How to Navigate Between Two Kinds of Discomfort for Chaos or Growth

There are two kinds of “uncomfortable.” The first might come up if you grew up in a chaotic and dysfunctional family like I did. That means you learned to put up with difficulty and discomfort. It could have been emotional, psychological, or physical discomfort. When our lives are like that, we come to accept that life is difficult and uncomfortable.

Then there’s a different kind of uncomfortable that has to do with changing your behavior and stretching yourself to go outside of your comfort zone. It’s uncomfortable to do that because it’s new. Using the metaphor of the well-worn groove from above — we have to leap out of our well-worn groove and carve a new one. That’s definitely not comfortable, and it’s not easy. At least at first, it’s not.

Whether you stay with your old pattern or try on new behaviors discomfort persists. The thing about the old patterns is that that kind of discomfort is perpetual. In fact, it’s likely to get worse and create more chaos and drama in our lives. But when we form new patterns of behavior and have discomfort with that, that discomfort will eventually end. We’ll eventually become comfortable with the new behavior if we persist. Even better, there’s healing on the other side of that!