In today’s high tech world we are constantly faced with moments of doing what is easy over what is more difficult. Do I take the stairs or the elevator? Do I ride my bike or drive my car?

As we choose more and more comfort over the challenges of life we create less resiliency in the face of painful experiences. It isn’t just bodily effort but also the inability to face the discomfort in our emotional and relational lives as well. Our inability to step into the discomfort of life is one of the challenges of our times.

Why do we seek to be comfortable?

For most of human evolution people have searched for a more comfortable shelter, warmer clothing or an easier way to do things. This made sense when our ancestors  lived in really exposed lives. It was a benefit to seek more comfort in those times.

This has led humans to find better ways to find and grow food (think the agricultural revolution). It has helped us to discover better ways to transport our bodies (let’s hear it for the wheel). These changes came out of a drive to survive in the harshness of the natural world.

Even today this drive can be beneficial. Creating more efficient ways to do things can give us back leisure time that we can use for being with loved ones.

 

Our comfort drive led us to find food. To build and take shelter. To flee from predators. To avoid overly risky decisions. To do anything and everything that would help us live on and spread our DNA. So it’s really no surprise that today we should still default to that which is most comfortable. (Easter, 2021)

 

How this comfort drive is hurting us now

The problem with our comfortable lives is that they are causing us lifestyles that lead to unhealthy outcomes. Sitting, numbing out on Netflix, compulsively using our smartphones and eating obsessively when we aren’t hungry leads us to the ill health we are in today. Some studies show that close to 75% of adults in the U.S. are either overweight or obese. That’s just one of the many statistics that shows Americans, as well as people around the world, are experiencing too much comfort.

Without having challenges to our bodies and minds we become complacent and lose resiliency. We live in temperature controlled homes and buildings and then run to our cars because we can’t handle the cold. We don’t take the stairs, opting instead for the elevator when just adding 15 minutes of movement a day can have a major improvement in our health.

 

How did this happen?

One of the challenges of humans is that as things became more comfortable in our modern technological lives we started to expect things to be get even easier.

David Levari is a researcher at Harvard University, studies what he calls, ‘concept creep.’ What this means is that when people are looking for something in their environment they start to make up things that aren’t even there. For example, the people at TSA  who look through our suitcases and bags are trained to look for suspicious travelers. As the security has gotten better there may be less reasons to see suspicious agents. This means the TSA workers can relax and not worry. Instead they become more vigilant ripping apart the bag of a four year old or some elderly woman with a walker.

Levari calls this concept creep. It means that human brains keep moving the goal posts of what they expect is going to happen. The TSA employee widens the search criteria rather than staying within the bounds of their training.

How does this relate to comfort? One way to understand it is that the same issue around our concepts can relate to our comfort. Comfort creep means that as soon as we have a level of comfort in our lives we don’t sit back and bask in the satisfaction of that comfort. We move our expectations and want more comfort.

Call it comfort creep. When a new comfort is introduced, we adapt to it and our old comforts become unacceptable. Today’s comfort is tomorrow’s discomfort. This leads to a new level of what’s considered comfortable. (Easter, 2021)

As we are provided more comfortable shoes, cars, and other luxuries we desire even more comfort. Old comforts are now uncomfortable. It may have been easy to walk up the stairs when there was no escalator…now walking up the stairs is so painful when the escalator isn’t working.

According to Levari this is all happening unconsciously. We don’t know that we are creating this comfort creep. And yet we keep doing this day after day, becoming less and less able to handle irritating things in our lives.

 

Discomfort is good for us

How can it be good to stress our bodies and push ourselves into places that are really hard? I don’t think it is good to just be uncomfortable. If someone has a rock in their shoe or a chill in their bones they should take care of it. The problem is this idea that we shouldn’t ever be uncomfortable. As we keep moving the goalposts, to greater levels of comfort, we keep limiting what we can deal with in our lives.

From my perspective, as a therapist and parenting coach in Denver, I see clients avoiding the painful emotions and sensations in their bodies. This often leads to poor decisions in their lives. One person may feel deep grief and sadness and decide to head to the refrigerator for a quart of ice cream as a way of numbing their feelings. Another person may avoid the depressive symptoms they are feeling by freebasing cocaine. Still another person may not want to engage their child because of the guilt they feel for their latest uncontrolled outburst.

The problem with these strategies is that they often make things worse. By not dealing with our internal discomfort we use external resources to numb and avoid what is happening inside. This leads to unhappy relationships, addiction and ill health.

The real answer is to turn towards the discomfort, feel the painful sensations and emotions that emerge and transform them by integrating our emotional and thinking brain. This allows these experiences to be part of our internal understanding of what we need or desire and can move us toward accomplishing it.

I believe that the need for external comfort mirrors this need for internal comfort. However, we will never be comfortable on the inside no matter how much we try. Things will irritate us, we will feel sad, frustrated and lonely…all possibly within a five minute period. Avoiding these inevitable feelings is not the answer.

 

How discomfort shows up in my life

Recently in Colorado there was a cold spell. I often ride my bike to work and I had the opportunity to feel the pain of subzero temperatures. As my fingers felt more frozen I turned into this aching sensation. The discomfort didn’t go away or get easier but what did shift is my relationship to it. I wasn’t trying to get away from it…I was just feeling it.

I think, like many of my clients, my inability to be with what I’m feeling in a moment is one of my biggest limitations. Instead of just feeling fear of disconnection with my wife, I will get highly analytical and start questioning everything my partner says (extremely annoying). If I could just feel the fear and step into the vulnerability of that fear I believe things would go much better.

Vulnerability is quite uncomfortable to feel. It is something many people want to avoid. I have found the more I go towards it rather than circumvent the discomfort, I have much better outcomes in my relationships and life in general. If I can get better at this I am highly confident you can as well.

If you or someone you know wants to connect with ways to deal with the discomfort in their life please contact me!

 

Wishing You The Day You Need To Have!

 

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References & Further Reading:

Eastmen, Michael. (2021). The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self. New York, NY. Rodale Books.