Taking the “Dis”
Out of Discomfort
The Hardy Survivalist
Life is destined to be in a state of constant change. I can’t reiterate this point enough. And even things that bring us joy and comfort are doomed to change as well; one day they are available to us and another day they are not. We cannot avoid losing what makes us comfortable. So it’s inevitable that we must come to terms with change and concomitant feelings of discomfort. Even that one word—discomfort—needs a new definition. We tend to treat discomfort as something bad and negative, something to avoid, dread, and fear. This is apt: We are wired to equate discomfort with fear and imminent danger because at one time that association served us well, helping us to avoid situations that were truly hazardous. But now, as I’ve been detailing, that’s seldom the case. Our level of discomfort today is in most cases not externally created, like it was in early times. Although external stressors can influence our discomfort, more often than not it’s generated by internal forces.
In chapter 5, I discussed how our fearful reactions and our inability to manage agitance leads to maladaptive habits, which are poor solutions. The purpose of these bad habits is to help us avoid pain, fear, or distress, and they trigger us to take certain courses of action that allow us to avoid confronting the uncomfortable feeling and fear. But they are temporary fixes, and they do nothing to improve our management of the discomfort and fear; they merely enable us to bury the fear—but at best it’s a shallow grave, for the fear continues to smolder and grow, becoming a much more formidable force. At first this force can exist and even grow separate from our more conscious, cerebral brain. We can continue with our lives, feeling little impediment or impairment due to practicing these bad habits. But there’s a price to pay, because what is actually happening within the brain is a so-called fractionation: The different parts of the brain—limbic and cerebral—are now functioning separately with their own agendas. This compromises our brainpower tremendously. And with different parts of the brain pursuing different agendas, it can be a little bit like Dr. Dolittle’s pushmi-pullyu creature, and a certain level of paralysis begins to develop. I also discussed how these maladaptive habits, so often accompanied by diminishing dopamine levels, only enslave us further by squelching this critical brain chemical and ensuring that we remain tyrannized.
When this polarity in the brain takes hold, the limbic part that’s being sequestered can, over time, metaphorically throw a temper tantrum, erupting in such a way that the cerebral brain loses full control. We already know that this has been found in post-traumatic stress disorder, in which the prefrontal cortex of the cerebral brain loses its ability to regulate the limbic brain. Technically this is referred to as dysregulation, which results in the limbic brain becoming overly sensitized to fear and danger while the cerebral brain has little ability to convince it otherwise. So initially, sequestering this limbic response may be similar to hacking off a reed that exists above the soil, while leaving its roots untouched beneath. The roots continue to flourish, strengthen, and expand underground while growing an even stronger foundation—eventually sprouting in multiple places above the soil in addition to the one where it initially appeared.
So we’ve really come to an important junction, where it’s important to accept levels of discomfort in our lives. In Jack Kornfield’s seminal writings, he talks about how pain is inevitable, but suffering is not. The goal, therefore, is to embrace discomfort in our lives, and to experience it in a more expansive manner. Rather than avoiding it, we can learn how to draw power from it. Just as pain can be an incredibly insightful teacher, the same is true of discomfort, making it something to embrace.
In many treatments today, the goal is to remove discomfort. I have already talked about how this has led to an explosion of prescriptions for painkillers. But it has also spawned many other interventions for dealing with it. The biological model has sought ways to use drugs and treatments to interfere with the registration of the pain response in the brain—to block the pain receptors. Most often this has involved medications, and in other cases surgical interventions that literally sever nerves so they cannot transmit the discomfort. Rehabilitation typically works on training the body to alter the physical causes of discomfort, such as retraining muscle groups or teaching the body to compensate for the pain by reacting in new ways. Traditional psychotherapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy looks to alter how beliefs and thought patterns influence uncomfortable reactions, with the assumption that by altering these beliefs and thoughts it becomes possible to turn down the volume or the cause of the discomfort. In mindful meditation, the goal is to learn to detach from the discomfort by accepting its presence while attaching less significance to it. This “top-down” approach relies on being able to teach the cerebral brain how to control the limbic brain. The term top-down comes from the fact that the cerebral brain, which sits on top of the limbic brain, is now exerting its influence from the outside in as opposed to the limbic brain exerting its influence from the inside out.
These approaches all have value, and many, such as mindful meditation and CBT, have been proven to make a notable difference, but each can also have certain limitations. I am going to introduce an entirely different strategy, one that has multiple benefits and can afford us the opportunity to engage both the cerebral and limbic parts together in order to gain a more comprehensive management and control over the discomfort in our lives. I call it the Survivalist Strategy of the 21st Century.
The Survivalist Strategy of the 21st Century
My approach doesn’t attempt to assert control over discomfort by numbing the limbic brain with medications or by trying to lecture it via the cerebral brain. This approach encourages the limbic brain and the cerebral brain to participate equally, which will allow the discomfort to be managed more broadly, instead of in an absolute or unilateral manner. The more parts of the brain that we get involved, the more comprehensively and effectively we can experience and manage discomfort. So rather than teaching one of our brains to dominate the other in the top-down approach, we are invoking a horizontal approach that equally involves both of our brains.
Perhaps the easiest way to think about defining this strategy from a metaphorical standpoint is to consider a rainbow. But instead of a typical rainbow, which has a spectrum of colors, consider one that has only one color, and it’s red. Clearly the red color would be our only experience of the rainbow. Let’s say within the same rainbow other colors begin to materialize, such as blue, yellow, purple, or orange. Now our experience of red is changed. Rather than it being dominant, it now shares the stage with other colors. And in fact we may find that the color red takes up less space in the rainbow, and now exerts less influence, leading us to perceive and experience it differently as the other colors join it.
In a similar way, we are interested in bringing different areas of the brain to tackle what happens when discomfort is experienced. I call this building a brain community. And as other parts of the brain become involved, there is a strength in numbers, which dilutes the influence of the amygdala fear center. In other words, you can begin to experience discomfort less prominently. Like the color red in our rainbow, it begins to take up less space, while other sensations and experiences occupy a larger space. Now both the limbic brain and the cerebral brain’s experience of discomfort has changed. In this way we are bringing in multiple parts of the brain to reexperience discomfort while forming a cohesiveness between them. It’s important, however, to understand that just as the rainbow involves a number of colors, we are developing a duality (defined more extensively on page 168), whereby it’s possible to experience discomfort even as we experience other sensations or feelings. Put simply, it’s not necessary to banish discomfort in order to feel more comfortable. As you’ll see, it’s the presence of discomfort that in fact makes comfort more possible.
Said another way, you will learn how to retrain your limbic brain to interpret its experiences differently, broadening its ability to differentiate and react to uncomfortable situations. Rather than experiencing discomfort as a trigger for the survival instinct because it feels that we are in harm’s way, we teach our instinct to respond with a sense of safety, heading off the tendency to react in fear. Meanwhile, we’re teaching the cerebral brain that discomfort can be channeled in productive ways—such as to facilitate performance, decision making, and health. So now the limbic and cerebral brains don’t have to resort to distraction or even maladaptive habits to manage discomfort.
Fascinating data shows how this neural retraining is possible. Recall that I described how the brain stem sends its primal impulses to the limbic brain, which then attaches meaning and significance to these impulses. In particular, when it attaches fear or danger to an impulse, it triggers the survival instinct, and then sends signals to the sympathetic nervous system to respond with a fight-or-flight reaction. The goal is to change the limbic and cerebral brains’ reactions to the primary impulses registered in the mind and body. Scientific evidence now reveals that the amygdala, housed in the limbic brain, can in fact become better at determining fear situations. As an added bonus, we also can reduce the fractionation between the two brains, allowing them to integrate more so that all parts of the brain can work together in a coordinated and aligned manner. This type of coordination within the brain is a far more effective manner of using its internal resources to successfully cope with and manage our current world—a world that is not black and white and not defined in absolute terms such as safe and not safe. Our world is best defined by many different shades of gray, which makes it more appropriate that our brains become agile and adept at handling all these shades of gray using synchronized reactions and responses to complex situations.
Scientists have proven that the environment can influence the size of the amygdala. By “environment,” I’m referring to social networks. Those individuals with more complex social networks have a larger amygdala, which helps them to better manage their social systems. In one particular study, researchers reported that the “amygdala expanded in conjunction with some other brain regions to which it is densely connected,” such as the hippocampus.
So just as brain mass can strengthen with meditation, limbic structures, such as the amygdala, hypothalamus, and hippocampus, are also capable of adapting to changes that allow them to function in a less absolute manner. Capitalizing on this ability, we will begin by grooming the limbic and cerebral brains to differentiate better between the levels of discomfort, raising the bar before the survival instinct is pressed into action.
Getting into Total Shape
As you prepare to alter the fractionation in your brain, while grooming it for alignment, keep in mind that the long-term goal is much more than situational improvements in your ability to tolerate discomfort. Your ability to manage discomfort needs to become a permanent part of your internal fabric, which will allow you to tolerate higher levels of discomfort more consistently across the different contexts in which it arises in your life. You won’t be “spot-treating” your discomfort in certain areas of your life as you would spot-treat a muscle in the gym using barbells—you’ll instead be getting yourself in shape to handle any situation in which discomfort emerges.
The Creation of Alignment
To begin the process of retraining your brain’s survival instinct, it’s first important for you to identify one area of your life that creates some level of discomfort. Find something specific that creates discomfort but not to the extent that it generates a level of panic. For example, if you had to apply a 1-to-10 rating scale, with 10 representing the most uncomfortable (“I’m in a full-blown state of panic!”), then see if you can pinpoint an uncomfortable situation or experience that’s closer to a 5 or 6 on the scale. It helps to compile a list in which you write down and rate different situations or experiences that are associated with discomfort (call it your Discomfort List). Once you gain confidence with using this method to retrain the limbic and cerebral brains, you can then tackle even higher levels of discomfort.
For the record, I want to be clear that this approach isn’t meant to be used in lieu of professional help. For those with truly life- and health-threatening situations or behaviors, this should be used in tandem with professional help. Moreover, you should not discontinue any medication that you are currently prescribed. This approach is primarily meant to work in conjunction with any treatment you are receiving, and to help you rely continually less on those maladaptive habits you have developed to sidestep learning to manage discomfort better. Please remember to not do any of these retraining exercises while driving.
Remember, even as we tackle minor sources of discomfort, we lessen the likelihood that higher levels will materialize, while increasingly reducing our oversensitivity to discomfort over the long haul.
Let’s consider some examples that could represent a level 5 or 6 on the discomfort scale. For the chronic weight loss struggler, it could be not eating for five or six hours. For claustrophobic people, it could be the anticipation of flying on a plane, driving on the freeway, or getting into an elevator. For others it could be the thought of public speaking. Or even the dread of having to confront a coworker or your boss, or deal with a thorny issue with your partner, parents, or children. Alternatively, it could be the mere anticipation of developing a physical symptom, such as insomnia or a headache. You could also consider those scenarios in which someone says certain things that are likely to incite your emotions.
In the following sections, I will be outlining a number of ways to begin retraining your limbic and cerebral responses to being uncomfortable. Feel free to test out each one of these different paradigms as a way to begin shifting your response to discomfort. Each approach involves creating different neuronal patterns within the brain and body so that discomfort now becomes associated with a broader and more comprehensive reaction of the two brains and body to discomfort.
Once you have selected your particular situation to use for the retraining, you’re first going to master the Schoen Breath Technique, which I outlined in the previous chapter and which generally produces results in forty-five to sixty seconds. I’ll be asking you to employ my breath technique at the beginning of all suggested strategies outlined in the following pages. But remember to check marcschoen.com for other ways to strengthen your results and build your brain commounity. Every time you practice this method, you’ll want to do so until you feel some level of relaxation before adding another strategy. For example, if being fully relaxed is a 10, then strive for at least a level of 4, and of course more is better. The purpose of this step is to set the stage for reconditioning the discomfort experience with a greater level of comfort and safety. But a quintessential part of this exercise is to build your confidence in your ability to alter the physiology of your body. This is a critical point, and cannot be overstated. Developing this confidence is essential in learning to manage your discomfort more effectively. Although it isn’t possible to have complete power over your physiology, it is possible to optimize what you can control. Feeling a greater sense of control is powerfully correlated with health and hardiness; thus it represents an important part of retraining your brain and body to manage discomfort more effectively.
Duality plays a major role in retraining our response to discomfort. For our purposes, duality refers to the ability to be aware of multiple levels of sensory experiences. For example, when you are at the beach, it’s common to feel both a cool ocean breeze and the warmth of the sun or the texture of the sand. Or you may laugh even as you feel the irritation from a mosquito bite. To imagine these multiple sensory experiences is not a difficult task. But when someone is experiencing stress, anxiety, pain, or fear, it is not uncommon to view these experiences as absolute—that they are all-or-nothing events. For example, it’s typical for those in pain to view themselves as either in pain or not in pain. Or, from a mood standpoint, you’re either happy or not happy. Yet these types of emotions and sensations are rarely experienced in the mind and body in an absolute manner, even though they may be perceived as such. In other words, we can feel pain, but other parts of the body may feel completely comfortable or nothing at all. Viewing the world in absolutes sets us up for many ups and downs, whether it’s significant pain or no pain, or happiness or despair. What’s particularly troubling is that when we perceive our sensory reactions in this black-and-white manner, we experience our reactions in extreme ways. This explains why even a small trigger, such as a long line at the airport to get through security, can lead us to overreact at times with anger, sweating, anxiety, and even catastrophic thinking—all of which are hardly justified by the situation.
Learning how to experience the world in a non-absolute way—to experience it from the standpoint of duality—is key. Practically speaking, this would imply that it’s possible to feel fear or discomfort while another part of us feels relaxed or unanxious at the same time. From our perspective, we are interested in learning how to feel a certain sensation or experience such as safety or inner peace even while another part of us might be concerned about an external outcome. For example, if you are feeling discomfort as you prepare to give an oral presentation to your supervisors, then the goal is to feel a profound sense of safety and peace while at the same time a piece of you still feels the discomfort. In this way, the amount of space occupied by the discomfort you feel is dwarfed by the space reserved for feeling safe and in control. The metaphor I like to use in describing this more precisely is to refer to the ocean, which has a surface filled with all sorts of turmoil—waves, swells, choppy water, and riptides. Yet at the same time the water just beneath the surface is calm and still, hardly affected by all the activity on the surface. In fact, the activity on the surface is just that—a mere surface disturbance. Similarly, what we’re trying to do is develop an inner core that’s like the water beneath the surface, in which all sorts of activity can transpire on the outside while we remain safe and at peace on the inside.
To achieve this, it becomes essential that we establish a duality in which two different events can in fact occur simultaneously. And notice that duality implies that these two levels can exist side by side—that it isn’t necessary to somehow deny one for the sake of the other. This is exactly what we strive for in our lives: a state in which we can be busy and active, juggling a number of different demands, while feeling safe and in control in what I call the Inner Core State of Balance.
I first came to understand the importance of duality in a surprisingly fortuitous way. I had moved my office to a new location, but without realizing how being on a busy street (Wilshire Boulevard, in Beverly Hills) would affect the atmosphere inside. All day long I would hear car engines, horns, the slamming of breaks, and sirens. I was very irritated with myself to think that I’d chosen this location. I remember saying to myself, “Marc, what were you thinking renting this office when you do hypnosis all day long?” I then tried to figure out how I could induce a quiet, hypnotic state in my patients while the din of traffic and the constant interruptions rang from the street. To my surprise, I soon found that when patients learned to develop a trance state within earshot of all these external interruptions, they were far more equipped to establish these quiet states of being in their regular life in the outside world. I had never considered that doing hypnosis in a noiseless room while creating an inner peace state was not applicable to the world in which most of us live—with constant distractions and interruptions mostly beyond our control. I quickly learned how to make it possible for these patients to experience peace on the inside while still being aware of all the noise and distractions on the outside. It was through these clinical experiences that the concept of duality became a cornerstone of my work with people.
Another way of understanding duality is to see it as a means of creating a better balance between the outer world and our inner world, as well as between our cerebral and limbic brains. Just as you would anchor a boat in choppy waters knowing that it might sway and drift somewhat yet remain intact, you can create inner peace in a world of distractions, ultimately establishing duality. Creating this duality gives us a great opportunity to minimize the effect that the outside world and its distractions have on our inner core. By building this inner core, we in a sense gain much more control and safety from a constant state of distractions and interruptions, and the barrage of unexpected events in our lives.
APPLYING THE CONCEPT OF DUALITY
Since duality is a major part of retraining the brain to manage discomfort in a more productive way, we begin duality training by applying the Schoen Breath Technique to the discomfort experience that you selected. In this exercise, the goal is to experience multiple levels at the same time—to feel some level of discomfort while at the same time feeling a level of relaxation. This may seem counterintuitive, but the duality concept emphasizes the lack of absoluteness. By using this breath technique, it’s possible to create a whole other layer of experience concomitant with the discomfort experience. Learning this duality and gaining confidence in your ability to experience it will be like building a muscle that you can use to shift your experience of discomfort in a much larger and more significant way.
Once you’ve practiced my breathing technique, the next step is to apply it when you’re experiencing a mild level of discomfort in the situation you selected earlier. Remember, the goal isn’t to be just relaxed and not feel discomfort. Rather, the goal is to have a sense of duality—the ability to feel discomfort in some parts of the brain and body while feeling even a ten percent level of relaxation in other areas. Of course, more than ten percent is even better. As you do this, notice which parts of the mind and body feel the discomfort or less relaxation. At the same time, notice which parts feel a level of relaxation. For example, maybe your shoulders and neck feel tense, but your chest, arms, and legs feel light. Pay particular attention to the fact that these two disparate sensations can coexist—that is, there isn’t an absoluteness to your experience, but rather a duality. Now go back and redo the breath exercise, again inducing a level of relaxation. Focus on the same discomfort situation. What happens now? Is there a difference from the first time you did this? Is it possible to perhaps feel not only a greater level of relaxation with the discomfort, but a growing sense of safety?
The concept of safety with this duality is critical, for we are very interested in the ability to feel discomfort and safety at the same time. By learning that we can feel a level of discomfort and yet feel physically relaxed, we are in a sense teaching the mind and body that the body is safe even in the face of discomfort or danger. Or to put it another way, the cerebral mind gains confidence in its ability to endure discomfort without having to rely on external means to manage it. At the same time, the limbic brain learns that discomfort is not a threat to the body’s survival and can be experienced with much more safety. The importance of confidence cannot be overstated; it’s natural to lack confidence in your ability to manage adversity, but by grooming the cerebral mind and sustaining a certain level of confidence in the face of discomfort, you can confront future discomfort with successful outcomes.
Label Your Discomfort
This strategy actually owes its success to the cerebral part of the brain. The technique was recently endorsed by Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock, two researchers at the University of Chicago who reported on its benefits in the journal Science in January 2011. They’ve shown the positive effects of having students write down their worries prior to taking an exam. Doing so allows those students who have test-related discomfort to deal more effectively with it and to moderately improve performance. Their research confirms earlier studies, like those led by Dr. Matthew Lieberman at UCLA, that found that labeling fear responses can lessen the limbic brain’s activity in the amygdala. In other words, when you identify and describe your discomfort, you lessen the fears associated with it. This may explain why keeping a journal by your bedside at night can be so effective in permitting more restful sleep. When you write out your deepest woes and concerns prior to bedtime, you in effect help tame your limbic brain and settle those nerves that would otherwise cause insomnia.
For our purposes, this strategy is a powerful tool in bringing the cerebral brain into much greater alignment with the limbic brain. We are not interested in using this technique to merely tame the limbic brain. Instead, we use this strategy to create powerful new associations between the experience of discomfort and alternative reactions in the brain. It’s very similar to what I described in chapter 6 about pairing, in which two different experiences are associated to create a relationship between them. This strategy also builds on the concept of “that which is wired together, fires together,” which I discussed in chapter 4. Clearly, labeling your discomfort builds on the concept of duality. In our case, it’s the idea of discomfort and safety at the same time. The power of labeling cements this new association in a striking way in the cerebral brain, since the cerebral brain relies on logical thinking. So in a sense we are giving the cerebral brain tools to better understand the experience of discomfort. This strategy will be used in two chief ways. First, it will help to identify your areas of discomfort in explicit ways, such as by writing them down or keeping a journal. And second, we’ll use labeling in the process of pairing discomfort with a number of other more positive experiences—a process you’re about to learn.
Practice Gratitude
Gratitude isn’t just about giving thanks or counting your blessings for good measure. As it turns out, there has been a significant amount of research that has looked at the value of gratitude in terms of discomfort and hardiness. Alex Wood, of the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, is one of many researchers who study the profound effects that a little bit of gratitude can have on one’s quality of life and health. According to Wood and his colleagues, gratitude is “part of a wider life orientation towards noticing and appreciating the positive in the world. This life orientation should be distinct from other emotions such as optimism, hope, and trust.” In a review article published in 2010, Wood and colleagues note that gratitude has a strong relationship to a number of very important aspects of functioning, including positive social relationships, more adaptable personality styles, and improved physical health, stress management, and sleep. Other studies have confirmed similar findings, showing that gratitude influences the experience of pain and overall life satisfaction and reduces body dissatisfaction.
So where does gratitude come from? What is particularly interesting is that it seems to emanate from the limbic areas of the brain. Recent research has shown that the “thoughtless” part of the limbic brain is actually where the experience of gratitude comes from. Because of this, we are particularly interested in drawing on the effects of gratitude and using them to influence the limbic brain’s experience of discomfort. And by pairing these two experiences—discomfort and gratitude—we can begin to retrain the limbic brain’s response to discomfort. As this happens, other parts of the brain—particularly the cerebral brain—become involved through the process of labeling, which again allows the discomfort to be experienced more broadly rather than in an absolute or unilateral manner. Stated differently, it now becomes possible to feel less threat and danger when faced with discomfort. Remember, the more parts of the brain we can enlist to work together (brain community), the more effectively and comprehensively we can experience and manage discomfort. It’s very important not to view this exercise as some form of new age therapy meant to whitewash reality; rather, think of it as a way of building up other muscles in the brain so that when it experiences discomfort, it now has more strength and inner resources to manage it.
Just how can this gratitude-discomfort pairing be done? One of the most effective ways is to simply boost your sense of gratitude through a proven strategy: writing down and then thinking about certain areas or events in your life for which you feel grateful. Following is a step-by-step exercise you can do to use gratitude in training your limbic and cerebral response:
Step 1: Identify Sources of Gratitude. Write down three to five events or experiences in which you feel a sense of gratitude. Examples include quality time with your children or partner, a trip to Italy, your mother’s triumph over cancer, or the success of your business. If you cannot come up with the experience, then imagine one you would like to have and the feeling that would be associated with it. Make sure that as you do this, you not only think of the experience, but more important, you focus on the feeling attached to it. Lightness, warmth, openness, or other pleasurable feelings might be the sensations you experience as you focus on these gratitude moments. Once you are able to conjure up the feeling of gratitude, which is essential to this exercise, you are ready to proceed to step 2.
Step 2: Perform the Schoen Breath Technique. This will adequately elicit an elevated relaxation response.
Step 3: Introduce the Source of Discomfort. Now begin thinking of that discomfort situation that you selected earlier. Allow a certain level of discomfort to move through your body, starting with just a small amount at first. Next, go over one or two of the items that you selected on your gratitude list. Make sure to not only recall these items but to conjure up the feeling of gratitude related to them. Keep in mind that the goal of the exercise is not to vanquish discomfort, but rather to associate the discomfort with a feeling other than anxiety or danger.
Step 4: Acknowledge the Duality. We are calling on the concept of duality that I described earlier, in which it’s possible to experience multiple sensory experiences at the same time. For example, you may notice that you can feel some emotional discomfort that registers as a tightness in your chest, while feeling a pleasant lightness or warmth related to your feelings of gratitude that you noticed in step 1. You are now enabling the limbic brain to experience discomfort in a broader and much less absolute way.
Step 5: Bring in the Cerebral Brain—the Power of Labeling. Now we bring in the labeling strategy for purposes of pairing discomfort with the feeling generated when you focus on feeling appreciative. You’re using labeling to identify and acknowledge that discomfort and the feeling of gratitude can exist simultaneously. The labeling not only turns down the volume of the limbic response to discomfort, but more important, it seals the connection within the cerebral brain that a duality can exist: It’s possible to feel discomfort and a positive experience as well—in this case, a sense of gratitude. Remember, we are not interested in extinguishing the limbic response. We’re aiming to bring it more into alignment with the cerebral brain.
Once you can simultaneously experience discomfort and gratitude in the mind and body, use your cerebral brain to relabel discomfort as more comfortable and safe to feel. How can this be done in a practical way? Labeling does require some deliberate self-talk here, but for good reason. Use labeling to tell yourself that you can comfortably experience gratitude and discomfort at the same time. For example, if you have chosen hunger to be your discomfort experience, you would focus on being hungry while also tuning in to feelings of gratitude. In other words, you are allowing your cerebral brain to draw a conclusion that you can feel discomfort even while you’re registering another feeling. This process also draws on what I described earlier about the importance of confidence, whereby the cerebral brain develops a greater confidence in being able to manage future discomfort in a more effective manner. The end result is that the cerebral brain learns to interpret future discomfort in a more productive and confident manner.
Step 6: Repeat. It’s important to understand that creating change and reconditioning are not quickly established by doing an exercise like this just one time. It’ll be important to repeat this regularly over time. For example, consider doing this exercise once a day maybe five days a week and see what you began to notice. Most likely you’ll see that even in the face of dealing with the uncomfortable situation, the discomfort interferes less in your life—it’s more tolerable and feels far less formidable, and obstacles don’t get so much in the way of productive functioning.
Recruit the Power of Social Support and Trust
In our next exercise, we turn to the area of trust and social support. Social support and trust have long been found to have an intense effect on the limbic response of the brain. In particular, they are strongly linked to the release of the brain chemical oxytocin, which influences the amygdala and brain stem. Sometimes referred to as the bonding hormone or the love hormone, oxytocin makes people care for each other, promoting harmony, cooperation, and altruism. It also has been found to be a factor in allowing social support to promote resilience, as well as making stress levels more manageable. In other words, in addition to being linked with situations of warmth and love, it’s also tied to stressful situations. When the going gets rough, it helps people feel more connected and less frightened.
Although the release of oxytocin is typically talked about in reference to women, men also produce this hormone and benefit equally from it, as it’s involved in our fostering relationships, seeking comfort and consolation, and building trust and likeability. In one of the more provocative studies of late on this multitasking hormone, Hungarian scientists found that oxytocin also participates in the science of secret-telling—the mere exchange of secrets between two people can elevate oxytocin levels and help forge a stronger bond.
For years I’ve employed the power of group settings as a means of boosting my patients’ success. In some settings it’s about helping a group manage their individual stress levels, while in others it’s facilitating weight loss. One of the strategies I use in these group settings is to evoke feelings of discomfort. With my weight loss groups, for example, I have my patients come to meetings hungry. I then pair this discomfort with the comfort of hypnosis, while drawing on the collective force of the entire group to provide social support. This creates a feeling of being bonded with others going through the experience as individuals work off one another in their emotions and generate strong feelings of support. Often I find that these treatments can produce results far superior to those achieved in a one-on-one setting. No doubt with this type of group treatment, it becomes possible then to associate the discomfort in the situation with the comfort provided by the oxytocin release, thereby sealing the association between discomfort and safety, which leads to discomfort becoming much more manageable.
Taking advantage of this technique is relatively simple. All you have to do is recruit a friend, partner, or family member to help you with the exercise. Begin by using the breath technique to achieve a level of relaxation. Next, you’ll use the power of trust and disclosure to alter your experience of discomfort. Start by disclosing something uncomfortably personal or even something you’ve never revealed before (it could even be something from your discomfort list)—but do this by writing it down on a piece of paper and then giving it to your helper to read. Then ask him or her to do the same with you.
Now tune in to the feelings of vulnerability and discomfort related to having to share your secret with your helper. For many of us, vulnerability and trust stir up some level of discomfort, since these feelings have at times been attached to disappointment or being hurt. But in this exercise we are using this vulnerability and trust to elicit the oxytocin hormone to actually promote a level of comfort. By doing so, we are giving the limbic brain experience in associating discomfort with comfort and safety, which has been helped by the release of oxytocin. Follow this by bringing in the cerebral brain with the power of labeling, and relabel the discomfort experience as one that now leads to connection with others and the formation of strong bonds, inner strength, and a sense of control, comfort, and safety in the face of discomfort or adversity.
Draw on Empathy and Love
The next strategy draws on the powerful emotions of empathy, love, and compassion, which are strongly rooted in the limbic brain. Dr. George Stefano, director of the Neuroscience Research Institute at State University of New York College at Old Westbury, has written extensively on how love and compassion draw on the motivation and reward circuits in the limbic brain. His research, much of which has been co-authored with Dr. Tobias Esch of Germany’s Coburg University, has added to a growing body of knowledge about what happens at a deeply biological level in the limbic brain when it comes to the emotions of love and empathy. His observations have been confirmed by several other researchers as well.
A striking example of how love influences discomfort and pain was conducted at UCLA by Sara Master, who found that pain induced in a laboratory setting was attenuated when the subjects were shown photographs of their loved ones. Interestingly, a study that was published online in late 2011 in the journal Emotion revealed how empathy has a direct impact on heart rate and a sense of calm or comfort, which is strongly influenced by the limbic brain. What’s particularly interesting about this study is that researchers observed that empathy was more likely to be found in the less affluent study subjects, who were more physiologically attuned to suffering and quicker to express compassion than the more affluent. The researchers, led by Jennifer Stellar, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, found individuals in the upper middle and upper classes were less able to detect and respond to the distress signals of others. The explanation? According to Stellar, as reported by Yasmin Anwar for UC Berkeley’s News Center, “It’s not that the upper classes are coldhearted…they may just not be as adept at recognizing the cues and signals of suffering because they haven’t had to deal with as many obstacles in their lives. These latest results indicate that there’s a culture of compassion and cooperation among lower-class individuals that may be born out of threats to their well-being.” What makes Stellar’s observations from the study particularly important is that empathy and compassion have strong survival value, and as a result become powerful tools that we can use to reset the limbic and cerebral brains’ reactions to discomfort.
You might be wondering how Stellar’s group measured levels of compassion among people. Unlike other areas of study, compassion seems like a difficult thing to evaluate. When Yasmin Anwar covered this story for UC Berkeley’s online News Center (“Lower Classes Quicker to Show Compassion in the Face of Suffering”), she brilliantly summarized how the study was conducted. In one of Stellar’s experiments, sixty-four participants viewed two videos—an informational one on construction and the other an emotionally charged story about families coping with a child with cancer. As you can imagine, people were moved by watching the cancer video and reported feeling sad but didn’t have such a response to the instructional video. But here’s what else the researchers found: “members of the lower class reported higher levels of compassion and empathy, as distinct from sorrow…and showed greater decreases in heart rate as they watched the cancer family video.” Anwar captured Stellar’s conclusions in the following statement: “One might assume that watching someone suffering would cause stress and raise the heart rate,” Stellar says. “But we have found that, during compassion, the heart rate lowers as if the body is calming itself to take care of another person.” In essence, being compassionate had a calming effect on the body.
Since love, compassion, and empathy are very much at the core of the limbic system, they offer us another opportunity to create a tool for altering the limbic response to discomfort. This is made all the more effective because they involve the motivation and reward circuits of the limbic system, which entails the release of dopamine and endorphins. As you have already learned, the release of these substances is at the heart of addictive behavior and motivation. When behaviors become associated with these reward circuits, they become powerfully cemented and encoded within the brain. And by drawing on empathy, love, and compassion, we have an incredible opportunity to rewire our experience of discomfort.
A great example of this rewiring was once superbly demonstrated by Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron in their 1974 paper, which describes a series of experiments done with a fear-inducing suspension bridge. In this study, conducted on young males, the men crossed the bridge and were met by either a male or an attractive female. When the men were greeted by the attractive female, who asked them questions geared specifically to reflect their fear reactions (related to crossing the bridge), their experience of fear was tempered and altered by their sexual feelings toward the woman. The researchers concluded that once the fear was attributed by the men as sexual arousal (as opposed to the fear from crossing the bridge itself), the fear attached to the event dissipated. Yet those who were greeted by the man correctly attributed their fear reactions to their crossing the suspension bridge. This study is a wonderful example of how sexual impulses, including empathy, love, and compassion, influence the reward circuits of the brain, altering our experience of fear and discomfort. Although the study looked at sexual impulses in particular, these impulses emanate from the same place in the brain where we root our feelings of love, affection, and passion, which explains why these feelings become powerful change agents that we can use to alter the two brains’ reactions to discomfort. We can now use them as tools to retrain the limbic and cerebral brains’ reactions to discomfort by engaging the reward circuits of the limbic brain in a constructive manner.
In this exercise we will pair the discomfort situation or event you selected earlier with an event, memory, or person that evokes either love, compassion, or empathy. Remember, we are doing this to build your brain community, as opposed to whitewashing reality. For example, this could be the love you feel for your partner, your children, grandchildren, or even a pet. Or maybe you’ll utilize the empathy or compassion you feel toward a certain cause as it relates to underprivileged people or those who have been victimized.
Like before, begin with my breath technique. Once a level of relaxation is achieved, focus on the situation that brings you discomfort. Once some level of discomfort is experienced, start focusing on what you selected to elicit love, empathy, or compassion. See what you notice. Do these feelings change your experience of discomfort? Do you notice that even though there may still be some discomfort, the nature of it has shifted—it feels less heavy, less piercing, or less distressing? Follow this by engaging the cerebral brain in relabeling this experience. For example, “I can feel safer and safer, or more and more comfortable even as I feel these feelings of discomfort.”
Take the Challenge
Now we turn our attention to the power of challenge. The importance of challenge has been highlighted by social psychologist Salvatore Maddi, whose seminal work entailed following a number of telephone industry employees from the mid-1970s to 1987, while the industry was being downsized. Then at the University of Chicago, Maddi studied 450 Illinois Bell Telephone Company managers going through the changes related to industry deregulation. He and his colleagues did annual psychological and medical tests on the employees for six years before the breakup of the telephone company, and followed them for six years after. Maddi, who now is a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and is the founder and director of the Hardiness Institute, in Newport Beach, California, noted that two-thirds of the group fell apart, as they suffered from heart attacks, depression, anxiety, alcoholism, and divorce. The other third not only survived but actually thrived.
By looking back at the surveys done before the company’s breakup, Maddi found that the successful study subjects shared three qualities now known in the field as the three C’s of hardiness: a commitment to what they were doing, enthusiasm for challenge, and a sense of control over their lives. According to Maddi, these were people who struggled to have influence, rather than being passive, and kept learning from their experiences, whether positive or negative.
As Rachele Kanigan chronicled in her “Are you Resilient?” article for the New England Financial Journal, in a follow-up study Maddi and colleague Deborah Khoshaba found that the hardiest telephone company employees had similar childhood experiences, notably those marred by several stresses such as divorce, frequent moves, illness, or death in the family. However, these people had learned to view and react to this type of adversity with tenacity and a sense of opportunity. And it was this perspective that allowed these individuals to view their present predicament of adversity as yet another challenge. “They hunkered down at school, they worked hard, they found mentors,” Maddi says.
The late Al Siebert, of Portland, Oregon’s Resiliency Center, has also looked extensively into what he coined “the survivor personality.” As reported by Kanigan, “In thirty years of research on Vietnam vets, Holocaust survivors, gunshot victims, parents who’d lost children, and others who had weathered significant trauma, he found that the most successful survivors tended to have curious, playful, adaptive personality traits. Other common attributes included persistence, optimism, flexibility, and self-confidence.” It’s no wonder that researchers in addition to Maddi have also found that people deemed more resilient or hardy don’t get sick as often as other people and generally endure life’s hardships and disappointments better.
Research like this has great application in our work, in which we are very interested in changing the experience of discomfort. Rather than allowing discomfort to evoke a destabilizing or paralyzing fear, which pushes the survival instinct button, we create a call to action and channel an uncomfortable situation in a productive way.
For this exercise, I would like you to select some type of problem-solving game or activity. It could involve a game of chess, Scrabble, or another board game like Rummikub. This game could be played with a friend or partner, or you could play online against a friend or someone you don’t know. We want this to be a strategic game in which you feel challenged, as well as focused. Once you’ve selected the game, we’ll associate it with your experience of discomfort to begin conditioning discomfort with strategy, challenge, fun, and focus. Start like before, with the breath technique, then elicit the discomfort experience, and then follow it with this challenging exercise. While you’re waiting for your turn in the game, focus on your identified discomfort experience, and pair the discomfort with the experience of feeling challenged. For example, if you selected hunger as your discomfort experience, then focus on your hunger as you await your turn. Once this association begins to strengthen, make sure to bring in the cerebral brain by using labeling to cement the association between discomfort and feeling positively challenged, experiencing discomfort as an opportunity to be strategic and proactive.
Tap Your Inner Warrior/Gladiator
I call this exercise “finding your inner warrior or gladiator” because it’s about using your inner warrior to recondition your experience of discomfort.
Begin the exercise by finding some kind of cue or imagery or a particular person that you would associate with a gladiator. It could be a scene from an old Rocky film, such as Rocky running up the steps in Philadelphia to get into shape; it could be a superhero, such as Spider-Man or Superman; it could be a particular athlete or Olympian. Or you might even be able to make this association with certain uplifting types of music (i.e. the theme song from Rocky). Imagine that you’re one of these characters. See if imagining yourself in this way or listening to the music does anything to lift your spirits. Then imagine yourself as a well-trained gladiator, prepared to take on any adversity or challenge.
As before, begin with the Schoen Breath Technique, then bring in your discomfort experience, such as feeling hungry, and finally imagine yourself as a well-trained gladiator welcoming adversity and only becoming stronger as you encounter more adversity. Imagine yourself breaking the chains that bind you and kicking away obstacles that stand in your path to your goal. Use the cerebral brain to label the experience as one in which the more adversity you experience, the more focused and determined you become. As in the previous segment, welcome all challenges that come your way.
Take Your Time
As you do these exercises, expect that they will need to be done a number of times to maximize the result. No doubt some of them will lead to stellar results, while others will be less powerful. Ideally, the more of these different exercises that you draw on, the better your ability to recondition your response to discomfort. As you become proficient with lower levels of discomfort, begin to take on higher levels.
It’s important that you avoid tackling a trigger for extreme discomfort right off the bat, since it’s likely to ignite the survival instinct and limit your potential results. Remember, the brain and body do not necessarily learn overnight. Although we all love instant gratification, substantive change does take time, and as with building up a muscle, repetition is rewarded. Be patient as you take on increasingly higher levels of discomfort, rather than going immediately from a low level to a high level. This would be akin to trying to get over your fear of swimming by jumping into the deep end; it would only lead to more trauma and a call to action from the survival instinct. Instead, you would start by getting a comfort level first in the shallow end of the pool, and then slowly saunter into deeper water. The same is true in learning to manage discomfort in new and healthy ways.
Let’s take one more example before zooming our lens back out and heading to the next chapter.
When Tom came to see me, he was aspiring to be an Olympic sprinter. He had been successful through a series of Olympic qualifying trials, but then suddenly felt a sense of panic as he closed out the final stretch of the 400-meter sprint. It seemed to revolve around the notion of having to draw on all the reserves he had left and channel them into the final portion of the sprint. His panic led him to begin letting up at the point when he should have been firing up toward the finish line. To understand the situation more, I placed Tom into a state of hypnosis, and learned that as a child he would constantly see his mother choke on food and gasp for air. Naturally this frightened him and seemed to have made him unconsciously fearful of losing his breath. Now, many years later, as he headed toward the final quarter of a race (when he felt most out of breath but needed to push through it), this association between being out of breath and his mother gasping for air was causing him great discomfort and triggering his survival instinct.
It wasn’t long before Tom felt out of breath in situations in which he didn’t even exert himself. His fear symptoms during a race were spreading to other areas in his life. Obviously this was not logical, but as I’ve discussed, the limbic response, particularly the amygdala, is often anything but logical. In my work with Tom it became necessary to retrain his brain to associate being out of breath with something other than panic and fear. I began by having him imagine being out of breath as he ran on the racetrack while at the same time pairing this with his image of a gladiator, which in his case was the comic superhero the Flash, who was known for his brilliant speed. This began the process of associating being out of breath with being a superhero.
Next, I had him imagine running the race, feeling out of breath, then picturing himself as the Flash and leaving his mother increasingly in the distance the faster and farther he ran. This allowed him to create distance from his mother in relation to feeling out of breath. Finally, to stitch the association even further into his brain, I had him go up and down the stairwells of my office building to create the feeling of being out of breath and then paired this with relaxation, identifying with Flash, a sense of control, and safety. By the time treatment was complete, the discomfort of being out of breath had new associations—with safety, performance, and being able to excel to his potential.
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Before we move on to the final chapter, I want to take a moment to address an aspect to this whole conversation about discomfort that didn’t belong in any other place in the book. Now that you’ve come to a point where you know how to cultivate a healthier comfort zone by taking the “dis” out of discomfort, it helps to understand how the power of this knowledge—and the skills you’ve acquired—can transform what is arguably the most precious and important facet of our human lives as highly social creatures: relationships, or the capacity to love.
Perhaps there is no greater place where we can feel discomfort in our lives than in relationships, for there is little else that can push our buttons emotionally. Many of us long for intimacy, and yet find it so difficult to achieve. And how ironic it is that the very thing we desire is so frequently the hardest to create. For most, the emotional discomfort related to rejection coupled with the fear of being hurt can become a powerful obstacle. This helps explain why moments of intimacy are often followed by periods of emotional distance, and at times conflict. It becomes nearly impossible to love freely until we have learned that it is safe to do so. And as I have learned in this journey, to truly experience the full depth of love, it becomes necessary to experience it from a place of being uncomfortable. In other words, tolerating discomfort becomes the ticket to feeling the vastness of love. And as long as we are unsafe with discomfort, true fulfilling love will feel like an unreachable shore.
The same is true of friendships. For rich friendships to develop, we must come to terms with our own ability to manage discomfort. A question to ask yourself: Can you really manage someone else’s emotional pain if you haven’t learned to manage your own? I think not. In my own practice I’ve experienced the clinical difference between feeling safe getting into the mud of my patients’ discomfort and feeling unsafe with their discomfort and distancing myself from it. I learned some time ago that I couldn’t help my patients unless I conveyed that I felt safe going to this dark place with them. If they perceived I was fearful of exploring the discomfort related to their painful issues, then it only validated their own fears of confronting and dealing with these issues. I had to master my fear of being uncomfortable before I could ever really be of service to my patients. And the same holds true for us to truly connect on deep and meaningful levels in friendships. If we are uncomfortable with being uncomfortable in our friendships, then our friendships will typically remain shallow and unfulfilling. All successful and fulfilling relationships, in fact—whether they are professional or personal—require that we manage our discomfort well.
There’s also something to be said for discomfort inspiring us to reach out to others in general—to connect and seek comfort from our peers rather than continue wallowing alone in our own pain. As remarkably social animals, we owe much of our survival to the establishment of social structures, of communities and civilizations, and our capacity to build strong interdependencies. Studies that have looked at the role of compassion, for instance, have revealed that other people can perceive our discomfort and feel compassion. After all, compassion is by definition the ability to feel pity or concern for the suffering and misfortune of others. If we didn’t have this quality, we might have been slower to evolve and develop as a society. Hence, discomfort can lead us to forge stronger friendships and social networks. Perhaps this is how empathy and love are capable of altering our experience of discomfort, making it more tolerable.
In this next chapter, we’re going to look at the relationship between discomfort and performance across an array of commonplace settings we all face sometime in our lives. It offers a great “twenty-thousand-foot view” of this book’s main theme, and will further equip you with strategies to apply to your life today.