Danger, discomfort, and growth

Hi friends, welcome back.

In the first part, we looked at the extent of painful and pleasurable sensations. We also split pain into two camps: danger and discomfort.

Now, how do you know if you are in danger or are you “merely” uncomfortable?

I’m in pain. Should I run or should I lean into it?

Obviously, if someone is attacking you and you have a gashing wound, you know that’s danger. But in most day to day situations, we deal with discomforts. When you pulled a muscle at the gym, that’s discomfort. You know you can still use your arm, how much to push, and how much to retreat. When your elbow is dangling, it probably is danger until you get some help.

I suspect there is no simple universal formula for this. It’s something we “know” but can’t really articulate.

If I have to venture a guess, it’s roughly: We conclude it’s danger when we are not confident of our assessment of the risk and uncertainty of the situation. We say it’s more of a discomfort if we feel the reflex to numb or escape even if we are confident that we are safe, when we step back and assess the situation. Fear is often unwarranted in this situation.

Our thought process boils down to answering, “Is this normal? Do I know what caused this? How much control do I have over this situation?“.

Mental pain, physical pain

It is also helpful to talk about mental pain and physical pain separately. Most of the time we have an accurate assessment of when a physical pain is dangerous and when it is not. Mental pain, on the other hand, are almost always discomfort that you can decide to bring to the realm physical danger, or not. This is also the realm of most spiritual practices are designed to support.

Some example of mental pain are stress, worries, envy, anger, heartbreak, and grief.

When dealing with mental pain, I find it helpful to remind myself that most mental pain are perceived danger or threat, either from the the past or the future. But not the present. When I ground myself and bring my attention to the actual present moment, I find that most of the times I am physically safe.

Yes you might be fully aware of and feel all the places that your body is aching and tingling from sitting for who knows how long for that Vipassana meditation, but you know you are technically safe physically.

Thoughts are thoughts, sensations are sensations, feelings are feelings, and emotions are emotions. Notice, acknowledge, befriend.

Discomfort breeds growth

So, is there any good reason why we should learn to get comfortable being uncomfortable?

To cut to the chase, we all know the answer to this: you need some discomfort to be able to grow.

The first 5 minutes of running is uncomfortable. The first two sets of shoulder presses is uncomfortable. Giving a presentation is uncomfortable. Fasting is uncomfortable. Any kind of physical or mental training brings a certain level of discomfort. But believe it or not, you don’t need to be comfortable all the time.

The more deliberate discomfort you train yourself to handle, the higher your resilience will be.

You learn most effectively when you engage with the material. Muscles only grow through progressive overload. You strengthen your opinions by being willing to get your views challenged and see different viewpoints.

When discomfort turns into danger

Now, even when you’re engaging, exploring, and testing the boundary of your comfort zone in a seemingly controlled environment, you can still cross over from discomfort to danger.

I’ll give you an example. In 2016 I started a fitness routine. I took on intermittent fasting, I trained consistently and progressively. I fought the discomfort and I won. I was in my best shape. I looked great and felt great. I had great energy, my stamina was the highest it has ever been, I had all the “good soreness” and all the gainz.

But 1 year into that routine, I lost my period. My body decided that it is in survival mode and it shut down the reproductive system. It took me 7.5 years to get it back (well to be fair, I was blissfully rocking with it for the first 4 years).

So,where is that line between discomfort and danger? When is sitting with the discomfort helpful and when is it harmful? How do you know? How much is enough?

I still don’t have a good simple universal heuristics for telling where that line is. But I have an inkling that things can go array when one or more of these things happen:

1. You are using your mind to control and override your body. Your mind is should-ing your body too often and for too long.

2. You didn’t register the bad signals because you have a skewed baseline of what “normal” feels like. Or you are not even that in tune with your body in the first place, which is a common failure modes of modern human.

3. You don’t have a sense of “what is enough” so you optimise until infinity.

OK, let’s wrap up here today. See you in the next post where we’ll look at two things I call addictech and anestechia — the death by comfort tech.

We’ll also look at how similar we actually are with LLMs and how easily we will trip ourselves in the face of “intelligent systems” in a near future if we don’t start engaging with our reality.