The idea of getting a better life is appealing, but the actual process for making that change involves a lot of frustration, stress, and waiting.

As you begin any self-improvement venture, your mind will inundate you with thoughts like:

“I deserve to skip the gym today, I did really well last week.”

“I’m not talented enough to make my business succeed, this is a waste of time.”

“Meditation isn’t working for me, it’s too stressful.”

There may be a degree of truth to such thoughts, but they’re mostly a manifestation of your desire to seek comfort and avoid pain.

We tend to believe that we make decisions based on logic, but in truth, our emotions play a much larger role in our behavior than most of us would like to admit.

A thought like, “I’m not talented enough to make my business succeed” sounds rational at first glance, yet if you pay close attention, you’ll notice these thoughts conveniently arise when you are experiencing emotional distress.

The idea that something outside our control (I.E. your IQ) is preventing us from succeeding brings us comfort because it means we no longer have to do something that was causing us discomfort (I.E. studying).

Put simply, when we experience a negative emotion, our mind crafts an explanation for what happened that allows us to avoid experiencing that emotion again in the future.

The human brain is hardwired to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

Initially, we pursue a goal because we hope it will bring us pleasure in the future, but as we start taking action, we are flooded with negative emotions (stress, frustration with our mistakes, the sense that we’re making progress too slowly). And if the pain of pursuing our goal becomes greater than our desire to achieve it, we will eventually give up on the pursuit of that goal.

This pattern in which our initial excitement is slowly overwhelmed by a building stress happens outside our conscious awareness.

The part of our brain that is responsible for logical decision making (the prefrontal cortex) is the part that communicates to us in words: it’s the voice in our head. What many of us don’t know is that the emotional parts of our brain (the lymbic system/ brain stem) also communicate to us through the voice in our head, though indirectly.

When we feel an emotion, whether it be stress or gratitude or anger, the prefrontal cortex tries to understand why we’re feeling that emotion. If the emotion is unpleasant, our brain determines how we can eliminate that feeling now and also avoid experiencing it in the future.

Unfortunately, the emotional centers of our brain don’t have the ability to process language, so the communication between our logical and emotional brain is indirect, it is nothing more than guesswork.

To make matters worse, our emotions twist our ability to think logically in the first place. When we feel a powerful negative emotion, long-term thinking goes out the window and our mind scrambles to come up with any excuse possible to eliminate that feeling.

Photo by Alora Griffiths on Unsplash

For instance, if you go to the gym and start feeling stressed, the logical part of your brain will be influenced by that emotion and your thoughts will begin to fixate on ways to escape your stress. The simplest answer, of course, is to end the workout.

Then, once you get home, you will remember how bad that experience felt, and the logical part of your brain will try to rationalize those feelings in a way that will prevent you from experiencing those feelings again.

For example, you might tell yourself, “I don’t have time to go to the gym right now, I should focus on bigger priorities.”

By thinking this thought, you’ve aligned your emotions with your conscious, logical goals: now you can avoid the stress you experienced at the gym without feeling guilty.

The process I just described is the fundamental reason that most people fail to achieve their goals in any area of life

Fortunately, you’ve already taken the first step to outsmarting this destructive pattern. Simply knowing that your brain has an instinctual desire to make excuses and avoid hard work will help you notice your own negative patterns

By knowing that your thoughts are often not based on logic, and are in fact, secretly guided by emotions, you will be able to question them instead of assuming they must be true. This awareness will open the door for positive change: the moment you notice a thought running your head is illogical is the moment that you can take a new course of action.

The next step to embracing discomfort is changing how you react to your own thoughts and emotions.

Be Skeptical Of Comfort

Accept that not all of your thoughts are logical: many are based on emotions that are misaligned with your long-term interests.

It’s easy to see this pattern play out in others. Clearly, our obese friend who eats fast food everyday is being illogical.

But it’s hard to see similar patterns in ourselves.

Truthfully, we all share a natural desire to give in to momentary pleasures, even when it comes at the cost of our long-term well-being. Furthermore, in a society where pleasure is available in our pocket at all times, we become addicted to finding immediate stress relief (in video games, social media, etc.).

Realize that comfort is not your friend. It is an addiction that makes you feel good for a moment at the cost of a lifetime of suffering. Comfort is the enemy: your ability to give up comfort now will determine your ability to get what you want later in life. Mandy Hale put it well, “Growth is painful. Change is painful. But nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don’t belong.”

Make A Bright Line

This process of embracing the discomfort inherent to any self-improvement endeavor takes time, and you must learn to embrace that temporary suffering is inherent to positive change. There is a simple, yet powerful, tool that can help you engender this shift — make a bright line.

In psychology, a bright line is a clear rule that you’ve committed to follow. For instance, when I started publishing articles lines, I wasn’t sure if this was something I wanted to do in the long-term. This became an excuse to dabble in a variety of different pursuits: affiliate marketing, creating YouTube videos, etc. I didn’t know what my ‘true passion’ was, so I tried everything and focused on nothing.

I knew I wouldn’t make a solid income online unless I dedicated myself to one specific pursuit. So, I made a bright line for myself: I decided to write self-improvement articles until I published at least 100 articles on that topic.

Once I made this rule, I still occasionally felt a desire to switch to other pursuits from time to time, but instead of following my emotions, I remembered, “I just have to get to 100 articles, if I get to that point and I still want to try something else, I can.”

Following this bright line allowed me to successfully make a living as a writer (at this point, my website gets about 1500 views per day).

You can create a bright line for any goal. For example, you might make a rule like:

“I will not give up on going to the gym until I’ve worked out 50 times.”

“I will practice mindfulness until I’ve logged one-hundred hours of meditation on Calm.”

“I will continue building my YouTube channel until I’ve posted at least 50 videos.”

Creating a bright line is a powerful strategy for counteracting the mind’s natural tendency to avoid discomfort. You can be creative with this, but make sure the rule you create requires you put at least a few months of consistent effort into your goal.

It can take some time to get past the initial pain period in which a new behavior is more stressful than enjoyable; a bright line is only useful if it helps you break through that barrier.

For example, I once made a goal to work out consistently until I lost 6% body fat. Changing my diet and sticking to a strict exercise regiment was stressful, but I was able to reach my goal within a month. Unfortunately, when I reached my goal, I felt like my job was done and I let myself go — in the next 90 days I gained all the weight I had initially lost, back (and more).

It can take several months to make a new behavior a habit. Make sure that whatever bright line you create is reflective of a longer term goal rather than something you can finish in a few weeks.

Lower Your Expectations

Once you’ve created a bright line, the key to success becomes patience. Don’t expect to be quickly rewarded for your efforts. You may enjoy studying for that test or writing that article, but mentally prepare for the opposite.

If you expect your first few months of building a new habit to be effortless and highly rewarding, then you’ll be disappointed when the results come slowly and the work is often tedious or difficult. This disappointment can be so frustrating that you’ll want to entirely give up on your goal.

If, on the other hand, you expect your first few months of a new pursuit to be challenging, to be stressful at times, and to result in more failures than successes, then you will be grateful for every small win you experience.

Consciously or subconsciously, we have a bar for success set in our minds. The higher that bar is set, the more difficult it is to feel motivated to pursue your goals.

To illustrate, let’s say you currently live paycheck to paycheck, but you’re offered a job that pays 60,000 dollars a year. Your entire life would change, this would be a transformative moment.

Yet, if you were a billionaire and someone anonymously donated 60,000 dollars to you, you would feel a mild hit of excitement that might last for five minutes, then you would get back to whatever you were doing beforehand: your bar has been set too high to care.

When it comes to self-improvement, most people have a bar for success that’s set way too high: they expect fast results. And when your expectations don’t match reality, you’re going to quickly become frustrated, even resentful.

Don’t expect any new habit to be effortless and don’t expect to get instant results. Expect emotional resistance, expect that you’ll want to quit, expect progress to be gradual. Setting your expectations so low will help you cultivate the resilience you need to push through the initial pain-period, and it will also teach you to experience gratitude for every small positive experience you have.

Conclusion

Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash

Our society reinforces a tacit assumption that what feels good, is good. This thinking has lead people in the modern world to become so addicted to comfort that 70% of Americans are overweight and the average American spends about 6 hours per day watching videos.

Comfort is the enemy of growth. Every day that you don’t do something uncomfortable is a day of stagnation. Embracing discomfort means accepting pain now and getting a lifetime of success later.

It’s easy to focus on the benefits of achieving your goals, but it’s difficult to think about the sacrifices you will have to make along the way.

Thinking about what you want will motivate you to take action for a moment, thinking about the pain you are willing to experience to get it will sustain that motivation for a lifetime.