I’ve been thinking and writing a lot lately about discipline and specifically about discomfort. Humans seek pleasure and avoid pain. Avoiding pain seems like a good thing but I think too often we end up lumping discomfort in with pain. Then we start avoiding discomfort.
Avoiding discomfort might sound good in theory but the trouble is, much of what we want (and even need) in life exists on the other side of some discomfort. The exercise we need to do to keep our bodies healthy might cause us some discomfort. Saying “no” to ourselves about a needless purchase in order to save some money might cause some discomfort. Reaching out to repair a broken relationship might cause some discomfort. Many (most?) things that are ultimately good for us exist on the other side of some discomfort. So if we lump pain and discomfort together and seek to avoid discomfort, we are only hurting ourselves in the long run.
One of the reasons this has been on my mind lately is I accidentally learned to be comfortable with discomfort! About 15 months ago I started training in Krav Maga (which I highly recommend for everyone BTW!) I’ve dabbled in martial arts a time or two in my life so I was pretty comfortable with most of what I was learning early on in Krav Maga except the grappling and ground fighting! I hated everything about it and wanted nothing to do with it. It was WAY out of my comfort zone!
Luckily, I have some really good instructors and I was committed to at least learning just the bare minimum amount of grappling and ground fighting that I needed to get by. To do that, I begrudgingly started showing up to a Thursday night class completely devoted to ground fighting. I may not be explaining this perfectly but the grappling and ground fighting portion of Krav Maga takes many aspects of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) and tweaks them for self defense and street fighting. So much of what I was learning in that class was Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. And after a few classes I discovered that I really liked it!
I always looked at wrestling as just brute force, hard work and while it can be very hard work, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is quite cerebral and strategic! Once I got used to what at first seemed like people trying to smoosh my face into the mat, I really started to enjoy the thinking and the strategy! One of the most important things our instructor told us is that there is a huge difference between pain and discomfort. If you are in real, physical pain you have to do something about it but if what you are experiencing is just discomfort you can chill out and learn how to exist in that discomfort. That’s big! Not just in ground fighting and BJJ but in life!
About a month ago I stepped further out of my comfort zone and joined a BJJ studio. What I learned in the Krav classes has certainly helped but the people who have been doing BJJ for a while are SO good at it! Needless to say, I spend a lot of time there trying to be ok with and trying to relax in extreme discomfort. Basically, I’m learning to be comfortable with discomfort…and it’s really fun!
I never would have imagined enjoying something like this so this is definitely another good reminder about staying openminded and being willing to try new things. It has also been a great lesson for me in the difference between pain and discomfort. I’ve since noticed that there are things in other areas of my life that I’ve been avoiding, thinking they would be painful. I now know that what I’ve been avoiding isn’t pain, it’s only discomfort and there’s a big difference!
I encourage anyone reading this to explore anything they have been avoiding thinking it might be painful. Could it just be discomfort that you have been avoiding and could you be comfortable with some discomfort if it meant making some big changes?!
(And if you are in/near the Knoxville area and are interested in Krav Maga and BJJ, I highly recommend Bullman’s Kickboxing and Krav Maga and Lucas Lepri Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. These are great places full of really good people!)
