Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort (2022)
journals.sagepub.com
journals.sagepub.com
I then realized that change has to be deeper on an identity and lifestyle level. "What is the kind of person you want to become, and what is the kind of lifestyle you want to live" - rather than doing one-off anxiety provoking tasks. In living up to your desired identity and lifestyle, if you face discomfort - THAT is a good discomfort to face.
Sometimes getting out of your comfort zone is a good thing.
Sometimes that feeling of discomfort is protecting you.
Doing that hobby you were always to nervous too try? probably a good source of discomfort to feel.
Taking sky diving lessons from the sketchy guy who is not really certified? That is probably the bad type of discomfort and you should listen to it.
Instead I read this as leaving your comfort zone to the level that you are ... eh ... comfortable with.
> Taking sky diving lessons from the sketchy guy who is not really certified? That is probably the bad type of discomfort and you should listen to it.
People who already know how to tell the difference between these two doesn't need the advice though. In order to try a new hobby you need to do a lot of work to understand what is sketchy and what is not, how to not get tricked etc, so much money is made tricking wannabe hobbyists in every domain. Selling them expensive shoes and gear etc, that they wont need and barely use.
If I shied away from discomfort, I would be an angry, lonely, sheltered person and exactly the opposite of who I want to become.
I am perhaps less comfortable than others as a baseline. I could seek discomfort by say, listening to people eat with their mouths open, to little avail
So seeking out just discomfort seems bad. You shouldn't instantly do something just because it is uncomfortable.
Or do you want to avoid the greater discomfort of becoming a "angry, lonely, sheltered person "?
I never seek discomfort. I seek the pleasure of overcoming uncomfortable obstacles.
Maybe this is helpful in the USA, but I hardly see how knowing anything about this counts as "personal growth"? There are plenty of things you can know that actively make you a worse person by making you depressed and thus less engaged with things you can actively act upon.
Poor models of reality are a Hallmark of depression.
I think that for many, learning more about gun violence could be a relief because their uninformed baseline is so bad
Is that a fact? I recall from studies with pessimists and optimists, where they should self report some progress on learning something - and the reports of the pessimists were way more realistic, than those of the optimists. (But the latter probably enjoyed the whole thing)
Pessimism is more of an understanding that things will go wrong (which is often just factual correctness; any vague understanding of risk makes most people sound like pessimists). Depression is more of an "it is hopeless" take which is not logically sound - even if life is meaningless the sensible thing to do is leave a peaceful & cheerful existence as best can be managed.
There'd be a bit of an overlap in some cases (depression would make someone an extreme pessimist), but the pessimism that comes from being realistic doesn't lead to depression.
It is usually more concrete in the sense of "it is hopeless, that I get into a state of happiness again". Which might or might not be correct. So calling depression not logical .. is a potential tough thing to say.
But nevertheless, as someone who is acutely aware that unspeakable horrors surround us, an accurate prediction of never feeling happiness again doesn't logically lead to feeling a sense of hopeless, so it doesn't follow that depressed people are more likely to be working from an accurate world model.
The logical thing to do is to either look for ways to feel happiness or ignore it and salvage some meaning from whatever is left besides happiness. Easier said than done I know, particularly for someone who is depressed. But logic is what it is.
Indeed. It is a abstract tool that is helpful, if the abstractions of reality are meaningful in the given context.
As others posted, pessimism and depression different topics.
Can someone help me understand this please? With an example? I haven't read the paper, just the abstract. I can barely understand the abstract, I am not going to understand the paper.
Per the paper, does the "discomfort" need to be in the same arena as that of the "motivation" one wants?
E.g.: If I want to learn a new language, does the discomfort need to relate to the language, or is it enough to do something like taking cold showers?
(FWIW, I have a strong suspicion that most Psych papers, including this one, have inadequate evidence. But I still like to understand what they're claiming.)
A natural extension of this work may be to study at what point does burnout occur.
Going over points of no return e.g. because you commit to certain decisions can be extremely uncomfortable and so many people will just push it off into the future, and so years can go to waste. Learning to spot that kind of discomfort in oneself (and reacting to it) can be extremely benefitial in avoid prolonging it.
I once wished to be a man during the week and a woman on the weekends.
In my attempt at nonmonogamy, I've had more mixed results. That is harder
It still applies perfectly tho.
These point of no return decisions can also turn out to be mistakes (from with we can learn), but if skateboarding thought me anything it is that there is a class of situations where you either need to do it or you don't — as soon as you try to do it "a bit" without following through you will get hurt.
Of course the art is to recognize when each one applies, e.g. if your goal is to live healthier that doesn't mean you need to run marathons right away or you are a failure, here committing means persistence and incremental improvement.
In another class of problems the outcome depends mostly on luck, without being in the know I could imagine that non-monogamy-thing could have gone differently depending on where the people involved are with their lives.
"The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."
Weird to restrict the focus of growth to one particular area, and to ask whether any discomfort (even physical) will contribute to your growth in that particular area, when the abstract just refers to "personal growth" and makes no claim related to some spooky cross-pollination of discomfort. It even gives a list of examples, and refers to feeling "awkward."
But when it comes to learning a language, some discomfort when you're using that language is obviously when improvement in the language is happening. If you're only in situations where your current knowledge is completely adequate, you'll never have any reason to get better. You're not getting better at anything if you're never breaking a sweat while doing it.
edit: could "results showed that these effects occurred only in areas of personal growth that cause immediate discomfort." be any clearer?
You're right in the "edit".
However, the results seem tautological and associative.
- Certain things cause discomfort.
- If you do more of certain things, you develop more motivation to do them.
- Scientific Conclusion: the discomfort caused the motivation.
Two conmen of the highest degree. I just beg of you to look at some criticisms of them on youtube and save your money and time.
Yes.
Comfort: Duolingo and similar. UX designed to make you feel proficient when in fact your are not, gamification, drag and drop words, point and click on things, streaks, leaderboards, etc.
Discomfort: write your own content, talk to people a bit before you are ready, seek content a bit too difficult for you, listen to a podcast many times to see how your understanding improves with each listening, deep dive onto a subject, shadowing exercises, etc.
In short: prefer harder and more efficient things even when easier and less efficient things are available.
I find your conclusions interesting, basically you’ve listed every modern “appified” experience as unsuitable for true personal growth. I’ve felt this way for a while but never put this fine a point on it.
The spiritual path -- i.e. the Path of Love -- is the journey to learning how to cause more happiness and less unhappiness. Note that doing that is the most important way to really improve the society and cultures we are a part of.
Like Dunning-Kruger's true-experts in any field of endeavor, the seeker of self-improvement must humbly and honestly search themself to find out which of the vices we tend to use to justify our selfish ideals, attitudes, and behaviors. Once found, we must then ceaselessly fight against manifesting them and instead choose their virtuous counterparts. Compassion is the foundation of all the virtues, but we must develop and aim our moral compass.
To love someone is to want them to be happy such that you selflessly act for their benefit. That is the only goal of the spiritual path, for the universe really prefers us to explore its wonders in peace and happiness and utter enjoyment; Earth was made for just that. And yet, it's always our choice whether to harmonize with that optimal organization and participation, or selfishly avoid it if only by denying its optimality; to either increase one's humanity, or to fall short and descend further into callous disregard or even savagery.
"Love is the astrolabe of God's mysteries." --Rumi
Examples include exercise, vaccination, caloric restriction. Many would argue that exposure to germs, stimulating the immune system, works the same way. Cognitively, examples would be desirable difficulty and deliberate practice in learning, and exposure therapy for phobias.
Ofc this is what Nietzsche meant when he said the thing about “what doesn’t kill you…”
The best way to “grow” or get better in most dimensions of strength and skill is to seek discomfort. The trick is get to get just the right amount for where you’re at, since too much is discouraging, and too little is boring. We seek out coaches and teachers in the hopes that they can trace the growth path for us.
Plus, how much toxin, radiation is enough? Even how much exercise is enough, and for who?
I will argue it is not about seeking discomfort, but what you do when you are faced with discomfort.
Uhm, screw you?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OHYynw7Yh4&t=305s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDLb8_wgX50&t=2769s
If you enjoy something- the AMC doesn't grow. Question: what if something is really challenging but you want to do it?
Friction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDLb8_wgX50&t=1235s
Also the AMC has many more functions than Huberman lets on. So his "one neat trick" will do nothing to change ACC volume.
Huberman does that all the time, posting "footnotes" so people can think his CONCLUSIONS are scientific.
Some of those "studies" are only articles. ("Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource?")
And NONE of them show evidence that the AMC shrinks or grows based on "doing difficult things" but he just goes out and says this because it makes people freak out to think the brain can shrink or grow.
It is a character attack because researchers have already been all over this guy and said the same thing.
It concludes with something not far off from what Huberman stated. Not saying it proves he’s right but makes it easy to give him the benefit of the doubt and try to track down the actual new research he is referencing.
> One intriguing possibility is that the structure and function of aMCC could be altered with sufficient behavioral training. Indeed, as a flexible hub, the MCC may be better equipped than other brain regions to reshape its connectivity in response to learning. It has been proposed that protein receptors important for plasticity (such as CaMKII, NR2B, NMDA) are highly expressed in limbic circuits including aMCC (Wei et al., 1999; Palomero-Gallagher et al., 2008; Garcia-Cabezas et al., 2017; Burt et al., 2018; Palomero-Gallagher and Zilles, 2019). Interestingly, Garcia-Cabezas et al. (2017) recently showed that in adult monkeys, markers of synaptic plasticity are high in MCC (and other limbic regions) while markers of stability (as expressed by cellular factors that inhibit synaptic plasticity) are low. These findings suggest that training related improvement in behaviors requiring tenacity may be mediated through the aMCC. We have seen evidence that aMCC can be ‘trained up” in the domain of exercise (Colcombe et al., 2006).