Getting comfortable with discomfort

All too often, I'll notice a scrape on my daughter's knee or a papercut on her finger. When I ask her about it, she shrugs and dismisses it, saying that she didn't even notice. On a couple of occasions when we went for our weekend hikes, she intentionally stepped in a brook to play, despite my warnings, and then insisted her feet were fine. When we got home, I noticed that her socks were wet, which meant that she had hiked the rest of the way on a winter's day in cold, wet socks. Kudos to her, my stoic, but hopefully not too stoic, child.

My son and I are the opposite of my daughter. When my fingers are cold, or I'm a little bit hungry, or I'm feeling anxious, it's like the end of the world. My very survival seems to be at risk. Of course, I'm not actually going to die from any of these feelings, but my mind processes the experiences as if I were.

Well, that was in the before times. Specifically, 3.5 weeks ago. That was when I learned that it's okay to be hungry, and I won't die from temporary hunger pangs. Since that time, I've been following my daughter's example and rewiring my brain to differentiate between minor discomfort and life-threatening pain. It's been going well.

If my fingers are cold during my morning hike, I sit with the feeling. Sometimes I even embrace the feeling in a bid to neutralize it. I tell myself that my fingers are not going to get frostbitten and fall off. They're just cold, which is normal in winter.

When I'm a little bit hungry during the day and it's not near snack time or mealtime, I tell myself it's only a little bit longer until I eat, and it's okay to feel hungry. In fact, I've read that hunger can be beneficial for maintaining healthy levels of insulin and human growth hormone.

I never thought I'd be someone who would be okay with hungry feelings. I've typically been more of a hangry person. But amazingly, I can now coexist with minor, totally normal, and healthy hunger pangs.

When I feel anxiety, I draw upon my mindfulness and meditation experience. I "watch" the anxious feelings from a bit of a distance and let them roll. They're there, and I don't know why, but it's okay. I let them happen, and I let them dissipate on their own. And I don't die from them.

For sure, meditation and reading books on mindfulness, particularly The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, have been helpful. Putting what I learned into practice is, of course, a bit of a different beast. But I look to my daughter as inspiration in being comfortable in the face of discomfort, and it makes life in general, and losing the COVID weight more specifically, a lot more pleasant.