I Made My Life Harder for 30 Days- It Made Everything Easier:

One month ago, I wrote about how I thought comfort is making me weaker.

The solution, so I thought, was to bring more discomfort into my life. So I'm back a month later to report back on the impact this had on me.

Just to recap, I decided to create discomfort in 3 ways:

1. No social media until after work

2. Grayscale mode during the day

3. A daily press up challenge

If you want to check out the previous article, You can read it here.

I designed these rules to make me uncomfortable just enough to push me out of my comfort zone. Looking back at the month, I think the regular discomfort definitely worked.

Over the last 30 days, I had 3 realisations that made me decide to keep discomfort in my life:

1. The more discomfort you face, the easier hard things get.

As I've immersed myself in discomfort over the last month I've noticed my resistance to doing hard things shrink.

The resistance starts as a mental wall you need to climb over to do hard things.

Every time you face discomfort, it's like removing a brick from the wall. When you keep removing one brick at a time, eventually the wall gets smaller and smaller and smaller, until it's nothing but an inconvenience to step over.

It's led to me being able to stand in front of a room of people and present. Something that would have frightened me before. Don't get me wrong, I still felt nervous. But I didn't flinch back when I was asked to do it. I walked towards it with open arms.

When you're forced to deal with discomfort every day, it loses it's fear factor. It stops being the boogeyman lurking in the shadows and becomes a tiny gremlin you can swat away.

2. The mind will play tricks on you to avoid discomfort.

In the past, I'd have the thought to get down and do some press ups, and my mind would push back and say "my back is sore" or "You're not well, have a break today".

Before the 30 days challenge, I would give in.

But it was around day 17, I noticed a shift. I was feeling rough. Tired. Short on sleep and stressed. I got up from my bed to do my press ups and the excuses started. But I didn't listen. I just pushed ahead and before I knew it, I was down and doing my press ups.

This is when I realised the mind will play tricks on you to avoid discomfort.

Your mind wants to dodge the discomfort that comes from facing situations that make you feel:

• Scared

• Embarrassed

• Intimidated

• Overwhelmed

• Frustrated

It takes self awareness and trust in yourself to notice this and do the thing anyway.

3. Physical discomfort has a downstream improvement on mental toughness.

When you push your body through discomfort, you don't expect the mind to get tougher.

But it does.

Over the 30 days, I noticed that with the regular physical discomfort came a higher tolerance for mental stress.

I've recently gone through a lot of big changes in my life. Things that would have distressed the old me. But it was over one particularly stressful week, I noticed a difference in my mental fortitude. There had been a couple stressful things both at work and in my personal life, but I was able to deal with them. Instead of overthinking and stressing, I just got to work on figuring put solutions and getting to work.

I moved from overthinking my problems to taking actions to find a solution.

Every day you've got a choice between stepping back into comfort or forwards towards discomfort.

Always choose to step forward.

Discomfort is scary. But scary doesn't mean it's bad. It's only scary because you're not used to it.

It's only by facing it, going through it and coming out the other side that you can look back and see what you're capable of.