4 Steps to help anyone who's afraid of discomfort make friends with pain and move beyond your fear

Physical Challenges are spiritual challenges

There’s something undeniable about grueling exercise, a punishing race, or plunging into an ice bath: they all cause you physical pain.

What compels ‘gluttons for punishment’ like myself to consistently push the limits with these physical challenges. The secret lies in the way people like me understand the utility of physical pain. We use the body and the undeniable reality of physical pain to empower our spirits and sharpen our minds: we’re training ourselves to feel adversity and overcome it in the moment.

With a little better understanding of WHY you need to feel pain, you as well will be able to see these physical challenges for what they really are; spiritual challenges of willpower and conquering fear.

Is pain really good for you?

I can hear the challenge already, “But pain hurts and exposing myself to hurt can’t possibly be good for my body.”

Here’s 3 scientific reasons why pain may indeed be beneficial for you to feel.

• Pain is a Boundary: The body gives you a limit by introducing pain, a barrier, but also allows you to go beyond it helping you gain physical and mental confidence

• Pain enhances the meaning of an activity, especially sports or physical exertion, so the ice bath or punishing race becomes important precisely because it hurts

• Pain inhibits other negative experiences so in an ice bath the pain of the body overtakes the ramblings of the mind that talks you out of wanting to get into cold water in the first place

The important thing to remember is that physical challenges are safe simulations of real world scenarios that help train us to feel pain in controlled environments. Sports allow us to take calibrated risks with our bodies, physical challenges the same. We don’t feel pain for it’s own sake.

We connect that pain to our character growth and incorporate conquering adversity into our day to day lives.

Why embrace pain?

By now you should be thinking about pain in a new light.

It’s not something to avoid but something to carefully come into contact with. Nothing makes you feel as invincible as feeling pain and deciding to keep moving forward. Each time you tell pain to wait, you become stronger in ways that will:

• Help you stick to your values

• Make the tough but necessary choices

• Keep your word when it’s difficult

• Choose the right sacrifices for your health

• Become a person who inspires and leads others through adversity

You don’t feel pain because you’re not scared, but because you get to overcome fear time and time again

How to make friends with pain: 4 Steps

In order to make friends with pain you first have to think about it in this positive way.

There are 4 steps to work through to help you not only embrace pain but make friends with it. You’ll begin to look forward to the challenge. That’s not to say you won’t feel fear and have doubts, of course you will and we all do!

The point is by mastering each of these steps you’ll always set yourself up to conquer that fear and learn how to keep moving forward despite everything in your body telling you to quit and turn around.

1.Breath

Without control of your breath you will never be able to find peace with pain.

Master breathwork first before attempting to embrace the positives of pain. Download the Wim Hoff app and practice his technique. Become an expert in box breathing so that you know how to slow and control your breath at a moment’s notice.

You can’t make the pain go away, but you can ‘breathe through the pain’ and find peace on the other side.

2.Endure

Once you master breath you can then move onto endurance.

That’s pushing the boundary of more time, more pain, more peace to find.

• Take a longer cold shower

• Plunge into a ice bath

• Run longer with less fuel

• Take on an extra set (physique and heart rate permitted)

You’re at the stage where you can push yourself beyond the initial period of accepting pain.

3.Compete

This is a tricky stage because you don’t want to turn feeling pain itself into a competition.

What you want to do is use competition as a mechanism to come into contact with pain on your own terms. This might be signing up for a too long race in your mind or in pledging to do a polar bear swim during the cold winter months. Use competition as a way to anchor accountability into your quest to conquer pain.

You can also compete with yourself, trying to outlast what you used to endure and push even further beyond your self perceived limits.

4.Community

The final step in creating or folding yourself into a community that thrives in voluntarily accepting pain.

You’ll never be able to push as hard by yourself as you will when surrounded by a tribe all struggling towards the same thing. Find a local community pushing themselves and join. Or take the lead and bring your friends and family to the ice bath and make it a celebration of pain together.

You’ll start to wish for the moments and days when you can not only test yourself again but push even further.

Takeaways

The 1 thing you need to remember when confronting pain is that you must accept it.

You cannot overcome it through hype. You’re only choice is to make friends and learn the lessons from feeling it. Find peace in the storm and you’ll have found the secret.

Don’t be afraid of pain, understand that it’s the only way to transcend the limits you place on yourself.

These 4 steps will help you practically, but without a change of attitude and heart you won’t be able to use them to find peace.

If you struggle with mindset and becoming strong enough to face fear book a free call with me to see how these strategies can personally help you.