The Cozy Paradox
Uncomfortable in a Comfortable World
Several years ago I received a call from a patient named James, whom I hadn’t seen for twenty years. He’d originally sought help in managing the stress he was experiencing while studying for the California bar exam, and later the Louisiana bar exam. Not long after he passed his tests, he moved to New Orleans to settle down and practice law. Like other patients I’ve seen through the years who return for a visit to Los Angeles, James contacted me after all that time to say hello again and bring me up to date. He also wanted to seek my opinion related to his ailing parent.
James had grown up in a rural setting, so I was curious about how he had adjusted to living in a busy city that is constantly bustling with activities and nightlife. On the surface he was living the life he dreamed, and wished he had moved to New Orleans sooner.
“I’ve never felt better,” he declared.
Later in the conversation James began to yawn and then rub his forehead. I asked him if he was feeling all right. He mentioned that he had slept poorly the night before, and had awakened with a headache. What followed was a shift from our casual and getting reacquainted conversation to one of more seriousness. I asked him how well he slept in general and how often he had these headaches. James seemed surprised by my sudden concern about his health.
“I think I generally sleep fine,” he said. “But last night I had to use a sleeping pill.”
I then asked him how often and how long he had been taking sleeping pills. That’s when he said matter-of-factly, “Well, it began last year when I started having these terrible headaches.”
“Have you been evaluated by a physician for these conditions?” I asked.
“Oh yes. He’s the one that gave me the sleeping pills!”
As it turned out, his doctor had diagnosed him with cluster headaches and felt that his nerves and poor sleep were probably to blame. He’d been prescribed Ativan for his nerves and as a sleep aid. He’d also been given barbiturate-based Fiorinal with codeine to help him manage his headaches. James wasn’t totally sold on the idea, but he nevertheless used the prescribed medication regularly. When I asked him more questions about his bedtime routine, he described how he typically became anxious about the mere thought of going to bed, worrying that he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep, and that if he didn’t get the sleep he needed, he was destined to develop a headache. So it didn’t take long for his sleep medication to become a normal part of his bedtime habit as well. And, he told me, although he used to wait to see if he’d run into difficulties with falling asleep, now he found himself downing an Ativan every night no matter what.
“And what about the headache medication? How often do you take that?” I asked.
“I have learned to take it at the slightest hint of a headache in order to head it off before it turns into something big,” James replied. “It can be after breakfast, if I am uncomfortable, and sometimes at bedtime.” As if it was no big deal.
As with the sleep aids, James used to wait on taking the pain pills but now took them at the slightest hint of discomfort. And since he saw stress as the culprit, he was finding himself at times taking Ativan during the day, particularly before an important meeting. James was now living in a cycle of pill popping that acted as a preemptive strike against his fears and ailments.
My concern must have been evident to James from my facial expressions alone. He said, “I admit I’m not happy about this either. But I think this just goes with the territory as we get busier, older, and have more responsibilities,” he stated.
But I wasn’t reassured by James, and I was reluctant to accept that his experience reflected the natural course of aging. Much to the contrary, I felt deeply troubled, for I also noticed that James had gained a lot of weight since I had last seen him. Although he was doing his best to present a strong front, I could see that he was losing ground to an insidious undertow.
What James described to me that day is not an outlier case of someone who lacks good sleep habits and healthy coping skills to combat stress and anxiety. I knew too well that what he characterized so perfectly is a problem that is taking hold in pandemic proportions across America and likely other parts of the world. In the past decade or so, I’ve observed a burgeoning pattern among the hundreds of patients I treat, despite their unique issues. It’s a pattern that reflects a most peculiar phenomenon that is prevalent in our culture today. Theoretically, those of us living in the developed world are a lot safer now than ever before. We don’t have to worry so much about dying of infectious disease, medical advancements have lengthened the average life span by several decades, crime is relatively low, and in America we haven’t seen civil war in nearly 150 years. And we have access to an enormous number of conveniences to make life easier, from the Internet and other technologies to plentiful food supplies and inexpensive means of traveling. But we’ve also grown increasingly less tolerant of being uncomfortable, and our threshold for discomfort is rapidly shrinking. At the mere hint of being uncomfortable, there is an urgent need to take action to relieve or end it. And if it is not managed expediently, then there is an escalating fear that we won’t be able to cope, or that something horrific will unfold.
The proof is easy to spot; it’s in our growing reliance on pharmaceuticals such as antidepressants, painkillers, sleep aids, and ADHD and antianxiety drugs; our rising emotional discord that results in behavioral and emotional overreactions, from overeating to road rage; and a general sense that we’re all living on the verge of a temper tantrum. This widespread unease has even affected our children, more than a quarter of whom now take a medication on a chronic basis.
Think about your own life. Does your temper get triggered easily by inconsequential events such as when someone cuts in front of you in line or when navigating through an automated telephone service? Do you ever feel pain somewhere and immediately worry that a catastrophic illness like cancer is to blame? Do you ever seek food the moment you feel any degree of hunger or unease? Do you sometimes feel like you’re living on the brink of a meltdown, constantly thinking about your next e-mail, text message, or your unending to-do list? It’s as if we’re feeling suffocated in a world where we shouldn’t feel that way. Despite an enormous array of goods and services to make us feel happy, comfortable, and safe, we’re rarely content, and any hint of struggle quickly causes us to feel physically and emotionally threatened. The end result is that we’re more inclined to develop symptoms and illnesses as we scramble to cope with our growing intolerance of discomfort. We’re more at risk for addictions and serious relationship dysfunction. We are, put simply, not comfortable in a world that is increasingly designed for comfort—where we expect to be cozy, healthy, and happy all the time.
The more I noticed this prevailing phenomenon over years of working with patients and seminar participants, the more I sought clear answers. Why have we lost the ability to deal with any adversity? Why is it that in the absence of serious threats—famine, war, pestilence, the proverbial saber-toothed tiger—we wage these wars within us? Why does our internal comfort zone feel cramped when we have wonderful advancements at hand to make life easier and, in a lot of ways, better? It’s astonishing to think that depression, for example, is the leading cause of disability worldwide as measured by “YLD”—Years Lost due to Disability—a metric used by the World Health Organization to refer to how many healthy years are lost due to a health condition. In many developed countries, such as the United States, depression is already among the top causes of both disability and premature death. Why are we so depressed when we have fewer things to be depressed about?
When you look around you, you can see that the depth of people’s fears today is much greater than it was just twenty years ago. It’s what I call the Cozy Paradox: Despite the growing ubiquity of comfort in our lives, we have become increasingly oversensitive to discomfort—so much so that even subtle adversity and general uneasiness have become capable of inculcating fear and unsettling our physical and emotional health. As you’ll learn shortly, disturbing external influences lie at the center of this Cozy Paradox. They can be any number of things, ranging from fluorescent lighting that triggers migraines to calls from your boss that stir agitated feelings leading to sheer panic. In James’s case, the Cozy Paradox is the fact that he lives in one of the most enthralling cities in the world yet harbors fears of insomnia and has to medicate himself to get through his day successfully. He may not describe himself as “uncomfortable,” but it’s the best word to describe his predicament, which is emblematic of how millions of people live today.
What’s important to understand is that our belief about doing well and that we are in control is often belied by our body screaming to the contrary, with symptoms that rage increasingly more out of control. It’s as if we’re living in a house with a leaky roof and are constantly trying to contain the leaks. We are busy doing patchwork on our leaky body with medications, medical procedures, and external distractions, on which we have become increasingly reliant. Clients like James are a common segment of my practice—they appear fine on the surface, but an entirely different picture of them unfolds as they talk about their physical symptoms, daily medications, how much stress they bear, and to what extent they feel in control of their life.
It’s also important to emphasize that in most cases, people like James are not deliberately lying to themselves or others. The mind has an extraordinary ability to overlook, minimize, and even detach from physical and psychological symptoms that have developed. Perhaps this is what has made us such an adaptable species. For centuries, humans have been able to adjust to extreme living conditions—whether it’s the deep freezes of Alaska or the searing temperatures of the Sahara desert. This quality of adaptation no doubt has many great benefits. On the other hand, it can lead us to keep our heads in the sand and not notice that symptoms are beginning to escalate that can significantly alter our lives, driving us, for instance, to live in more restricted ways. James reached the point where he didn’t think he’d be able to sleep without his medication, or get through his workday without having his antianxiety drugs on hand. While he may not have thought he was living a restricted lifestyle, his reliance on such crutches defined his limitations. Symptoms and reactions can develop below the radar, and it’s not until people’s attention is alerted to them or their symptoms begin to commandeer their life that they realize the magnitude of their predicament. I don’t think James tuned in to his own plight until our meeting that day. I assured him, however, that his experience reflected the goings-on in society at large. His story also gave me great pause.
We live in one of the greatest nations on earth, with access to the world’s best medicine and knowledge, and despite spending more money per person on health care than any other country, the United States lags embarrassingly behind in terms of population health. We rank fourteenth among the nations that have the lowest percentage of preventable deaths; we rank twenty-fourth in terms of life expectancy. And on the happiness scale, we don’t even make the top twenty; we come in at twenty-three. (Denmark claims to have the happiest people on the planet.) So despite increasing access to things that make life easier and more comfortable, our happiness quotient is hardly being boosted.
How is it that in our advanced technological era, symptoms and conditions such as obesity, depression, panic and anxiety disorders, sleeplessness, autoimmune disorders, allergies, chronic pain, heart disease, gastrointestinal problems, certain cancers, and fatigue are more rampant than ever? Doesn’t this seem paradoxical? Treatment for such conditions is not stemming the tide. Have we overlooked an important element? What’s missing?
The answer to that question entails a more in-depth understanding and appreciation of the role that discomfort plays in our life and its relationship to our survival instinct. It lies at the heart of our health and abundance in the unfolding twenty-first century.
Feeding the Discomfort
Perhaps there’s no better way to understand the origins of discomfort and its potential behavioral consequences than to hear a few stories of people who illustrate this phenomenon well. James’s story demonstrates the effects of trying to deal with discomfort in ways that may not actually be benefiting his overall health. Now let’s take a closer look at how this discomfort can manifest in other ways. I’ll start with one of my patients, whom I’ll call Kate, who reflects the millions of people struggling to cope with their weight.
Kate was about to start another diet when she came to see me at the request of her primary-care physician, who worried she was prediabetic. She was like many other patients I’d treated in her condition—overweight for far too long and seeking an end to the frustration and anguish of failing again and again at weight loss. The thought of diabetes was terrifying, and her doctor was concerned that, given her history with diets, another attempt at classic dieting using a self-help program or a commercial weight loss program wouldn’t solve the problem. For Kate, the weight started to come on during her college days, when the freshman twenty became a permanent fixture. Now she felt like there was no hope of turning off her “voracious eating machine,” as she called it. And like so many others in her situation, she was well versed in all the popular ideas circling the field today—good carbs versus bad carbs, the perils of processed foods, and the bane of emotional, recreational, and mindless eating. Group therapy had trimmed a few inches here and there, but she always wound up back where she’d started. Kate had embarked on a rigorous exercise program thinking that getting into shape would somehow also change her eating habits. And she had also experimented with medically supervised weight loss that included many different diet pills meant to stimulate her metabolism, squelch her appetite, and make fatty foods unappealing. Suffice it to say Kate won the gold medal for effort, but she hadn’t found the thinner, healthier version of herself.
After I let Kate chronicle her journey, I asked her a simple question: “How often do you eat when you’re actually hungry?” She admitted that she was seldom hungry but found herself eating regardless. According to Kate, she was “hardwired” to eat uncontrollably. It didn’t matter what emotion she was feeling, either. She found herself eating whether she was bored, happy, apathetic, or sad. I agreed that there was something to be said for our thoughts and emotions affecting our eating behaviors, but I also suggested that our inner instincts had something to do with it—in a big way, and especially for someone like Kate. I asked, “What happens when you want to eat but try not to? Do you really begin to feel hungrier?”
Now, this question stumped Kate, and caused her to reconsider her well-rehearsed and pat responses. When she really thought about it, she admitted that she didn’t necessarily feel any hungrier when she tried to avoid eating.
“So then why do you feel you need to eat?” I asked.
Instead of hunger, what she felt was a general uneasiness—a sense of being physically uncomfortable, which she described using the words restless, antsy, and edgy. This would then precipitate her need to eat, because food eased these sensations.
Acknowledging this discomfort was a huge step for Kate, even though she was just beginning to understand its role in her life. I went on to help her come to terms with it by sharing the difference between two distinct parts of her brain that relate to eating. I explained that the oldest part of our brain experiences the perceived lack of food or the anticipation of scarcity as a danger signal; it’s wired to take action in an instinctual manner whenever it feels it’s in harm’s way. And when this survival instinct’s button is pushed, our ancient hardwiring focuses on whatever it needs to do to assure our survival. So it seizes control of our logical mind and takes over our whole body.
As you probably know, long ago we were hardwired to survive by consuming food, especially if we didn’t know when we will eat again. One way to get sustenance quickly was to consume calorie-dense foods, and ever since, this instinctive behavior has been stitched within us. Our early ancestors didn’t need to worry about gaining weight; these preprogrammed instructions to load up on these types of foods had survival value. Look no further than your pet dog to understand these instincts. Dogs don’t lounge through their meals. Instead, they gulp them down as if they are fearful the food will be taken away. They are in fact driven by the instinct that this meal could be their last, even though they are consistently fed.
After Kate took a few moments to digest what I was telling her, she asked an obvious question: “Are you saying that I’m eating to satisfy my survival instincts? That doesn’t make sense to me. Shouldn’t my instincts be driving someone like me to eat less?”
I agreed that this would make logical sense, but the problem is that this part of the brain is not concerned with logic or healthy beliefs or thoughts. It’s instead driven by old programmed instincts honed eons ago, when food wasn’t so plentiful and eating served the sole purpose of preserving our species. But now, this instinct is no longer necessary, yet it operates as if it is. I also explained to Kate that traditional weight loss treatments for overeaters emphasize the importance of correcting thought patterns related to food, such as “this is not healthy,” or “these are empty calories,” or “this will make you fat.” But often these components are only a small part of the big picture, and are trying to tame the often feisty and independent-minded survival instinct that is actually driving the eating behavior. Unfortunately, these thought and belief approaches often fail to penetrate and influence our limbic brain, leaving the survival instinct in full control of our overeating behavior.
Of course, Kate next asked about how she could change her programmed behavior and teach herself to eat less despite such a powerful underlying force.
“You need to become more comfortable with being uncomfortable. Going on another regimented diet won’t take the survival instinct’s needs away, and it will continue to drive your eating behavior. And in many cases, the survival instinct will undermine the results of whatever you do, even if you one day consider something drastic like surgery. So you will need to work on training that primitive part of your brain to no longer equate being uncomfortable with danger or being unsafe—especially when you face no real danger. And by doing so, you’ll find yourself turning to food less and less.”
Given this explanation, I made a deal with Kate: I encouraged her to test, on a short-term basis, what would happen to her when her survival instinct was retrained, rather than rush immediately into another diet or sign up for a formal program. She accepted the challenge, and we went to work on taming this inner part that would always be with her. To Kate’s astonishment, she began to lose weight relatively quickly and ultimately found—for the first time—that she could sustain a significant weight loss. She also steered her blood sugars down to a healthy range, reducing her risk for becoming diabetic.
Kate managed to gain control of her weight within a year of work with me, which reflected nearly the same results she could have expected from any traditional diet. But she achieved so much more than control over her weight, bonuses that another diet could not have provided. Kate could now sustain her weight loss long-term. She also applied the same lessons and strategies she learned with me in her effort to lose weight to a variety of other challenges in her life. Having a survival instinct in shape for the twenty-first century made all the difference. She began to experience more fulfilling relationships, weathered stress and adversity better, became more effective and productive at work, and achieved an improvement in her well-being that even impressed her doctor.
Contrary to what you might think, Kate’s dramatic changes were not the result of willpower and personal restraint courtesy of a regimented program. They were a direct outcome of coming to terms with the core cause of her overeating, which had nothing to do with physical hunger and had everything to do with a neglected part of her brain that ached to be safe and sound.
The 21st-Century Escape Artist
Make no mistake, our survival instinct is affecting and influencing a growing number of facets in our twenty-first-century lives. Most everyone is familiar with the fight-or-flight reaction. We’d run away from a charging bull or pick up a weapon to duke it out. The survivalist in all of us is incredibly powerful—and convincing. It’s that programmed soldier born with us who tells us what to do intuitively to save ourselves when necessary. Rarely do we need to recruit this inborn warrior today because rarely do we find ourselves in situations that are truly life threatening. But the fight-or-flight reaction, which is powered by the survival instinct, is becoming more and more prevalent, while genuine life-threatening danger becomes less so. And as petty situations increasingly trigger our survival instinct, we find our comfort zone shrinking. Eventually, we feel imprisoned by a narrower and finite space, which only increases our feelings of vulnerability.
As I explained in detail to Kate, our inner survivalist lives in the farthest reaches of the brain, in the limbic system, which formed after humans began evolving from reptiles. Its instincts have deep, permanent connections to visceral, or automatic, responses. It’s the part of us that we share with much of the animal kingdom, and it is the home of our primary emotions such as fear, pleasure, love, lust, pain, and rage. It’s also the seat of our addictions, as well as sensations of safety, hunger, and thirst. In fact, virtually all of our gut responses originate in this ancient part of the brain. These responses are also very trainable. By “trainable,” I’m referring to the fact they are easily capable of becoming asso-ciated with certain circumstances, which can then influence our behavior, thoughts, and emotions. If, for example, you have a panic attack in an elevator, you may find yourself inadvertently conditioned or trained to have a panic attack in future elevator encounters.
Clearly, many of our body’s knee-jerk reactions help us to survive in our world, but when those reactions lead to illness or injury, this powerful system has essentially gone awry. Like an Olympic swimmer who trains his body to reflexively flip around when he approaches the wall at the end of the pool, we can train ourselves to respond automatically to external conditions, essentially becoming “programmed” to know when, what, and how much to eat; when to sleep; when to feel ill, healthy, or happy; what is fun and sexy; and so on.
So many of today’s maladies are driven by this primitive brain, which, as we’ll learn in chapter 5, is the ultimate creator of habits. As I also explained to Kate, this is why cognitive approaches, or what I call “lecturing the emotions,” can fail to improve matters. They rely too much on the cerebral brain, and in particular the cerebral cortex—the modern, advanced section of the human brain—to be the purveyor of change, while our instincts and intense emotions stored below in the limbic brain remain untouched and unaddressed. As you might have guessed already, the limbic and cerebral brain speak two vastly different languages, just as two people living under the same roof can possess two different personalities and rely on separate forms of communication. The cerebral brain is reflecting, calculating, and logical; it prefers to engage in critical thinking, problem solving, and analytical, inductive, and deductive thinking. Its decisions and choices typically involve a pause as it takes data in, draws conclusions, and then acts on this information.
The limbic brain, on the other hand, responds instantaneously with primal emotional and physical reactions to the world that revolve around fear, safety, pain, pleasure, hurt, and anger. Our limbic brain is the sensitive and reactive part of us. And our two brains may find themselves in disagreement, in which the logical brain is telling us we are safe, while the limbic brain has an entirely different opinion. Can you guess which brain usually wins? If you guessed the limbic brain, then you are absolutely right! We don’t have to look too far for an example of the two brains being in conflict. Have you ever told yourself you weren’t going to eat a certain food, like dessert, bread, or candy, when you were out to eat? What happened? Did you notice that one part of the brain was saying no while another part of you was saying yes, yes, yes to eating the food? Who won? Was it your good intentions or your lusty limbic brain?
This is exactly the type of disconnect that went on with Kate. During her days of overeating, her cerebral brain and limbic brain were communicating and expressing themselves in two entirely different tongues, with neither of them understanding or in agreement with the other. Her cerebral brain was screaming that it had had enough of being overweight, and it was searching for a logical and cognitive solution (i.e., another diet), while her limbic brain was tenaciously erupting like a volcano, with no interest in a rational containment, and screaming for food.
Safety and Change Go Hand in Hand
If the idea that we can pin our disorders and dysfunctions on our survival instinct still sounds a bit abstract and obtuse to you, let’s take a few more examples. Consider Janet, whose life, like Kate’s, became dominated by her survival instinct. For Janet it began like it had hundreds of times before—catching a plane, then a taxi, which drove her to where she was scheduled to speak on the topic of world hunger. Even though she always built in a buffer of several hours in case something unanticipated led to a delay, on this particular day it wasn’t enough. A two-hour holdup on the tarmac followed by rush-hour traffic meant she had no chance of getting there on time.
When she finally arrived at her destination thirty minutes late for a sixty-minute talk, she was extremely ramped up. The combination of her lateness and built-in, ordinary anxiety prior to giving a talk made for the perfect cocktail of sheer panic. Her heart pounded as her head began to sweat, her hands tingled, and she found herself blushing in a mental fog. She had difficulty concentrating as the panic attack descended on her. Luckily, Janet managed to fumble her way through her speech, and she was relieved when it was all done. At the time, she chalked it up to “one of those things.” But when she appeared for her next talk a few weeks later—on time, no less—she experienced the same disturbing panic attack.
Searching for a solution, Janet went to see her doctor, who prescribed Klonopin, an antianxiety medication that she was instructed to take before her next talk, which would inhibit a panic reaction. This seemed to solve the problem for at least her next six or seven presentations, but she needed more and more of the medication to preserve her composure. She noticed that more medication meant she felt less mentally sharp and articulate. Janet felt stuck between a rock and a hard place, and eventually began turning down speaking engagements altogether.
But it didn’t stop there, for Janet was also an actress, and she began declining auditions for television shows. Her career had once flourished as she landed a number of high-profile TV gigs, but by the time she came to see me, her panic attacks were enough to keep her away from all speaking engagements and auditions. Janet felt vulnerable, as if she no longer had control over her life, and the thought of having an attack was terrifying.
So how does vulnerability relate to Janet’s panic attacks? As I learned in my work with her, she had been overweight as a child and experienced a lot of teasing and rejection as a result. Now, thirty years later, the prospect of having anxiety symptoms in front of an audience represented the risk of being judged harshly and appearing stupid—which was the epitome of rejection. (As an aside, fear of rejection is also a strong emotion that’s likely tied to our survival instincts; long ago we needed to be accepted within our social group just to stay alive through the help of others and to procreate.) The mere anticipation of this rejection was so horrifying and uncomfortable that Janet was willing to do anything to avoid it. Even though it wasn’t logical, it really didn’t matter, and Janet couldn’t talk herself out of it. This was a sure case of the survival instinct seizing control of her life to keep her from experiencing discomfort and harm.
This instinct is so pervasive today that it can dominate and, quite frankly, erode our personal and work relationships. Another example is Allison, who’d had a slew of disappointing and unsuccessful relationships with men, the last one of which left her physically sick from the heartache. The mere anticipation of another relationship would trigger fear and pain in her limbic brain, as well as nausea and headaches, courtesy of her survival instinct. As this instinct took action to alleviate the discomfort (the fear of rejection), it strove to create safety in any way it could. In Allison’s case, this meant refusing to accept future dates or to put herself in a situation in which she could meet a man.
Although Janet and Allison would have liked nothing more than to feel a greater sense of ease and comfort, their compelling need to alleviate their discomfort became the driving force in their lives, and a formidable obstacle to creating change. The need to banish their discomfort and generate instant safety ultimately took precedence over the need for self-improvement. Hence, change is possible only if it’s truly safe to change.
Let me bring in one final example, which I think many people can relate to: the chronic insomniac. To think that an insomniac may actually be avoiding sleep to allay fears or feelings of discomfort seems illogical and counterintuitive, but not when you consider that the ability to fall asleep depends on our inherent need to feel safe and in control. But what happens when sleep inadvertently becomes associated with losing control? Although the insomnia could have started harmlessly one night following a bad day at work, after a series of sleepless nights, a fear of letting go begins to reign supreme over the biological need to sleep. In fact, one of the ways in which our survival instinct deals with fear is by getting in the way of us letting go, or by holding us back. This explains why many people who’ve suffered a heart attack develop terrible insomnia: They equate letting go and falling asleep with dying. It’s true that surrendering to the sleepy feeling is as close as we can get to surrendering to death. And because this is frightening, the survival instinct restrains the sleepy feeling and interferes with it.
Obvious questions that you might be pondering at this point: Why can’t these people see the train wreck coming? How can a single bad experience erupt into a chronic problem? Why can’t our instincts help us out long before we’re essentially paralyzed and require serious help? Sometimes, we can and do notice the red flags in the distance, but we may minimize their gravity or ignore them entirely, just as James did. Because we’re genetically wired for survival, we can adapt to change with little conscious consideration. This inherent capacity to acclimate to new environments, including those that could be hostile or unhealthy, inadvertently allows us to put our head in the sand, until circumstances lead to a crisis that forces us to pay attention and take action.
Also, rather than asking ourselves why we can’t sleep soundly or manage our stomach pain at night, let’s face it—it’s far easier to take a sleep aid or painkiller. In lieu of figuring out what’s at the core of our symptoms, we reach for relief at the drugstore and force our bodies to adjust to this new environment of chronic insomnia or intestinal distress. We begin to accept and tolerate a suboptimal way of living, oblivious to opportunities to change before our health takes a bigger turn for the worse. But this human quality should not be judged harshly, for it’s our nature to acclimate and not take action until a real crisis emerges. No doubt this attribute has helped us survive as a species, but for this next century, our survival may in fact depend on a whole other paradigm: being able to weather the storm of discomfort in healthy ways, and becoming much more tolerant of discomfort, like warriors, turning sources of discomfort into sources of power.
But before we get to the how-tos of becoming a warrior, which is the crux of part 2, we have to answer many important questions in preparation, starting with the following: What is the true nature of discomfort? What characterizes discomfort from a practical perspective, and what are the outward signs that your discomfort is reaching critical levels, potentially putting you at risk for health issues and other challenges in life? These are the questions we’re going to address next, and you’ll get a chance to take a quiz to determine where you fall on the spectrum of discomfort.