Sit in discomfort

How the brain uses the Emotional Rolodex to file away pain to keep you safe... and also small.

“When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90-second chemical process that happens in the body. After that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.”

—Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight

How do we make the next best move?

We sit in discomfort.

In a game of chess, if someone puts you in check and your first reaction is "oh shit," and you react with the first move you can think of, you’ll probably lose that game. Unless you’re like a grandmaster or some shit and all the moves are as natural to you as walking or chewing, but let’s be real—that’s not most of us.

Most of us want the ability to slow everything down, stay calm, and sit in discomfort.

Not so that we can react with the first move we can think of.

But so we can respond with the best move we can think of.

And not just the discomfort of chess. But the discomfort of everyday life.

Discomfort is fucking wild. We hate it so much. We avoid it. All the time and constantly. We move through life dodging one uncomfortable situation after another as our bodies seek the peace of comfort because, honestly… why not?

Comfort feels better.

Yet comfort is where growth goes to die.

But you and I? We’re different. We will never die.

Kidding, we’re all going to die. But in the meantime, we’re alive! Which means if we’re just noticing, we’re going to become aware of serious feelings of discomfort.

Great.

Let it happen.

Because we know that on the other side of discomfort is freedom.

The freedom to think clearly.

The freedom to make the next best move.

The freedom to grow.

A big reason why we’re unable to sit in discomfort is what I call the Emotional Rolodex. For those who are under the age of 40, a rolodex is—I can’t believe I have to explain this, and if you think I don’t, you’re wrong—basically an old school, paper version of the Contacts app on your phone. Meet someone new? Add them to the rolodex by writing out their contact information on a card.

To be clear, I was never old enough to own one and use it—I just know what it is 😅

Now imagine you have an Emotional Rolodex. Each time you go through a difficult or overwhelming experience, your nervous system flags it and files it away:

• A bully makes you look incompetent in front of people you respect.

• A relationship of seven years ends.

• A close friend betrays you.

• A loved one passes away.

Your brain catalogs not just the facts of these events, but the emotional pain they carry. These memories get added to the Rolodex with a note at the bottom, “uncomfortable to experience, avoid at all costs.”

Unfortunately, the costs of avoiding reality are often massive—with invisible compounding interest stacking up in some dark mental attic, until one random day the ceiling collapses and you’re flooded with an unmanageable amount of emotional debt.

That’s often what we later call a mental breakdown or midlife crisis. All because we can’t sit and process difficult situations in real-time.

Even worse, your brain doesn’t have time to wait to see if what you’re dealing with is as bad as previous situations—even the faintest echo of a past emotion can get rounded up to the worst-case scenario and trigger a threat response, flooding your system with stress hormones.

Basically, as we experience more shit in life, we experience more shit that feels like shit and we don’t want to feel like shit, so we end up avoiding situations that we can easily handle… but our minds say “look, even if we could handle it, there’s a chance we can’t, and it’s just not worth going back to that uncomfortable place again.”

• A coworker questions something out loud in a meeting → AVOID BULLY.

• A partner asks “can we talk tonight?” → AVOID BREAKUP.

• A friend cancels dinner last-minute with no explanation → AVOID BETRAYAL.

• A loved one gets diagnosed with a treatable form of cancer → AVOID DEATH.

When we avoid discomfort, we make worse choices.

We react and snap at the coworker—who was actually excited about the idea you were pitching and wanted to build on it. We react and bring fear into the conversation with our partner—who was actually building up the courage to ask if we’re ready to move in together. We react and text our friend a passive-aggressive brush-off—when they were actually dealing with something that had nothing to do with us. We react and pull away from the loved one with cancer—because facing their diagnosis feels unbearable, even though they’re still here, still fighting, and needing connection more now than ever.

We react and move our king out of check—only to have unintentionally moved him right into checkmate.¹

The walls close in. Our world gets smaller.

But you and I? We’re different. We’re going to sit in the discomfort long enough for our body to realize, “oh wow, this isn’t actually a threat.”

“Turns out, I don’t need to round this up to it’s worst-case scenario version.”

“Turns out, I can handle this.”

The reality is that once you realize how your mind rounds up the small discomforts of everyday life into the largest traumas of your past, the power that discomfort has… fades. And we realize that the feeling of the walls closing in was just that—a feeling. And we open our eyes and realize that we were actually sitting in an open field of clarity the entire time.

A field where we can now think our next moves through.

But we’ll get to that. For now, just sit.

1. Which, actually, I don’t think you can legally do in chess but again, I’m not Bobby fucking Fischer so just roll with the analogy please and thank you.