If you’re like me, at the first instance of discomfort, you’re immediately searching for a solution to resolve the pain. If it’s a muscle ache, soreness or tightness at my first opportunity I’m stretching, rolling, massaging, percussive gunning, bio freezing, etc.
Same goes for stressful discomfort. I run to breathing exercises, perspective thinking, meditation, drugs mood calming supplements, booze, etc.
What if the solution wasn’t to extinguish the pain but to learn how to build a tolerance for pain? I mean, isn’t that what we do when we train? We build our endurance to handle physical discomfort as we grow our capacity to handle heavier workloads.
Now, let’s make this clear, training with physical injury is stupid and could lead to more severe issues but understanding exactly what your pain is, expanding your capacity beyond the pain, moving your point of focus past the pain, you learn to build a tolerance for it. When your world is much larger than your pain, it becomes small and much more manageable. When your pain is all you know and feel, you can’t do anything but sulk in it.
Start training your ability to endure, your capacity for discomfort and increasing your tolerance in painful or stressful scenarios and watch your results improve.
Pain will never go away, the only thing that changes is your ability to handle it.
