How To Make Pain Your Ally
Twenty centuries ago, the philosopher Seneca boldly claimed that anyone living a life free from pain and suffering should be pitied.
Today, that bold claim looks prescient in light of modern research; those leading charmed lives are crippled, and maybe we should sympathize with their plight.
Misfortune strikes almost all of us eventually, and those who haven’t prepared their minds and bodies are unlikely to endure suffering well.
So I’d like to explore what pain, suffering, and other stressors do for us, and what the implications are for how we should live. In other words, I want to talk about making pain our greatest tool and ally.
When I was about six, I spent an afternoon playing with a group of girls who were a few years older than me. I noticed they spent a lot of time complaining about the routine factors of play; the scratches of tree branches and brambles as we ran through the woods, the inevitable bumps and bruises from time spent on the playground.
I foolishly concluded that girls were wusses and playing with them wasn’t worth the effort, since they had to take so many complaint breaks. This mistaken notion held for a few months until I played with another group of girls who’d trained as gymnasts since age two.
Quite the opposite of the coddled girls from before, these gymnasts were tougher than I was by a considerable margin and seemed to barely notice the physical trifles that left the other girls in tears.
Ok, I remember thinking afterward, so being a girl doesn’t doom someone to life as a complainypants. Anyone can apparently be fated to blow simple discomforts out of all proportion.
It wasn’t until many years later that it dawned on me that the complainypants distribution wasn’t random: stress, suffering, and misfortune mold our character in ways that — if they don’t break us — leave us better able to deal with stress of all kinds.
As Seneca said centuries ago, “When pleasures have corrupted both mind and body, nothing seems to be tolerable — not because the suffering is hard, but because the sufferer is soft1.”
As life has gotten gradually easier since the industrial revolution, we haven’t become more satisfied. We’ve just lowered our threshold for what we consider a problem. Instead of appreciating our good fortune we make up new things to complain about instead.
Seneca thought throwing ourselves into unnecessary danger was foolish, but that willing exposure to intermittent hardship improves resiliency and insulates us from this gradual creep of uncomfortableness into scenarios our ancestors found perfectly tolerable, or even luxurious. Willing exposure to hardship makes the intolerable barely worth noticing.
The Developed World’s Voluntary Stressor of Choice
It’s fitting that we began with those gymnasts, because physical exercise, in all its varied forms, is probably the most common way modern people willingly subject themselves to discomfort and stress.
There are so many labor-saving devices and services available that once-unavoidable physical stressors have disappeared from our lives. For the first time in history we need to consciously seek out physical stressors to experience them.
It’s probably not possible to run long distances without experiencing significant discomfort, or even pain. You simply need to endure it if you want to reach your goal, and that resilience bleeds into the rest of your life.
Stressful exercise builds not only to a higher threshold of stimulus before you perceive pain at all, but also a greater ability to endure pain before considering it bad enough to stop what you’re doing2. Different sports lead to different thresholds and tolerances, with endurance seeming to generate more pain tolerance than strength sports. Endurance athletes seem to have the greatest pain tolerance, though all athletes appear to have a lower pain threshold and greater pain tolerance than nonathletes: pain perception of endurance athletes versus strength athletes3.
Having a higher threshold and tolerance for discomfort gives you a leg up in life because you’re less a slave to your body’s sensations and preferences, and better able to let your rational mind run with your ideals rather than surrendering to the exaggerated complaints of the body. More physical resilience under the supervision of an ordered mind is almost always positive.
The stress of exercise also renders us stronger, healthier, fitter, and better able to think clearly4, but its effect on our characters may be its most important attribute.
Plain Fare and No Fare at All
Excess food leaves us fat and sick, whereas periods of food deprivation and eating simple whole food improves the health of our bodies, fighting disease and delaying aging56.
But what’s more surprising is how fasting affects our minds. A bout of fasting improves perceptions of stress, depression, anxiety, and quality of life7. Although there are physiological explanations for this, perhaps it is as Seneca suggested: we realize that what we feared wasn’t that bad after all.
“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest (food)…saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’8”
Too Hot and Too Cold
Getting your body used to the discomfort of hot and cold is another great exercise.
I live in Texas, and we get at least 60 days a year in which temperatures exceed 100℉ while humidity remains oppressive. Many of my fitter friends — aged under 50 and theoretically healthy — struggle to endure it, and may stay away from normal outdoor activities.
Wherever you go, people complain that they’re imprisoned inside air-conditioned buildings and cars, unable to venture outside.
But much of their struggle is self-imposed.
Significant heat adaptation takes 5-15 days, after which we’re better at shedding heat, maintaining blood pressure and electrolyte balance, and don’t perceive heat to be as oppressive.910
But we lose those adaptations in about two weeks if we don’t maintain them, so at the very least you need to start over each summer11.
To stay inside and shield yourself from the stress of heat isn’t much different from hiding from any other stressor. It might not come back to bite you immediately, but if you’re forced into conditions beyond the narrow optimal temperature range you prefer, prepare to suffer, or even face health consequences.
I make it a point to at least go for a long walks outside each day, regardless of the temperature, and find that I can easily be out for several hours in mid-August without feeling like the heat is particularly bad.
Each winter, Seneca liked to plunge into the virgo aqueduct in Rome, where the Trevi Fountain is today. He did this, he wrote to a friend, because, “The body should be treated more rigorously that it may not be disobedient to the mind.”
The physical benefits that may or may not occur with cold exposure weren’t the point. It was that you could make yourself do a hard thing and unpleasant thing, and thus were likely to be able to do other hard things when it really mattered — when it came to questions of virtue.
The Siren Song of Distraction
Another sort of suffering we can expose ourselves to is the mental scream demanding we go scroll Instagram or otherwise switch tasks when faced with a bit of hard work. This might be working on a challenging bit of art, designing something, or writing something. Our mind keeps urging us to escape the work and find distraction. The question is, are we going to listen?
Every time you refuse, every time you embrace the discomfort and tell yourself that you’re the kind of person that does hard things, you rewire your brain and make it easier to do more hard things in the future without giving in to distraction.
It’s the more constructive version of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast while the Sirens sang their seductive song. If you’re tied up you’re not really growing. But hearing the siren song of distraction and holding fast when you could easily give in leads to growth.
I’ve written about this at length and won’t do so again here, but this is another kind of adaptation to a challenge/stressor (the song of distraction).
The Power of Exposure
The observable theme is that we domesticate the fears, anxieties, and challenges we regularly expose ourselves to. Those we avoid are entrenched, and often grow.
We have decades of research on exposure therapy showing that it’s the best treatment even for PTSD, social anxiety disorder, phobias, and panic disorders12.
Resilience, then, is built by wrestling with stressors that don’t permanently maim us, whether we’re talking about the physical or the psychological.
Coddling ourselves in the name of comfort ultimately leaves us weaker and less able to deal with the real challenges of life when they arise.
As the famous Latin saying goes, “If you want peace, prepare for war.”
Or as Seneca says, “It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence.”
Seneca, On Anger, 2.25.3
O'Connor, PJ, Et al. Exercise and pain: the neurobiology, measurement, and laboratory study of pain in relation to exercise in humans. Exerc Sport Sci Rev. 1999
Assa T, Et al. The type of sport matters: Pain perception of endurance athletes versus strength athletes. Eur J Pain. 2019 Apr;23(4):686-696.
Erickson, KI, Et al. August 2015. Physical activity, brain, and cognition. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. 4: 27–32.
Longo VD. Et al. Intermittent and periodic fasting, longevity and disease. Nat Aging. 2021 Jan;1(1):47-59.
Tewani GR. Et al. Effect of Medically Supervised Prolonged Fasting Therapy on Vitamin D, B12, Body Weight, Body Mass Index, Vitality and Quality of Life: A Randomized Control Trial. Nutr Metab Insights. 2022 Oct 28;15:11786388221130560.
Berthelot E, Etchecopar-Etchart D, Thellier D, Lancon C, Boyer L, Fond G. Fasting Interventions for Stress, Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Nutrients. 2021 Nov 5;13(11):3947.
Seneca. Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 18, On Festivals and Fasting,
Garrett AT, Et al. Effectiveness of short-term heat acclimation for highly trained athletes. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2012 May;112(5):1827-37
Tyler CJ, Reeve T, Hodges GJ, Cheung SS. The Effects of Heat Adaptation on Physiology, Perception and Exercise Performance in the Heat: A Meta-Analysis. Sports Med. 2016 Nov;46(11):1699-1724.
Garrett, AT. Et al. Induction and decay of short-term heat acclimation. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2009 Dec;107(6):659-70.
American Psychological Association. What Is Exposure Therapy?