Voluntary Discomfort

A psychological vaccine

There's this concept called Voluntary Discomfort. It's an ancient Stoic practice from over 2000 years ago, and it's exactly what it sounds like: voluntarily putting yourself in uncomfortable situations.

Now, you might be thinking, why on earth would I do that? Life is already uncomfortable enough as it is… but that's exactly why you would do it.

Voluntary Discomfort, also termed “voluntary hardship”, is like a psychological vaccine.

By willingly putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, you're sort of building up your tolerance for discomfort. Taking cold showers, spending time in a hot sauna, fasting, eating unseasoned unsweetened bland food, even working out—these are all examples of voluntary discomfort techniques.

Sleeping on the floor for a night is one of the techniques they did thousands of years ago, getting an “uncomfortable night's rest”. Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor from and a Stoic philosopher, is said to have done this one.

Seneca, another one of my favorite philosophers, also suggested a good voluntary discomfort technique. He said, "set aside a certain number of days during which you wear” itchy, worn, unfashionable clothes. Then you're supposed to go out in public in order to feel the discomfort of everyone's judgment of you. Doing this would not only build your tolerance to the uncomfortable feeling of negative judgment from others, but it would generally build your tolerance for discomfort as well.

The logic behind voluntary discomfort is the idea that if we practice being uncomfortable, it won't have much power over us anymore. It won't be something we go out of our way to avoid and can actually turn into something that we are excited to embrace.

Getting good at voluntary discomfort makes us feel more powerful because fewer things have the ability to take our power away. Another one of my favorite philosophers, Epictetus, once said, "It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." We might not have total control over what happens to us, but perhaps nothing can ever rob us of the opportunity to react how we prefer.

-Felecia For The Win

Felecia is a software engineer by trade but a philosopher at heart who has amassed a following of over 500K on TikTok by talking about society. Felecia chats about social constructs, social experiments, social programming, and social psychology.