On how the anxiety of discomfort cleverly derails your relationships
If you're comfortable, you're safe. And safe is a beautiful place to be if you plan to never grow.
Let's imagine you get a text out of the blue:
Yikes. Yikes for two reasons:
It's uncomfortable to be told that you've upset someone.
It's uncomfortable to have a friend who’s dating a "Brayden." Like, the name alone was the red flag, girl.
Humans don't like disappointing other humans. We don't like finding out that someone is upset on account of something we've done. It's uncomfortable.
In fact, we dislike sitting in discomfort so much that we pull out every defensive, gaslighting tool in our toolbox and hurl it at the other person with the grace of a Cirque du Soleil act. But like, one of the top-tier Cirque acts, not like that clown baby that just stumbles around on stage for two hours.
Sometimes our reaction happens so quickly, we don't even realize we're being defensive. We just think we're clarifying.
Of course it's "Madison" that's dating "Brayden." Fucking of course.
Now, in our iFakeTextMessage.com response above, what's our goal? It seems that our goal was to Homer Simpson GIF out of discomfort as fast as humanly possible by lawyering up with defensiveness—“Madison is too sensitive to hear the truth, and friends tell friends the truth.”
But what if, instead, our goal WAS to sit in the discomfort? If we aimed for discomfort, we might be able to pause. To think about what we want to say. Less defensiveness and more validation might just allow Madison to feel seen, heard, and express her feelings freely. God forbid we provide a safe space and cultivate a long-lasting friendship.
Mom, aren't you so proud of me?
"People won't remember what you said, but how you made them feel."
-Donald Trump
Reading is a laboratory and at some point you gotta get out into the field
And while most people would agree, the problem is that a blog post is a laboratory where we wax poetic about the philosophies of life and meanwhile, the real world isn't so gentle. It moves a lot faster, and we don't always have the ability to pause, think, and say the "right" thing. Sometimes we just default to our defaults, and a lot of our defaults are shit.
Imagine instead:
Incredible for two reasons:
Owning the fact that you upset someone validates their feelings and diffuses the situation.
Owning the fact that you're dating someone named Harper will likely make Madison not feel quite so ridiculous.
But wait a second, aren’t we admitting that we’re wrong? Aren’t we just giving in to Madison’s oversensitiveness?
Who. The Fuck. Cares.
Seriously? Who cares? Is she oversensitive?
Of course she is.
We’re all oversensitive
We’re all just rotating between being strong and being sensitive depending on the fucking hour of the day. And sometimes people say things that hurt our feelings. Sometimes we want to let them know that. And all of the time we’re just looking for the same thing: a thoughtful, understanding, and empathetic response.
But that requires something we haven't quite trained enough for:
Discomfort.
Discomfort is often so discomfortable that we'll squirm our way to a justification any way we can:
They're overreacting.
They asked for my opinion!
I was just joking.
I guess they can't handle the truth.
"You can't handle the truth."
-Maya Angelou
I use the word "train" because every situation we're in is as a opportunity to train. I’m trying myself to relax by playing video games. But I feel like a fucking college drop out when I play them, and not in the good “my mom is paying the bills and cooking dinner for me and my friends every night” kinda way. In a way that doesn’t even allow me to sit there for one hour a week and simply enjoy myself. When I’m playing, my inner monologue rotates between "wow this is fun" and "sure I’ve improved my understanding of the geography of Mount Qaf, but I haven’t improved my actual life.”
What I have to remember in those moments of discomfort is that relaxation IS improving my life.
So instead of beating myself up, I’ve been trying to say, “Man, training to relax sure is tough. Good thing this training is a priority to me.”
It sounds ridiculous.
But it also works.
Train for the expected, which is literally everything
The best financial advice I ever got was to prepare for "unexpected" expenses by building them into your budget because, well, they're actually quite expected. We don't always know when these expenses will happen, but we know without doubt that they will.
Retail stores build theft into their budget. When someone steals a pair of $20 nail clippers and the store says, "wow that's so unexpected," they just seem ignorant. Theft is GOING to happen. Especially when nail clippers cost $20 and you're a high school student living in the W section of Palm Coast and there is no security at the Wal-Mart. It's just GOING to happen.
You know what else is going to happen?
You GOING to get a parking ticket.
You GOING to get a flat tire.
You're GOING to see Dua Lipa on her Catch Me Or I Go Houdini 2024 World Tour.1
You know what else is going to happen?
You're GOING to experience a nonstop stream of situations involving discomfort in life. We don't always know when these situations will happen, but we know without doubt that they will. So what do we do?
We prepare for expenses by saving. We prepare for situations by training.
A surgeon doesn't enter the operating room without having opened an anatomy textbook.
A chef doesn't open a restaurant without having chopped vegetables.
I don't enter the pit at Dua Lipa's Catch Me Or I Go Houdini 2024 World Tour without having taken several months of Krav Maga so bitch, don't even think about pushing your way to the front to find those fake ass, nonexistent “friends.”
Train when the stakes are low
We're all already training in life. I'm training to relax. You might be training to get out of bed first thing in the morning. You can train for discomfort in the same way. And the more you condition yourself to handle it when it's within your control, the higher your tolerance will be when it's outside of your control. Notice when
you blame
you justify
you deflect
you interrupt
you downplay
you procrastinate
you withdraw
you complain
you use sarcasm
you change the subject
you reach for a distraction
you don't embrace silence
you don't speak up
you don't listen
you give an excuse (even if it's valid)
you can't quiet your inner monologue
You know what that list is titled?
Opportunities to train for discomfort.
Make your own list of situations that are uncomfortable or your own red flags that raise your awareness of an inner feeling of discomfort. Pay attention. Notice the feeling.
And then just sit there.
Say in your head, "wow, I'm uncomfortable. That's interesting. Let's see how long this feeling lasts."2 And then just sit there. Guess what’ll happen.
It’ll go away.
There’s some science or whatever about how emotions can only exist in the body for like 90 seconds, and if we stay present with them, they just pass right through us like Patrick Swayze in the movie Ghost.3
Don’t refresh the feed of your emotions
When we keep asking ourselves "why me? what caused this?” we’re pulling down to refresh, except we’re not refreshing Instagram, we’re refreshing an unconfirmed story that we’re telling ourselves about our circumstances. And in doing so, our emotions start recycling in our system. Again. And again.
Until we just sit there and let it move through us.
It’s like a taking a cold shower, or, if you’re super hip—a cold plunge. After that initial "holy fuck holy fuck" feeling, your body stabilizes into an "okay, this isn't ideal but I can sit in this feeling."
Pay attention.
Notice discomfort.
Don’t refresh the story.
Just sit in it.
Sitting in discomfort is a lot easier said than done. But if we train for it, we'll be better equipped when it shows up "unexpectedly."
Comment below if you have anything else to add. We’re just getting this Substack started and having conversations with you folks is one of my favorite things to. Let’s post it all publicly so we can learn from each other.
Just set aside $500 now because you're GOING to get pit tickets.
Or fuck it, say it out loud, who cares?
Or Patrick Swayze actually 😬