This spring, we had a streak of unseasonably hot weather in Southern California. It reached the high 90s in my town and topped 100 just a few towns away.
To be fair, the weather was actually beautiful, the heat didn’t last long, and the humidity was low, so it wasn’t like a sauna. But jumping from light sweaters to tank tops in March felt like a drastic leap.
At the time, I had just finished reading Michael Easter’s book The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self, which argues that our modern quest for comfort and convenience may be undermining our physical, mental, and emotional well-being. As he chronicles his own month-long hunting expedition in the Alaskan Arctic backcountry, Easter makes the case that embracing discomfort is essential to living a fuller, healthier, more meaningful life.
Inspired by the book, I caught my mental complaining about the heat and chose to tell myself the story that the heat was giving my body the opportunity to do the biological work of adapting. Instead of relating to the heat as something I needed to fix, I could relate to it as something I was capable of experiencing.
The brain and body do not grow stronger by being protected from every stressor. They grow by meeting manageable stress, responding to it, and learning, I can handle this. That is part of why researchers have long been interested in the idea that small, tolerable stressors can help strengthen resilience over time.
And there’s another layer to it: use it or lose it.
When we stop asking our minds and bodies to do hard things, tolerate discomfort, solve problems, or adapt to changing conditions, we can become less capable over time. Not because we’re weak, but because capacity grows when it’s challenged. The more we avoid effort, uncertainty, frustration, and inconvenience, the easier it becomes to see them as threats instead of normal parts of life.
That same idea has been showing up in the culture more lately, too. A recent Washington Post article highlighted simple ways to add a little more “friction” to daily life: working your memory instead of immediately looking something up, learning a skill that doesn’t come easily, cooking from scratch, or choosing real-world interaction over constant digital convenience.
The goal is not to make life harder just for the sake of it. The goal is to remember that your mind and body stay capable when you actually use them — and that they can tolerate much more than we often give them credit for.
I think this applies to emotions as well.
When we rush to shut down every uncomfortable feeling, we miss the chance to expand our tolerance for being human. Anxiety, frustration, uncertainty, embarrassment, boredom, disappointment, physical fatigue — none of these feelings are fun, but all of them can teach us something. They stretch our capacity and remind us that discomfort is not the same thing as danger.
That doesn’t mean all discomfort is good, and it definitely doesn’t mean we should glorify suffering. There’s a difference between helpful challenge and unnecessary harm. But for many of us, modern life insulates us from even minor discomfort and inconvenience and leads us to believe life "should" be like that.
Here's your Ultimate You challenge.
Choose one small, safe discomfort to practice on purpose each day this week. Nothing extreme or reckless. Just one intentional moment of mild inconvenience or discomfort that you would normally avoid.
This could look like:
- Letting yourself feel hungry before a meal instead of snacking at the first stomach growl
- Not immediately reaching for your phone when you're curious about something
- Trying something you are not immediately good at
- Initiating a hard conversation
- Feeling hot or cold and not running to adjust the thermostat
- Pushing yourself to breathe a little harder than usual when you work out
- Acknowledging feeling anxious and telling yourself that’s okay
- Sitting with discomfort without scrambling to numb it, fix it, or flee from it.
Notice not just what you feel, but what you learn. Does your tolerance expand? Does your confidence grow? Do you feel a little stronger, a little steadier, a little more alive?
Small discomforts like these can become quiet training grounds. They remind your mind and body: We’re okay. We can do hard things. We can adapt.
Sometimes the real issue isn’t that life is hard. It’s that we’ve forgotten we are built to handle hard things.
And that may be one of the greatest gifts discomfort offers us — not misery, but proof. Proof that we are more capable than our habits of convenience would have us believe.
In health and happiness,
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