Lean Into Discomfort

There’s a natural human drive to seek comfort and avoid discomfort.

This makes a lot of sense — no point wasting energy, putting yourself in unnecessary dangerous situations, or anything like that. But this originally valuable instinct has actually become a serious drawback in the modern age…

Because it turns out that a reasonable amount of discomfort is actually good for us…


In the past, the activities needed to survive in the natural world guaranteed humans plenty of discomfort on a regular basis. So it was positively helpful to move towards comfort at every opportunity you got. You were still going to get more than enough discomfort.

But the modern world isn’t like that. Things are set up so that you could avoid all discomfort altogether. Perfect temperatures all the time. Regular meals. The ability to drive rather than walk. Etc etc.

So now we need to go the other way. Resist the temptation to keep things comfortable all the time. Or actively seek out occasional discomfort.

Find ways of doing this that you ‘enjoy’ (the aim here is not to make yourself miserable. Just to give the body some varied and challenging environmental conditions). Here’s one recent example of how I’ll do this…


Sometimes I let myself get completely soaked when I could have chosen to stay dry.

Like the other day when I was out for my usual afternoon wander around my rather lovely local Edinburgh area.

Not the sunniest of days when I trotted down the stairs and out into the street. But no sign of what was coming.

Until what had been a clear sky suddenly started whipping down sheets of rain.

This is somewhat of an occupational hazard in Scotland. So I was sporting a waterproof jacket just in case.

All I had to do was put my hood up and I’d stay pretty dry.

And I wasn’t far from home at this point either. It would have been easy to scamper back inside and curl up on the sofa.

I’d be lying if I pretended that wasn’t my immediate thought.

But I stopped and paused a second before actually acting on it. And I’m really glad I did.

You see, that desire to stay warm and dry seems very sensible. But it’s actually a bit odd when you think about it.

Getting wet really doesn’t do you any harm. Your skin is a miracle of engineering. Totally waterproof while remaining breathable. No man-made fabric comes close.

And the human body is capable of hanging out in surprisingly cold conditions without suffering any negative effects.

The thing is that we have so many options for staying comfortable that we tend to forget just what conditions we’re designed to deal with.

Those situations simply aren’t familiar to most of us these days. And they’re not comfortable. So we tend to see them as a bad thing. Something we ought to avoid.

But if you give them a chance, you’ll find out that they’re actually very manageable. The problem comes if you spend your time thinking things ought to be a certain way.

If you think you’ve got a right to stay dry all the time then you’ll resent it when you get wet. If you think you’ve got a right to be toasty warm then you’ll resent it when you get cold.

And you’ll be miserable.

But if you let go of that need to have things a certain way then everything changes.

If you accept that being wet is just the way it is then you’ll find it actually feels ok. Same with being cold. You’ll see that those things aren’t inherently negative or positive. They’re just sensations.

It’s when you judge them as ‘bad’ that they become a problem. So when that rainstorm hit I left my hood down.

And I kept walking.

I probably stayed out in the rain for half an hour. I got wet. I got cold…

And it was absolutely fine.