Falling in Love with Being Uncomfortable

Falling in love with being uncomfortable might sound like a weird goal. Right now, it’s my main thing. Stick with me here, this might be you, too.

Feeling uncomfortable with being uncomfortable has been singing its song in my brain for years. I first heard this idea in the 90s in Australia. Relating to ‘successful study habits for teenagers’, a motivational speaker drove home the point that fighting a feeling just gives that thing more life. More power. Ummm OMG YES!

Agreeing wholeheartedly on the sidelines, I don’t think I really got that the message was for me, too. Oh man, head smack!

Feeling uncomfortable with being uncomfortable became obvious in 2019 when I’d just had enough of not going after what I really wanted and doing the stuff I really wanted to do. I was so uncomfortable in whatever I was attempting to make happen: speak in public; sing in public; sing in a choir or in lessons; share my writing; and even publishing this blog. Just being audible was so damn uncomfortable, I turned down the dial on all my “things”. My voice was down to a whisper. That was NOT ok!

BASTA! As they say here in Italy (or “Enough of that crap!”).

Researching and finding a bloody amazing coach and psychologist who specialises in tracking what fear is running and how its playing, I grabbed fear by the horns and started. In my first session, I was knee-deep in feeling my uncomfortable stuff. I’d been working really hard to not feel uncomfortable. 53 years of trying not to feel stuff. Now, that is exhausting.

Why start feeling uncomfortable with being uncomfortable?

Wow, you are SO smart! What a great question.

Imagine you had all these moments where you felt ashamed, embarrassed, angry, sad, ridiculously happy… whatever… you had some kind of feeling. But you didn’t stop to fully feel them. They don’t just “go away”. The stay, festering, looming, waiting for another event to join them. Irene Lyon, who coined the concept of Neuro-sensory Exercises as a way of rewiring the brain goes in depth into this training. It’s science. It’s biology. It’s physiology. It so ain’t in your head, it’s nervous system health 101 but it’s not that commonly known and done, yet.

These unfelt and unexpressed ‘feelings’ grow. Then you have an exaggerated response to something that seems, on paper, to be ‘nothing’. So you feel ashamed or angry or whatever all over again. And it keeps growing and going. Not in a healthy good way. Now you’ve got more crap building up inside.

Uncomfortable Feelings Spark Survival Stress

Speaking in Public can spark a type of fear. For me it has been like this: I’m standing on some kind of stage, talking about one of my favourite topics. Preparation and practise, done. And just after I start, there’s this uncomfortable feeling.

What to Do With That?

Seems obvious, but you want to feel or sense what’s going on inside you. My go-to is firstly visual. In my mind, I design an icon of a curly-bumpy-knotty-ball of thick purple wool and slap it an inch under my belly button. That’s the how, what and where of it.

And in that moment, I can feel it. I can sit with it. Even get curious about the sensation. A minute or two. No longer. Oh, I feel that. It looks like this. It’s sitting in this spot inside me. This exact spot.

Feeling uncomfortable with being uncomfortable seems ridiculously simple. And it can be. Simple, but not easy. A phrase I love, learned from Christine Askew, the brilliant coach & psychologist mentioned above. As simple as it sounds, it’s also uncomfortable.

Can I practise feeling uncomfortable with being uncomfortable?

Yes. I can and do. Here’s how I tackle this piece of nervous system goodness:

You can wait for something to happen that causes you to feel uncomfortable (emotional or physical pain). It will happen, unless you’ve already reached an enlightened state. But first, you’ve got to notice that you’re uncomfortable. That you’re in some kind of pain. Baby steps though. First you might just want to name it. Like saying “Oh I feel uncomfortable.” I’ll give you an example.

Let’s take the “discomfort” or the pain of embarrassment. A few days ago, I bumped into someone I hadn’t seen for years. When she was walking away, I called out saying it was great to see her and I couldn’t remember her name! This is a pretty “beige” example, but it’s the kind of baby steps I recommend. Let’s start with the seemingly innocuous stuff.

What happened? What did I feel?  I felt my cheeks glowing red. Another wave followed about 2 seconds after, a light pounding inside my chest, then a swirly kind of sick feeling in the pit of my gut.

Just this practise of pausing a second or maybe 38 seconds, this all happens really quickly. But it’s essential to pause, and let that bloody feeling have its day. And then, it’s gone. It got felt. It’s done. I go home and tell my husband that I couldn’t remember a woman’s name. We laugh about it. It’s funny. It’s not uncomfortable anymore.

Baby steps. Start feeling uncomfortable with being uncomfortable. Every “little” feeling helps. The more you pause and feel, the better your capacity to feel that great stuff that happens often too. You want to cache your brain space and free it from those feelings as they happen. The more you do this as stuff happens, the more space you’ll have in your brain to notice the good stuff and make that the feature of your day.

Challenge: Share your next “uncomfortable” happening, and what & where you feel with it. I guarantee it will be the start of something for you. Something good. Healthy nervous-system good. Go on, you know you want to.