Okay friends, for today’s Thoughtful Thursday post I wanted to talk about comfort culture and why it’s dangerous. Somewhat adjacent to that idea, I wanted to talk about the importance of pain in our lives!

So before I get into this conversation I feel like I need to make a disclaimer. I want to acknowledge that dealing with pain – whether physical or emotional – is challenging. I don’t want to minimize what some of you may be going through on a daily basis. Also, putting yourself through pain and discomfort just for the sake of it with no goal in mind is not necessarily beneficial. We do not need to be martyrs. But I will get into that pain/pleasure balance later. 

The first thing I wanted to talk about is self care. I feel like in our culture these days there are a lot of people promoting self care and the importance of self care. However, often I think this term “self care” is shared more in the context of self indulgence. Like: take a bath, get your nails done, get your hair done, go on a shopping spree, buy that fancy coffee. I would like to argue that self care is not always self indulgence. Self care is not always something that feels comfortable. In my opinion, a lot of healthy self care is not comfortable or easy. Take exercise for example. Moving your body every day is self care. Quite literally taking care of yourself. Can self care be those more indulgent or comfortable things? Of course! But I want to encourage you to think of ways you can take care of your body – self care – on a daily basis! Like exercise, getting plenty of rest, eating healthy foods, or other healthy habits.

Next, I wanted to get back to that pain/pleasure balance. The other day I watched this really fascinating video on YouTube about finding balance in this age of indulgence. It was shared on a YouTube channel I really enjoy, After Skool. I will do my best to concisely explain what the doctor in this video explained about the importance of balancing pain and pleasure. 

She explained that the same part of our brains process both pleasure and pain. She described the need for balance of pain and please like a see saw or scale in our brains – with pleasure being on one side and pain being on the other. Our brains want this to stay level. When we experience pleasure, our brains release a chemical called dopamine, which I am sure most of you are familiar with. But as soon as our brain produces this chemical, it tries to regain balance by downregulating our dopamine receptors. She described this as little gremlins jumping on the pain end of the see saw for this balance to be achieved. If we stop the pleasurable activity, those gremlins eventually hop off of the other side. But if we continue to indulge in something pleasurable, then the gremlins continue to multiply and eventually we change our homeostasis set point. Now you need to continue doing that pleasurable thing just to feel normal. She explained this in the context of addictive behavior and how we keep going back to that behavior in order to feel normal. One of her suggestions to this problem, and what she had suggested to clients, is to do a dopamine detox where you cut out whatever that behavior is: watching tv, scrolling social media, or playing video games, for a period of time in order for your brain to reset and for all the gremlins to jump off the see saw. The video describes everything in more detail, so I highly recommend checking it out! But it reminds us of the importance of balance and why we must fight against constantly seeking out comfort.

I have talked about the importance of stepping outside of our comfort zones in life. I even had a whole series on my YouTube channel where I challenged myself to do things outside of my comfort zone. It’s when we challenge ourselves in this way that we grow and become stronger – either physically and/or emotionally. Unfortunately that is not an easy thing to do in this day and age when so much entertainment is available to us! We must be intentional with pushing ourselves away from constant indulgence and towards things that will be better for us in the long run!

I wanted to share with you about a book I read quite a long time ago, however it was so impactful that I remember it to this day. The book is Where’s God When It Hurts by Philip Yancey. I specifically remember a story he shared in this book about how people who contract leprosy do not always die from disease itself. They die from the effects of the disease. What happens with leprosy is that you can no longer feel pain, therefore you might cut your hand or stub your toe and not notice it. Oftentimes these things will get infected, but because they don’t feel pain they might not notice that a body part is infected. His point is that pain is an indicator for us. Pain lets us know that something is wrong. Because of this, we can have a different perspective about pain, and be thankful that we can feel pain so we know when something is wrong. This can be physical pain, but even emotional pain helps us know when something is wrong, and therefore we can respond to it!

Like I mentioned, in this day and age it is not easy to remain disciplined in how we spend our time. I just wanted to encourage you today to see the value in doing things that are not easy, doing the things that are outside of your comfort zone in order to become the best version of yourself! I find it funny that this was what I had planned to talk about in conjunction with the back yard clean up YouTube video {{linked below}} because while I didn’t think about the connection at the time I was planning it, it was certainly not an easy task to clean up this back yard, but as I lay in my hammock this morning I realized it was so worth it!