The Skill No One Teaches: How to Sit With Discomfort Without Running From It
When we learn how to stay, we learn how to listen. And when we learn how to listen, life has a way of telling us exactly what we need to know.
Last year, I was speaking at a conference in San Francisco when a woman who’d read an article I had written confronted me in front of about 70 people. She was shouting, waving her finger in my face, spraying me with spittle, and accusing me of being a liar.
She was wrong, and I knew she was wrong, but instead of trying to argue with her or take a shot back, I decided to just stand and listen. She finally ran out of steam and stomped off.
Most of us were never taught how to sit with discomfort. Instead, we’ve been taught by our culture and mostly by our media how to escape it.
From the time most of us were young, discomfort was treated as a problem to be fixed as quickly as possible. Hunger is silenced with snacks, boredom with screens, sadness with distraction, and anxiety with noise. The message here is subtle but relentless: if something feels bad, make it stop. Don’t linger, listen, or ask what that discomfort might be trying to tell us.
But discomfort is not an error in the human system. It is, instead, one of our primary sources of often-important information.
Physical pain, for example, tells us something is wrong or overused or inflamed. Emotional pain tells us something matters, something has been lost, crossed, or ignored. Existential discomfort often signals that the story we’re living, the story we tell ourselves about who we are, no longer fits who we are becoming. None of these signals are pleasant, and, most importantly, none of them are meaningless.
What most of us were never shown when growing up is how to stay present long enough to learn from them.
Sitting with discomfort doesn’t mean indulging it or wallowing in it. It doesn’t mean turning suffering into some sort of tribal identity or wearing our pain as a bizarre badge of depth. It means resisting the well-trained reflex to flee. It means allowing the nervous system to feel what it feels without immediately anesthetizing the experience.
As any monk, practicing Buddhist, or lifelong meditator can tell you, this is harder than it sounds, because modern life is engineered to make flight from discomfort effortless.
There’s always something to scroll, buy, watch, eat, or argue about. Silence itself has become suspicious. A quiet room, an unfilled afternoon, an unanswerable feeling can trigger the same restlessness once reserved for real danger.
And yet, when we don’t run, something curious happens: discomfort often changes shape.
Anxiety that feels sharp and urgent at first may soften into sadness. Sadness may reveal grief. Grief may uncover love that had nowhere else to go. Boredom may dissolve into imagination. Loneliness may clarify which connections are missing and which ones are merely loud.
But this only happens if we stay with the discomfort.
Many of the wisest practices humans have developed are, at their core, structured ways of sitting with discomfort. Fasting teaches us that hunger comes in waves and doesn’t always mean emergency. Meditation reveals how quickly the mind invents stories or ruminations to escape stillness. Long walks expose the body’s complaints and then its quiet resilience. Even our historic mourning rituals like funerals, memorials, and eulogies exist to prevent us from rushing past loss before it has finished its work.
Children, before they’re trained out of it, understand this instinctively. They sulk, brood, stare out windows, and even lie on the floor doing nothing. Adults often rush to interrupt these moments, fearing they’re signs of something wrong, but often they are, instead, signs of integration, the psyche sorting itself out.
As we age, the cost of not sitting with discomfort increases. Unfelt feelings don’t disappear, they harden. They show up as irritability, numbness, chronic tension, compulsive busyness, or a constant low-grade sense that something is off but unreachable. When we refuse the small discomforts, they return as larger ones.
There’s also a moral dimension to this. A society that can’t tolerate discomfort becomes easy to manipulate. If every uneasy feeling must be eliminated immediately, then anyone who promises relief can gain power. Outrage becomes addictive, as the billionaires who own social media have discovered to their own profit. Certainty becomes seductive. Demagogues know that complex truths are easily rejected in favor of simple enemies.
Wisdom, by contrast, requires tolerance for ambiguity. It asks us to live inside questions without demanding instant answers, to feel sorrow without rushing to blame, and to experience fear without immediately turning it into aggression.
Learning to sit with discomfort isn’t about becoming stoic or detached. It’s about becoming honest. Honest with the body, the heart, and about what is being asked of us in that particular moment of our lives.
The practice itself is simple, though not easy. When discomfort arises, notice the impulse to escape. Name it. Then pause, breathe, and feel where the sensation lives. Give it a little time. Not forever, just longer than you usually do.
Often that’s enough.
Over time, something shifts. Discomfort loses much of its terror and becomes familiar, even trustworthy. You begin to recognize which pains are warnings and which are merely “growing pains.” You stop mistaking every ache for catastrophe.
In a culture obsessed with comfort, this is a quiet form of courage.
It’s also one of the foundations of wisdom.
When we learn how to stay, we learn how to listen. And when we learn how to listen, life has a way of telling us exactly what we need to know.