Try This –Are You Too Comfortable? (Why Discomfort Might Be The Key To Unlocking Your Health Potential)

What’s one surefire way to completely sabotage your goals and dreams in 2025? 

Avoid discomfort.

The honest truth is that society is constantly trying to convince us that being as comfortable as possible should be the goal of life.

Nope. 

In fact, our constant search for comfort is a HUGE contribution to the biggest health disaster of all time – almost 90% of Americans being metabolically unhealthy (think prediabetes, obesity, abnormal lipids, high blood pressure, and more.) 

And our obsession with comfort is probably why only 9% of Americans follow through on their New Year resolutions – including getting and staying healthy long term. 

My question, and the topic of today’s newsletter is… can embracing discomfort hold the key to supercharging our greatest hopes and dreams?

To answer this question, I’m sharing some words from my dear friend, Dr. Rangan Chatterjee.

His new book, Make Change That Lasts: 9 Simple Ways to Break Free from the Habits That Hold You Back, outlines in detail simple, yet necessary ways to overcome bad habits and create the life we dream of – including embracing the unknown or discomfort.

I love this book because instead of focusing on the perfect diet or perfect workout routine, Rangan focuses on the biggest piece of the puzzle: our mindset. Once we become masters of our mindset, anything is possible.

Today, let’s start with getting comfortable with the uncomfortable…

For all its advantages, the modern world fools us into believing that comfort is the natural state of existence and that anything that isn’t comfortable is to be rejected and complained about. Industry makes millions by figuring out new ways of making us marginally more comfortable than we used to be, often presenting us with perceived ‘discomforts’ and then providing the solutions that they convince us will make our lives better. 

When I was a kid, I honestly cannot remember a single time when we went out to get a takeaway. Now we have delivery services bringing hot, fresh meals to our door without us even having to get off our chairs. Even our supermarket shopping is brought to our homes in specially built vans, at whatever hour we decide is most convenient for us. Of course there’s nothing wrong, in isolation, with seeking comfort and convenience. The problem is we’ve got to a point where many of us are overdosing on it, and it’s making us sick. 

Most of the chronic diseases we are suffering from today can be directly linked to our reliance on comfort. Type 2 diabetes, for example, currently affects 7 million people in the UK alone. It is a condition that occurs because excess fat has accumulated inside our bodies, which damages our metabolism. This causes our blood glucose levels to rise, which results in kidney, eye, circulation and nerve problems, to name just a few. A condition like this can pretty much only exist in a world of comfort and convenience. 

For most of our existence, humans have had to move their bodies every day to acquire their food and cook it. It would have been almost impossible for excess fat to build up inside our bodies over a long period of time, with all the damaging effects on our health that this causes. Our bodies still expect this kind of daily effort and movement. Today, however, most of us live lives of excessive physical comfort, with our sofas, sedentary jobs, cars and home deliveries of anything you could possibly imagine, from food to books to lightbulbs. And it’s killing us. Scientific research shows clearly that lack of movement is one of the leading causes of premature death globally, increasing our risk of cancer, obesity, heart attacks, strokes and type 2 diabetes.

The problem is, while we need a certain amount of movement to be healthy, the brain is programmed to conserve energy whenever and wherever possible. This is because we evolved in an environment of scarcity, in which periods of involuntary fasting would have been inevitable. The Swedish psychiatrist Anders Hansen explained to me on my podcast that, as well as being lazy, the brain wants us to be anxious and fat. In times when survival was front of mind, being anxious enabled us to identify danger, while putting on fat allowed us to store precious energy. Unlike us, our ancestors didn’t have to seek discomfort intentionally. Life was already full of discomfort, and our minds and bodies still thrive best when we are regularly doing the kinds of things that we would have had to do in the much more hostile and difficult world that our ancestors inhabited.

Physical exercise is the intentional practice of controlled discomfort. Regularly exercising the body makes it more resilient because we are essentially putting it through manageable amounts of stress. As it works to handle the stress load we’ve put it under, then returns back to normal, it is ‘practising’ how to deal with stress. This means that when a bigger load of stress comes into our life – which it inevitably will – we’ll be more ready and able to handle it. In fact, a 2021 study found that just eight weeks of aerobic exercise improved resilience and the ability to react to non-exercise stressors. In this study, participants moved their bodies just three times per week, with sessions varying from 30–50 minutes.

WE ARE GETTING WEAKER

Our over-reliance on comfort doesn’t only affect us as adults, it affects our kids as well. A rough but useful yardstick of judging how fit we are is our ability to run. To run well means we have good cardiovascular health as well as the physical and psychological ability to endure discomfort. People who have good aerobic fitness have a significantly decreased risk of heart attacks and strokes in later life. A scientific review of fifty studies that involved 25 million children from twenty-eight countries found that today’s kids take, on average, ninety seconds longer to run a mile than children did in the 1980s. This is a shocking but extremely telling finding. As we rely more and more on things outside ourselves to solve all our problems for us, the ability of our own minds and bodies to survive and thrive deteriorates. 

This reliance on comfort also affects our moods. When we outsource our reliance, whether that’s to other people or companies and services, we become vulnerable to their failings. Just like children, when things in our external world let us down, we experience low mood and complain and often end up having an embarrassing tantrum. 

Not long ago I found myself on a train to London with a friend who was getting frustrated because the app that was supposed to get a bottle of water delivered to his seat wouldn’t work. Because I’d been thinking so much about Minimal Reliance, I reflected on the absurdity of the situation. There we were in a warm carriage in the middle of winter, travelling at over one hundred miles an hour to one of the great capital cities of the world, and my friend’s mood had been spoiled because he had to actually stand up and walk to the cafe in a different carriage to get a drink. 

This is one of the traps of modern life. We’re seduced into becoming reliant on companies and services, which (when they work) make us briefly more comfortable, while putting us in a state of permanent childhood and dependency. But no matter how hard companies and services work to remove problems from our life, we’ll never stop experiencing them, no matter how easy life becomes. Evidence for this is seen in research by Harvard psychologists David Levari and Daniel Gilbert that shows the human brain will start looking for problems even when they don’t exist. Levari calls this concept ‘prevalence induced concept change’. This basically means as we experience fewer problems, we start to lower our threshold for what actually constitutes a problem. The psychologists conducted a series of experiments that demonstrated this, including one in which they asked participants to identify faces that appeared threatening, which they did just fine. But as the number of threatening faces they were shown was reduced, they then started to classify ordinary faces as threatening, as well.

CREATE YOUR OWN RULES FOR DISCOMFORT

Practicing discomfort doesn’t always need to be a big gesture. There are many opportunities in everyday life for us to practice, with knock-on benefits for our wellbeing. Doing your meditation each morning takes more effort than drinking your coffee while scrolling Instagram, but it will help you feel calmer and in control. Turning your smartphone off one hour before bed takes more effort than watching YouTube on it, but will likely improve intimacy with your partner, as well as the quality of your sleep. Taking the stairs to get to the supermarket car park is harder than taking the lift but, over time, will make you stronger and more resilient. Going for a walk on a cold, rainy day is uncomfortable but hugely beneficial for your physical health and mood.

When you’re sitting on the sofa, and the next episode of your favorite show starts playing, the easiest thing to do is to stay there. The inconvenient and uncomfortable thing to do is to stop watching, get up from the sofa, and go to bed. And, of course, getting enough sleep will have a huge impact on the way you feel the following day, and improve your physical health and mental wellbeing. All of these small ‘uncomfortable’ actions will yield incredible benefits when done consistently. However, in order to counteract our natural tendency to take the easy option, we need a strategy.

In his book Clear Thinking, Shane Parrish writes about replacing decisions with rules. ‘In a quirk of psychology, people typically don’t argue with personal rules’ he writes. ‘It turns out that rules can help us automate our behavior to put us in a position to achieve success and accomplish our goals.’ The basic idea is to get away from constant decision-making, which is tiring and open to sabotage by our moment-by-moment feelings. 

To help you make practicing discomfort your default mode of being, have a think about some ‘discomfort rules’ that you can bring into your own life. Here are some simple examples to get you thinking, but feel free to come up with your own:

• Always take the stairs – so that lifts and escalators become the exception rather than the norm.
  

• Never eat after 7 p.m. - or at a time that suits you better. Many of our poor food choices tend to come in the evening. This one-time rule automatically eliminates them.

• Never snack - only eat at mealtimes.
  

• Always go to Parkrun - make a commitment that every Saturday morning you are going to show up rain, wind or shine
  

• Do 30 minutes of daily movement - it doesn’t have to be anything fancy or going to a gym, just make a commitment to yourself that thirty minutes of movement every day is what you are going to do.
  

• Never say yes to a request on the phone - this will help reduce the likelihood of over-committing. Always say you’ll have a think, decide and get back to the other person. If you want, you can even explain that you never say yes to requests over the phone.
  

• Never eat a dessert alone -  this helps avoid comfort and emotional eating and means that if you do choose to eat a dessert, you can do so in the company of others, rather than to soothe loneliness.
  

• Turn off your smartphone one hour before bed - or at a specific time that works for you every evening. This one-time decision will have multiple downstream benefits, like enhanced sleep, more time for intimacy and a feeling of calm.
  

• On weekdays, never start a new episode after 9 p.m.-  it is tempting to binge watch your favorite box sets but this one-time rule will help you prevent late nights during the week.
  

• When you wake up, do one five-minute action for your health -  make it a promise and stick to it. This could be journaling, breathwork, meditation, or a quick workout – whatever appeals to you. By keeping this promise, you send your brain a signal that you are trustworthy and reliable. Doing this first thing in the morning also has an additional benefit. It becomes a little ritual that gives you a sense of order and control in a world full of chaos and uncertainty. 

Copyright © 2024 by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, BenBella Books, Inc: All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by US and UK copyright law.

What are some rules that you can embrace to make the “uncomfortable” part of your daily life? Even the most simple ones can make the biggest difference. 

If you want to read more and uncover the 8 other strategies in Dr. Chatterjee’s new book, check out Make Change that Lasts here. 

You can also listen to my recent conversation with Dr. Chatterjee on building lasting habits here. 

Here’s to a happy new year sprinkled with a lot of healthy discomfort!

Dhru Purohit