04 Aug The Benefits of Discomfort
Brendan Leonard the writer and creator of the blog semi-rad.com, a blog that revolves around passionate people who do cool things, recently wrote a very interesting post in the adventure journal about The Benefits of Discomfort.
About a year ago, psychologist and author Kelly McGonigal gave a TED Talk on “How to Make Stress Your Friend,” which has now been viewed six million times. To paraphrase, McGonigal said this: Stress can kill you, but only if you believe stress is bad for your health. If you don’t believe it’s bad for you, stress won’t kill you.
Which is quite revolutionary, but it wasn’t the part of the talk that I frantically transcribed as I was listening a few weeks ago, then rewound it and listened again to make sure I got it right. After the talk, the host asked McGonigal: How does this apply to people who are, for example, choosing between a stressful job and a non-stressful job? She said:
“One thing we know for certain is that chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort. And so I would say that’s really the best way to make decisions, is go after what it is that creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows.”
In the past century Americans have developed many ways to remove life’s discomforts and become more “civilized,” and now we can have things like central air conditioning, $3,000 mattresses, and $1,500 reclining chairs. But all along, the pendulum was swinging the other way for people who went back out into the mountains and woods to sleep in the dirt, get sweaty, get rained on, and maybe spend a night shivering and waiting for the sun to come up.
In the adventure world, we see a billion examples of this: climbers who live out of cars for months or years at a time, ordinary people who spend six months thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail or PCT with ultralight packs, others who spend three weeks hauling gear and sitting in tents waiting for a weather window for a summit attempt. And we all have those moments ourselves: whether we’re about to puke from exertion of climbing a thousand feet on a bike or a set of crampons or pair of running shoes, or getting blasted in the face with 40 mph wind-driven snow, or freaking out about falling above a piece of not-so-great gear. We’re not doing it so we can get a six-pack or a selfie—we must think there’s something else out there.
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