Obsessively seeking Comfort or compulsively avoiding Discomfort is a very poor tactic in my arsenal, and so tempting, and so alluring, and so difficult to scrub out because the subconscious places it comes from are completely understandable, in some cases even outright rational.
Those who follow me elsewhere have seen me write about this on numerous occasions because it’s one of my Dragons; part of my Path in a way much more concrete and much more real than many of the rest of my personal challenges. It’s one of the big mind-patterns I’ll be dealing with and fighting, for what I presume will be the rest of my entire life.
The basic principle of this is simple.
The Comfort/Discomfort-Loop is helpful when used right.
Seeking Comfort makes sense, insofar as it’s a low-processing-load method to align with Reality, and avoiding Discomfort makes sense for the same reason. This stops short and it does have an upper-bound on how effective it actually is compared to when these two are supplemented with rational decision-making. Rational decision-making, meanwhile, is very difficult in the face of this, because it often dissonates against the basal Discomfort/Comfort-Loop all humans run and execute in our minds constantly.
Comfort and Discomfort are at their strongest and best when they’re treated as Communications from my Body, Senses, and Feelings: signals about my current context and my existing surroundings, be they temporary or consistent. They can become corrupted and harmful rather than helpful and healing like they’re meant to be, and can be abused or misused if I over-indulge or if I over-avoid. Let me explain.
How Comfort and Discomfort get misused
Comfort to the exclusion of everything else, means I’m falling prey to my mind’s desire for it. The Comfort outlives its use as communication from my being to my higher mind and it makes me stagnate. This would be fine, in most circumstances. People should rest! People should be comfortable, and cozy, and should feel pleasure, and should feel good!
The problem is, over-indulging in Comfort and the stagnation it results in always makes us feel horrible if we do so to excess. This has nothing to do with guilt or with conditioning, by the way. It’s just a natural consequence of certain things not getting done. In the most extreme cases this can be stuff like body-maintenance, showering, or eating. In less extreme cases it can be personal or interpersonal things you intended to do but didn’t get around to. I state again, even when this is wholly integrated as a very Personal, Self-Centered and Selfish thing, which means it’s not beholden to the expectations of another person, authority, organization, or entity outside ourselves, it still feels bad. It feels bad to indulge in Comfort to excess because it denies ourselves the ability to do what must be done, and it starts to become an even Greater Discomfort later down the line because of it.
Not showering now because it feels nicer to just chill out and vibe will make you feel sluggish and itchy later. Not doing this enjoyable thing when you have the time to because it feels more resonant in the moment to click around mindlessly wasting time on the Internet, will make you long for it later when you’re even busier and actually can’t do it anymore. “A stitch in time saves nine,” is a stupid saying but it exists for a reason, and this is one of the major ones right here:
Excess Comfort Now brings Excess Discomfort later. It sucks.
It’s one of the Top 5 Worst Things About Being Human.
Discomfort avoided at all costs actually starts out very well but its primary disadvantage is that it seriously doesn’t scale. It can’t scale, because if I let my neuroplasticity just run wild with it, there will be no end to what my mind eventually decides is too uncomfortable. This makes the upper-bound on how useful avoiding Discomfort is much lower than the upper-bound of seeking Comfort’s use. What’s “too uncomfortable” will just be everything that presents the slightest amount of friction or displeasure to me. It’ll end up being anything that I don’t want to deal with. Discomfort is an even better Communication than Comfort is, but it’s easier to distort because our method of engaging with it is the opposite, it’s something we’re intended to flee from, and we traditionally do! You can already imagine the issues this has built-in, right? If I constantly avoid Discomfort, then I’m unable to “unstick” myself and detach from the shlorpy glue that Comfort-seeking binds me with. Avoiding Discomfort to excess makes being Comfort’s prisoner so much more adhesive and it becomes impossible to do anything or process information in any substantial way.
If I’m doing something wrong or if I’ve made a mistake, if I feel some kind of guilt over something, or if I’m meant to do something that is tiring but helpful to me, avoiding any of these things makes them so much worse the longer it goes on. Avoiding Discomfort is made much more damaging by its innate difference in function.
We run towards Comfort. We run away from Discomfort.
Comfort makes us do things, Discomfort prevents us from doing them.
Discomfort is usually present when something is wrong or needs to be addressed that the mind is already unable or unwilling to put energy into. Again, at low-levels this is fine. People shouldn’t be forced to do something that makes them uncomfortable, we shouldn’t be at the mercy of misery and stuff that we don’t want to do, or don’t enjoy.
Like I alluded to in the beginning of this segment, the problem with this is that a lot of the time, we ourselves are abysmally awful at deciding correctly what is “too uncomfortable,” and if we’re not Aware we can very often use this as an Excuse. You all know what happens next. We avoid it for long enough that it actually becomes a much bigger problem later. If we addressed it right now it would just go away more easily.
Note this is not a problem very conscious or self-reflective people have, but we all know a guy like this, someone whose mental resilience feels fragile as glass and for whom the slightest expectation of personal Discomfort, self-reflection, or personal growth is an affront to his very nature. That’s what excess Discomfort-avoidance becomes and leads to. The last awful thing about it has to do with what I mentioned in the bolded quote earlier, what Discomfort makes you do as opposed to Comfort.
Comfort makes you want to keep doing something.
Discomfort makes you not even want to start.
When they work well, they work hand-in-hand to keep you well-centered and in tune with what’s going on around you. When out of hand and abused they just keep you restrained and imprisoned, unable to make yourself do anything. You become a helpless observer in your own body, feeling yourself becoming more and more miserable as time goes on.
So how do we even begin fighting back against this, how do we make sure we use the Comfort/Discomfort-Loop without misusing it? Most importantly, how do we live our lives without letting the Loop use us?
Like many powerful mental techniques, it’s simple but really tough anyway.
Recognize the Comfort/Discomfort Loop as a Tool, not a Goal
Comfort and Discomfort are not the end of the Path. They’re not the grand objective we strive towards, and we should give ourselves regular reminders of that fact. They’re Tools. They’re keys and symbols, they’re tracks in the dirt, broken branches on the path. They’re not the Destination. What the Destination is, I can’t tell you. No one other than you can tell you that, but I can tell you what it’s not; ephemeral, fleeting experiences of short-term resonance and dissonance in our brains.
Knowing this is easy. Remembering it and using it well is really fucking hard.
