoided it because you were afraid of how it was going to go?

If you are like most people, you probably told yourself a story that the other person was going to overreact and say something hurtful… Or some other version of an exaggerated response.

But what happened when you had the conversation? Most of the time, the actual conversation goes way better than we imagined.

The pain… the stress… the fear that stemmed from the conversation was all in our head.

Pity.

Imagine if you just skipped the imagination and got right to the conversation… We would realize that our imagination is an enemy that exaggerates the pain we might feel.

We feel a stressor, or anxiety, or pressure and we blow it out of proportion.

This is a tragedy, and we need to overcome it if we want to perform better.

Because at the end of the day, pressure (or stress) actually helps us perform at a higher level.

Stress is a Performance Enhancer

Have you ever heard of Yerkes-Dodson Law?

It is a psychological principle that describes the relationship between arousal and performance.

Formulated by psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson in 1908, the law states that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a certain point.

When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases. This relationship is often illustrated as an inverted U-shaped curve.

Remember, stress (or the perception of a threat) primes our body for action with a hormonal cocktail which includes adrenaline and cortisol. Our brains adjust our dopamine and serotonin levels so we can focus. Stress is meant to move us to action.

With only small amounts of stress, there is not enough physiological change to impact our performance.

And with too much stress, our system is overloaded.

There is a goldilocks zone of stress where our performance is elevated.

Remember how we said that our minds are guilty of exaggerating perceived threats?

Just as our minds are the culprits in creating pain, they are also the solution in leveraging stress to enhance our performance.

Perceptions and Performance

Again, when you feel stress or anxiety, you are primed for action.

Remember this the next time you feel your stress response kick in.

The next time you think about escaping or avoiding an uncomfortable situation, just remember that you are also wasting the opportunity to take action at a higher performance level than in a neutral state.

There is power in discomfort. It helps you perform better.

Here are some steps you can take to acknowledge your discomfort and step out of the comfort zone so you can grow.

First, acknowledge your perceived pain.

The next time you feel hesitant to do something due to fear, take a moment to simply call out the story you are telling yourself.

This must be a conscious effort.

Pause. Name your feelings. Then dig deeper to identify the story you are telling yourself.

For example, if you are avoiding a difficult conversation, acknowledge that you are feeling fear. Then speak out loud or write down the story you are telling yourself.

“I am worried how the other person is going to respond.”

“I’m afraid they are going to overreact.”

Whatever your story is, own it.

In this moment, you have created clarity. In this process of verbalizing or writing down your internal stories, you may immediately recognize that you are overreacting. If you don’t recognize this, the ask yourself the question, “where am I exaggerating my story?”

And again, own it.

After you have acknowledged your perceived pain, then consider your possible actions.

The goal here is to remove the emotions from the equation, get to neutral thinking, and rationally consider how to move forward.

The stress is OK.. the negative emotions are not. Cut them out by thinking rationally.

At this stage, this is your opportunity to acknowledge the opportunity in front of you.

You are facing fear, reframing it, and getting ready to take action. At this point, recognize the growth that will occur once you get through this.

Third: get some. Get after it. Go take action right now with the actions you have identified.

With your enhanced stress hormones, you will be ready to pounce.

After you take action, take time to reflect on how you did.

What worked? What didn’t? What mistakes did you make? If you had to do it again, what would you do differently? What would you do the same?

And there you go. You just leveraged the power of discomfort to take action and grow.

The Wrap Up

Discomfort is just a sign that you are being called to become more.

Your comfort zone is where your skills go to die.

We only grow when we step out of the comfort zone.

First, acknowledge your feelings and OWN the stories you are telling yourself.

Second, consider the actions you could take.

Third, take action.

When you do this, you don’t let stress, fear, and anxiety overtake you. You own it and act in spite of that fear.

Also, while the level of stress we feel is due to our perceptions, the physiological response of stress is one that primes us for action and performance (thank you, Yerkes-Dodson Law).

When you take action in a stressed state, you can leverage it for improved performance.

Don’t let stress take you, you my friends.

Embrace it.

Own it.

And crush it.

I’m rooting for you.

Clark