Step into your Discomfort Zone

We all get uncomfortable – physically, socially, and intellectually. I’d venture a guess that even the most obscenely confident people occasionally find themselves in their Discomfort Zone. What I’m interested in talking about today are the intellectually painful challenges, the ones that push you to think in ways you’ve never thought before. There are the obvious trite analogies about forcing yourself into uncomfortable situations as a means to an end (e.g. training intensely for a marathon, undergoing repeated exposure therapy for arachnophobia, etc.). On some level, I think these analogies hold, to the extent that academic endeavors can be trying on an emotional and physical level, and yet I am inclined to say that there is something uniquely challenging about intellectual discomfort. I’m not sure quite why this is, and would love to hear your thoughts, but it seems more personal somehow. 

 

There’s something particularly irksome about things you can’t understand

My own first experience with intellectual discomfort came in the second grade, after I read a book on astronomy. When you think for a long time about the solar system, and then the galaxy, and then the universe, you reach a point when you start to think “…well THEN what?” I went through a phase where I would literally lie awake at night wondering where it ended and – once it ended – what was after that. Human brains are not wired in a way that comprehends endlessness. It still bothers me that my brain will never truly understand infinity.

I’ve also spent a fair bit of time pondering the ways in which different people perceive things like colors. My thoughts on this are aptly summarized in one of the many brilliant footnotes in David Foster Wallace’s “Authority and American Usage”:

“…the adolescent pot-smoker is struck by the ghastly possibility that, e.g. what he sees as the color green and what other people call “the color green” may in fact not be the same color-experience at all: the fact that both he and some else call Pebble Beach’s fairways green and a stoplight’s GO signal green appears to guarantee only that there is a similar consistency in their color-experiences of fairways and GO lights, not that the actual subjective quality of those color-experiences is the same; it could be that what the ad. pot-smoker experiences as green everyone else actually experiences as blue and what we “mean” by the word blue is what he “means” by green ...”

(N.B. I think it is totally legitimate to have these thoughts even if you are not an adolescent or a pot-smoker. I also think this is somehow analogous to the limits of empathy; we should recognize that we never completely understand what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes.)

I deal with the problem of infinity and the problem of green in the most mature way possible: I ignore them. However, it would seem that most issues in life DO need to be dealt with, even when it is very, very uncomfortable.

Things you simply don’t know vs. things you don’t even know how to know

Let’s take a moment to explicitly distinguish this feeling of helplessness and incomprehension from the more common feelings of embarrassment and failure. Embarrassment can easily stem from simple ignorance, but it often reveals some gap in your knowledge that you can fix. (My first embarrassing moment in memory was at age three-and-a-half, in preschool, when I told my teacher that I knew how to close the Cheerios box, but then neglected to properly use the slit and tab.) It ranges anywhere from awkward to terrifying to be surrounded by people who are experienced and brilliant…but it is also thrilling! I love being around inspiring people who have so much to teach, especially when it seems they will talk about the type of thing I might one day be capable of learning. It’s not all that complicated to exchange feelings of inadequacy for those of excitement. 

It’s also okay to enjoy being good at things; no shame in that

Everyone likes to sit down to practice piano and play the songs they already know. It feels good, it sounds good, it pleases you, and it pleases others. And, on the flip side, you don’t really want a lot of people listening and watching the first time you try that new song. There is a certain amount of time everyone devotes to perfecting what they already do well because it’s fun to do things well and – admit it – positive feedback from others plays no small role. It can prevent you from trying new things, though, if you subconsciously settle.

New experiments

Lots of what we learn does not actually fit with the idea we started with – that of “intellectual discomfort.” Much of the newness we encounter follows the predictable course of frustration, embarrassment, failure, and then eventually learning. There are certain times it’s acceptable to “fake it ’til you make it,” but there are also times it’s understandable to let others know you need help (professionally, academically or personally). Who knows? Maybe they were faking it, too! Pretending to know what you are doing is an excellent strategy in many respects…until it prevents you from stepping back to realize that other people might, in fact, have a better way of getting it done. On a more serious note, there are times it is patently NOT okay to fake it. There is the immediately horrifying example of doctors making up answers when patients or colleagues ask questions they do not know how to answer, but we could come up with countless other situations in which it is just plain wrong to pretend.

The difference between ignorance and the Discomfort Zone

It is uncomfortable to feel stupid and arguably much, much more uncomfortable to be presented with something you think you’ll never master. I think what I’m trying to get at is this idea of frustration with our limits and why it might somehow still be worthwhile to push them, walking out to the edge, hating every second and thinking we’re going to fall right off. Why exactly might it be good to wrestle with certain intellectual dilemmas? For starters, maybe some of those impossibly incomprehensible things actually start to make sense (but please don’t waste your time with infinity or green…it’s a lost cause). Beyond that, though, it’s good to remember how pathetically little we actually know. It’s good to learn to be comfortable with – and even excited by – our weaknesses. We can make it an active decision; we don’t have to be “pushed out of our comfort zone.” Does it make it any more enjoyable to frame it as “stepping into your Discomfort Zone”? Perhaps not. Is it on some level more palatable? Maybe. You’ll have to test the waters.