Are you inadvertently shrinking the life available to you because you’re avoiding hard things? Are you unknowingly making yourself, or the people you love, more fragile with too much protection? And what does science say about using discomfort to help you change for the better? Listen in for this and more!
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A listener asked me to do an episode on adversity and my first thought was, okay, I know what that episode sounds like. Struggle is hard, hard times build character, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, blah blah blah. But I didn’t want to make that episode. Because I think we already know struggle can be useful, while none of us like adversity, we understand in theory that it helps build us internally. What I want to talk about is what happens on the other side of that equation. Not what adversity does to us, but what the absence of it might do to us. We have entire industries built around comfort, ease, optimization, convenience and even my podcast here, we talk about creating calm and peace. Everyone wants the fastest route, the least friction, the smoothest experience. And that’s completely natural but not always helpful.
Imagine someone who has been protected from hardship their whole life. Not because nothing was wrong with their life and everything was wonderful with no suffering, but they were protected because the people around them loved them and caught them every time. Or maybe because they were just so careful with life. Or because they just got lucky. From the outside that looks like a good life, and in a lot of ways it is. But the downside of what we perceive as the good life is that person might have a very low tolerance for things not going their way. Minor inconveniences can feel enormous. Uncertainty which is always part of life can be unbearable. And when something genuinely hard finally arrives, and it always does because that’s just life, they are not equipped for it. The comfort didn’t protect them. It actually made them more fragile. Even if whatever happens is small, it could feel devastating. And remember that everyone’s version of adversity, their version of the big or small can be different depending on where they are coming from or what they have to work with.
I think about parents, and even myself as a parent, but honestly this applies to all of us in our relationships. Think about how natural it is to want to shield the people you care about from pain. That’s love and one of the most human impulses there is. You see someone you love struggling, and everything in you wants to fix it, to smooth it over, to take the hit so they don't have to. And sometimes that's exactly the right call especially in life altering decisions. But sometimes we jump in too fast. We solve the problem before they've had a chance to wrestle with it. We cushion every fall before they've had a chance to learn how to fail. And in doing so, we accidentally rob them of something really important.
Because the thing about comfort is that it’s not neutral. We treat it like it is just the absence of difficulty, like a blank space. But it is actually doing something to us the whole time we’re in that bubble. When we’re never asked to stretch, we actually tend to shrink. When we’re never asked to adapt, we lose some of our ability to do so. Psychologists have a term for the range of experiences a person can handle without being overwhelmed and it is called the window of tolerance. And like any window, it can open and close in varying amounts. A life built entirely around staying comfortable slowly narrows that window so that we don’t allow discomfort to fit thru it. It doesn’t happen all at once, but gradually, until one day even the smaller things that should be manageable start to feel catastrophic.
And this is something we see playing out in today’s world especially here in the west. We see it in the rising rates of anxiety in younger generations who have, in many ways, had more protection and more comfort than any generation before them. We see it in adults who can’t sit for long with a boring Saturday afternoon without reaching for their phone, because stillness has become so uncomfortable. We see it in relationships that never go too deep because vulnerability feels too risky, and dreams that never get chased because the possibility of failure is just too much to sit with. Comfort, when it becomes the primary goal, starts to quietly close doors before you even know you had the opportunity for them to open.
Now let’sbring some science in as to what your brain and body are doing. When you encounter a difficult situation, your body does so many things to help protect you which is great, and get you ready for this uncertain possible attack. It triggers the stress response and signals your adrenal glands for cortisol and adrenaline to flood your system, your heart rate goes up, your focus sharpens, and your brain essentially clears the decks to deal with what’s right in front of you. And in the short term it’s really helpful to you. It’s one of the most sophisticated systems your body has and it’s literally designed to help you rise to a challenge.
The problem is not stress itself. It’s unresolved, chronic, relentless stress without any support or end point. That’s when cortisol becomes destructive, when inflammation rises, when sleep breaks down, when memory and decision-making start to suffer. So I am absolutely not saying pile stress and suffering onto your life and call it growth. What I am saying is that there is a very meaningful difference between the kind of challenge that stretches you and the kind that breaks you, and we may have gotten so afraid of the first kind that we are accidentally engineering lives that eliminate it entirely which is not healthy in the long run.
Neuroscientists talk about something called neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to literally rewire itself based on experience. And difficult experiences are among the most powerful triggers of that rewiring. When you navigate something hard, your brain is not just surviving it. It’s building new neural pathways and developing what researchers call cognitive flexibility, which is the ability to think in new ways, to problem-solve under pressure, to regulate your emotions when everything in you wants to spiral. You come out of a hard situation with a brain that is genuinely more capable than the one that went in. And there’s a concept in psychology called post-traumatic growth. Most of us have heard of post-traumatic stress, but post-traumatic growth is what the research shows happening on the other side of that experience for many people. Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun spent years studying people who’d been through serious adversity, illness, loss, disaster, and what they found was not just that people survived. They found that many of them reported meaningful positive change afterward. Greater personal strength, deeper relationships, and they saw new possibilities they hadn't previously considered and felt a shift in their sense of what truly matters. A sense of new possibilities in their life and their abilities they’d not been able to see before.
Tedeschi described it this way, that people develop new understandings of themselves, the world they live in, how to relate to other people, the kind of future they might have and a better understanding of how to live it. And it’s not just that they felt better eventually. It’s that they understood things they couldn’t have understood before. The adversity was not incidental to that understanding but in fact was the source of it. You can’t read, learn your way or listen your way to that knowing. As much as I’d like to think podcasts like mine can get you there, sure, it can help you think different but you can’t shortcut this growth without adversity. Some things only reveal themselves under pressure.
Now none of this means suffering is inherently good or that everyone who goes through something terrible automatically grows from it. Trauma on it’s own without support, without community, without someone to help you make sense of it, can genuinely break people and the research is clear on that too. What makes the difference, more than almost anything, is whether a person has the resources and the relationships to process what happened. The adversity alone is not the teacher but the adversity plus the willingness to sit with it and learn from it is the magic mix. And again, I’m not suggesting that you go looking for pain or create it, as I’m sure you already know, there’s plenty pain and suffering just naturally in life.
So let's bring this closer to home because if challenge is this powerful a catalyst for growth, what are we doing when we work so hard to make sure the people we love never have to experience it? And I am not talking about protecting someone from genuine physical or psychological danger. I am talking about the softer version of this. The parent who solves the problem before the child has had a chance to wrestle with it. The relationship where someone is always managing the other person's discomfort so they never have to feel it. One of the results from this is what we’ve touched on before called learned helplessness and if you want to know more, listen to episode 34. When people are consistently rescued from difficulty, they begin to believe, often unconsciously, that their actions don’t affect outcomes and in fact, they’ve no power over the outcomes. That hard things are not even manageable for them and that they’re not capable of handling the outcomes. And that belief is genuinely limiting in ways that have nothing to do with actual ability. It’s not that they can’t handle hard things, it’s that they’ve never been given the chance to find out what they can or can’t handle.
We see this everywhere when we look for it. Young adults who live on their own and completely fall apart the first time something doesn’t work out, not because they are weak but because no one ever let them experience not working things out before. Adults and teens who numb every uncomfortable feeling because they were never taught that uncomfortable feelings pass. So they purposely avoid feelings and numb them with various addictions whether it’s food, alcohol, sex, social media scrolling. It could be people who stay in situations that are not right for them because the uncertainty of leaving feels more threatening than the discomfort of staying. We talked about that last week as to why people think they can’t change because change is too hard and one of the reasons for that could be that haven’t pushed themselves to know they can handle the hard.
So here is the reframe I want to offer you, what if we stopped asking how do I get through this and started asking what will this make possible for me? Not in a toxic positivity, “everything is a beautiful gift kind of way”. But in a curious, “what is being built here” kind of way. Because something is always being built. Even in the hardest moments, and maybe especially then, there is something forming in you that could not have formed any other way. Remember that diamonds are made under pressure and so too can you be built under pressure.
So here’s some shifts to think about. The first shift is to stop treating discomfort as evidence that something has gone wrong. Discomfort is almost always just evidence that something is happening, that’s all. That you are being stretched, that you are in unfamiliar territory, that you are growing in a direction you have not grown before. It’s information, not emergency. And when we can start to hold it that way, just a little bit, even on the hard days, something changes in how we move through it.
The second shift is about how we support the people we love. Your job when someone you care about is struggling is not always to fix it. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is stay close without solving. To say I am here and I am not going anywhere, and then actually mean it as they figure their way through. Developmental psychologists call this supportive presence, or the idea that having a safe, caring person nearby while you work through difficulty actually amplifies the growth that comes from it. You're not removing the adversity, you're creating navigation around it or thru it, andit makes them more capable inside of it. There is a difference in being there to support vs fix, one removes the challenge and growth, the other helps you rise to it.
The third shift, is about the story you tell about what you’ve been through. Research on what psychologists call narrative identity shows that people who are able to weave their difficult experiences into a coherent story, not a story where everything was fine but a story where the hard thing happened and here is what it made of me, those people are significantly more resilient and psychologically well than people who either stay stuck in the pain or pretend it didn’t happen. Your hard experiences are not just things that occurred to you. They’re part of how you became who you are. So don’t dismiss it, don’t pretend it didn’t happen, find the growth and own the strength you gained and the positive way you changed.
Now we also need to acknowledge that there are times when adversity is not the teacher and not all difficulty is productive. Chronic stress without any relief, without support, without any sense that things can change, that’s not building anything, that’s erosion. There’s a significant difference between the kind of challenge that pushes you and the kind that depletes you, and part of developing a healthy relationship with difficulty is learning to tell the difference. If you’re in something that is traumatically breaking you down without any light, without community, without support, the answer is not to push harder and wait for the growth. The answer is to get support. To reach out and ask for help as a sign of strength and awareness. Because the research on post-traumatic growth is clear that the growth doesn’t happen in isolation, it happens in connection. The struggle may be yours alone but the processing of it was never meant to be done alone. This is one of the reasons AA is so effective, it’s not just the steps or the light being shined on what’s going on. It’s the community being built of knowing others are there for you, others have been thru and have found a way and can help support you as you find your own way.
Now if you’re someone who’s been protecting yourself from discomfort for a long time, who’s been avoiding the risks and the hard conversations and the uncertain leaps, I want to say this gently. You’re not broken for doing that. It made sense. It felt safe. But I wonder if you’re starting to think that the safety has its own cost. That the life you’re living might be a little smaller than the one you are capable of, a bigger better life that could be available to you. Because self awareness is always where all of this change or even the possibility of change starts.
So let me bring this back to what we began talking about with the hidden cost of a too-comfortable life, because it can happen quietly and gradually. It shows up as a slightly lower, self limiting ceiling on what you believe you can do. A slightly higher anxiety when things feel uncertain, and maybe a sense of who you actually are under pressure. And the antidote to it is not dramatic, it too is gradual. Remember it’s not about seeking out suffering or creating hardship. It’s just about letting life be a little less managed and let it flow. It’s about trusting yourself and the people you love with a little more of the hard stuff and about getting curious about discomfort, where it can lead you and what you can gain from it, instead of immediately trying to make it stop.
As the Buddha observed, life inherently involves difficulty. That is not a design flaw and in fact it is the design. And when we can stop fighting that and start working with it, when we can meet hard things with curiosity instead of dread, presence instead of avoidance, and the understanding that we are being shaped by all of it, something opens up. Not just resilience and feeling more capable but something more like freedom. The internal confidence that comes from knowing you’ve handled hard things before, and you will handle whatever comes next, that while whatever comes may still be uncertain, you’ve handled uncertainty before and you have the skills to do it again. So as you go about your week this week, what questions will you ask when things get hard this week or feel uncertain? How will you uncover what you might learn and will you be sure to give yourself some self love by making sure you have a good support system when you go about trying to let things flow more naturally? And how will you support others by allowing them to build their adversity muscle and still be there, not to fix but to support and encourage their growth and belief in themselves?
Thank you for being here, thank yourself for allowing yourself to do the hard work, to grow and learn, and please share this if you found it helpful or you know someone who needs to hear it. No matter what kind of life you’re living, we all have pain and suffering and it’s only in the knowledge that we’re sharing and are all working thru something that we gain deeper connections to each other. By sharing that we’re here for each other that we can help each other become more resilient and more capable, and get thru this life with more calm, little by little and peace by peace.
