Why Being Uncomfortable Is Good for You

As I closed in on the longest distance I have ever ran, my whole body tired and the entirety of my muscles seized up, I wondered – once again – why I’d put my body and mind through the wringer.

The sun had begun to set and the breeze had started to cool. The magic golden light that had danced through thick leaves to land on the damp blades of grass had all but faded. We had been running for close to 12 hours and I was ready to give up.

Not only could I barely move my heavy legs anymore but my mind was in a ditch, every tiny emotion threatening to flare up and erupt like the mightiest volcano. I hadn’t struggled this much for a long time, yet deep, deep down I was glad for it. I wouldn’t realise this until days later, removed far away enough from the event to fully appreciate the whole picture.

Sport, with all its mental and physical health benefits, is also an ideal vehicle for discomfort. This is, perhaps counterintuitively, one of its biggest benefits.

If you’re reading this, chances are you lead a relatively comfortable life. Sure, you’ll experience stress and anxiety from time to time, but you’ve met your basic human needs: you’ve got a place to sleep, food on your table, and a regular income.

Technological advances have brought comfort to almost all aspects of our life, which is great but comes with one big disadvantage. As our brains and self-preservation instincts encourage us to take the path of least resistance and find easier ways to lead our lives, our capacity to successfully deal with discomfort decreases and we become increasingly sensitive to anything that challenges us.

Being uncomfortable is not easy.

Yet some people actively seek this through sport: signing up for bigger races, events with longer distances, higher elevation, or more technical difficulty than what they’ve previously attempted.

It’s no mistake either; when I signed up to run the Devil’s Loop Backyard Ultra, a race with no end consisting of 6.66km loops starting every hour on the hour until you can’t go any longer, I knew it might not all be smooth sailing.

Why do we voluntarily challenge ourselves through sport and put ourselves in immense physical and mental discomfort?

The answer might lie somewhere in between the mere exposure effect (which has been used as a basis for exposure therapy) and affective habituation. The former establishes that repeated conscious exposure to a (neutral) stimulus improves our attitudes directed towards it, while the later states that exposure to extreme stimuli leads to these stimuli to be perceived as less extreme.

There is some evidence that repeated exposure leads to less intense psychological reactions to emotionally charged stimuli.  In other words, the intensity of a reaction decreases after multiple exposures to the same extreme stimulus.

In practical terms, this means that exposing yourself to situations that bring you discomfort at first will make similar situations in future feel more comfortable. Given that you have been exposed to a problem, you know how to handle it if it ever presents itself again in future instead of shying away from it.

To decrease the negative impact a situation might have on you, you need to expose yourself to it in a safe environment. Sport offers the perfect setup for facing discomfort. It is contained, it is safe, and it is within your control. If the extent of discomfort gets too bad, you know it’s your choice to be there, and you know you can always drop out.

You are choosing to put yourself in the path of discomfort. Unlike life, which can throw anything at you unexpectedly, it is your choice to participate and, as such, you have greater control over how you respond to adversity.

Additionally, chances are you’ll finish the experience on a high (you feel accomplished and might even get a medal), which is incredibly important towards our perception of an activity.

When the going gets tough, when every muscle in your body aches and your mind implores you to stop, you need to have at least an excuse of a reason to keep on going. Running for hours on end I have come to understand that I sign up for ultramarathons and races without end because I am looking to be challenged.

Ultramarathons offer me a meaningful way to feel and face discomfort.

The lessons learnt during gruelling endurance events are entirely transferrable to day-to-day life. When you’re presented with a situation that’s outside your comfort, you have the tools to handle it. “We’ve been here before,” you smile at the challenge like an old friend. You know you’ve mentally faced and overcome similar situations.

Once you’ve been there, any situation becomes less intimidating. You know what feeling vulnerable and being on the brink of giving up feels like, you know what to expect and, most importantly, you know how to respond to it.

Slowly, you gain mastery over your natural fear response and work out how to persevere in the face of adversity.

This means you can face future challenges head on, increasing your chances of working through them successfully. Controlled discomfort – whether you experience it during a long workout, a tough swim, or a hard run – offers invaluable learning experiences that are hard to replicate in similarly conductive environments.

Impressive feats of endurance can be more rewarding days or months down the line, when you’ve had time to process what you went through, look at the bigger picture, and understand how to transfer the lessons to day-to-day life.

Brad Stulberg writes about Steven Hayes’ work, a well-known clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Reno, Nevada, saying that “When you’re in pain, be it physical or emotional, you need not make it worse by resisting it. It’s better to accept the pain and commit to accomplishing your goals, and often that means carrying the pain with you.”

Exploring your limits, being uncomfortable, and studying your feelings as they appear makes similar situations easier to bear, dampening their intense effect on your persona.

“If you fight the pain, or freak out at its onset, that’s when you really suffer and tend to crumble,” Steve Magness, running coach at the University of Houston, told Stulberg. “But if you learn how to somewhat dispassionately observe your pain, you increase your chances of working through it.”

Thick drops of rain fell hard all around us during the fifth lap and then again on the sixth, drenching every item of clothing we were wearing but hardening the path underneath our feet. We started every loop together, but speedier runners would quickly leave us behind.

We would warm up during the first kilometre of every lap only to cool down again when we finally made it back to the end. Waiting for the next hour to start involved everything but waiting; we wolfed down whatever we thought our stomach could handle, stretched our tired legs, changed our clothes, and charged our watches.

Out on the loop, surrounded by green forest and birdsong, avoiding the overgrown nettles that stretched their treacherous fingers towards our path, we ran, walked, swore, and sang. Ten hours in, as the pain increased, we pushed each other to keep going and found a thousand silly reasons to persevere, at least for one more loop.

We found our limit that evening after 12 hours of running, and as awful as it was to reach the deep end physically and mentally, I couldn’t help but feel empowered as the intensity of the experience started to fade; I had just pushed the limits of what I believed was possible and set the bar higher.

Any attempt at improvement generally comes with some discomfort, so let’s all seek out more uncomfortable experiences in our lives, a better future awaits on the other side.