How to use fear and discomfort to your advantage
Deliberate practice of introducing fear and discomfort into your life can eliminate the illusionary problems you're currently facing.
This is the story of how I almost died four or five times on a boys trip.
Me, Lou, and Justin set off from Taipei, arrived in LuoDong, got a hitch hike ride to the edge of the road in the middle of nowhere, then we treacherously scaled the cliff downwards towards the sea far below. Inclination was at 50% in the beginning, then it changed to a steep, vertical cliff.
When we reached the last part, some giant cliff secured only with an old wet frayed rope, it was already night time. We basically just had to close our eyes and grope around on the cliff wall looking for something to grab. We slowly inched our way down this "if you slip you die" dark cliff.
There's an interview of Alex Honnold where he says the reason he's so calm all the time is because he faces true fear, true physical danger where he can easily get seriously hurt or even die, and that these moments put the small problems like traffic, wrong orders, text messages, making everything else small in comparison. He says most people never experience this true fear and that is why their brains try to find problems and dangers out of nothing. There's another analogy about the TSA agents at the airport - how even when everything the passengers possess adhere to the regulations, the agent will still look for problems: it's just how we are. It's what the brain does. So there are many ways to take advantage of this fact.
How to use fear and discomfort to your advantage
Through the deliberate practice of introducing fear and discomfort in your life, you can create a wider spectrum and largely eliminate the illusionary problems currently facing your life right now. It would not only eliminate these problems, but also make you a stronger person, one who no longer takes the slightest slight from any mild annoyances.
This is perhaps the great benefit of extreme sports, facing rejection, public humiliation, going without amenities, and so on.
It doesn't need to become your entire life, but just occasional acts will set a point of contrast for the rest of your life and make things much easier. It's better to suffer and get over with one difficult hardship, then to constantly be in misery by a thousand stings.
The stoics knew this when they wrote about pursuing discomfort. The obstacle is the way.
So attempt to seek more of these opportunities in your life and see what happens.
