~ Aaron Swartz
When we begin exercising, it's painful but eventually we begin to enjoy it. Not the pain itself but what it represents: Growth.
Indeed, we come to see the pain as a sort of pleasure — it feels good to really push yourself, to fight through the pain and make yourself stronger.
Similar to physical pain, we also run into psychological pain when we think about certain topics, mostly something we need to address, to attend to. There is a discomfort. But it also means the thing is important to us.
The problem is that the topics that are most painful also tend to be the topics that are most important for us: they’re the projects we most want to do, the relationships we care most about, the decisions that have the biggest consequences for our future, the most dangerous risks that we run.
So if we make that mental shift of seeing pain as something to savor, something that signals we are growing, we can start to almost look forward to it.
Pretty soon, when you start noticing something that causes you psychic pain, you’ll get excited about it, not afraid. Ooh, another chance to get stronger. You’ll seek out things you’re scared of and intentionally confront them, because it’s an easy way to get the great rewards of self-improvement.
We need to move towards those discomforts.
The trick is: when you start feeling that psychological pain coming on, don’t draw back from it and cower — lean into it. Lean into the pain.
An agile development concept is to do more often the things that hurt. Eg: Code merges.
If we keep procrastinating and putting off those things, they eventually become too large to surmount.
We can even start with just thinking about the thing we have been avoiding.
It’s always better to start small. What’s something you’ve been avoiding thinking about? It can be anything — a relationship difficulty, a problem at work, something on your todo list you’ve been avoiding. Call it to mind — despite the pain it brings — and just sort of let it sit there. Acknowledge that thinking about it is painful and feel good about yourself for being able to do it anyway. Feel it becoming less painful as you force yourself to keep thinking about it.
There will always be things we find uncomfortable, painful, things we want to avoid. But if we make the jump to become people who leans into the pain, we can, in a way, even start to look forward to those things. Like someone looking forward to their time at the gym.
Of course, this is predicated on those painful things being ones that actually help us grow.
Anyway, could pair it with this other essay inspired by this on Getting better at scary things.