Comfortable with the uncomfortable

There’s a tendency for me to start off a post like this with a bit of backstory. Perhaps some very surface level reasoning and almost explain myself before starting off the real post. Writing a few words that gets people interested in an age of reducing attention spans and constant need for entertainment. This dear reader is the issue at hand, and it’s time we got uncomfortable.

Without going into too much detail, for the past few weeks I have been both intentionally, and non intentionally, making myself uncomfortable. Since my hellish run in the Manchester marathon, and the few days afterwards, I have felt something missing. Nothing to work towards and my day-to-day life being, well, a bit meh!

Leading in no small part to using my phone too much, eating too much, and procrastinating lots about the things that I do have to do. Every influencer on social media would call this a dopamine issue (while selling you something to ‘cure’ it) so I decided enough was enough and proceeded to have a bit of a detox.

At first, it felt like I was cutting out everything that I enjoyed. That I was punishing myself in a moment of self sabotage because I felt a bit down. There were times when I could have given in. Easily sneaked a look at my phone instead of reading a book. Perhaps grabbed some junk food to fill the hole that I felt in myself. It certainly would have been easier.

As time went on, I filled this void myself. By making myself uncomfortable, and coupling this with making my workouts tougher, everything else felt easy. In fact, the spaces in my life were filled, but with more meaningful things than instant hits of gratification, and even the empty space became much more comfortable. The emptiness became a period to think about the things that I wanted to achieve and not something I wanted to fill with rubbish.

With this came the understanding that many of the things that I thought I enjoyed. Those that I was worried I was ‘missing out’ on but actually matter all that much. The online people that I enjoyed talking to still go in contact by other means, and my life continued just as it did. However, I am much more content, much more fulfilled. Yes, I am much lonelier than I was before, but my determination to be uncomfortable for a while made me perfectly ok with that.