The quality of your life is determined by your relationship to discomfort.

The quality of your life is determined by your relationship to discomfort. Read that again. I came across that quote in the book "Bending reality"and it made me think.

I think accepting this idea and reminding ourselves this "fact" might be one of the keys to feel happier, and better in our lives. The goal of life is not to avoid any type of discomfort and go for the smooth sailing choices. I am saying that but I often thought that having a smooth sailing journey was what success and a good life was. By maturing, living more experiences I got to learn that no. Smooth sailing might be nice once in a while but the fact that it is punctuated by challenges, obstacles, hiccups is what makes it interesting and takes us to another level, expands us. You must think "Life is hard enough, why would I go towards even more challenges?"

Think about your biggest changes, your most significant shifts in life... what did they come with? Did they feel difficult, challenging and being in the unknown of what happens next felt unsettling? If this is the case you probably came out the other side of it and saw how it made you grow, expanded and added to your life...

I think we humans are built with a kind of resilience battery and that if we don't use it it drains our energy and makes us feel depleted. Of course, the idea is not to wear yourself out every single day by provoking situation that will challenge your resilience but as well not to avoid those situations and especially not to avoid the things out of your comfort zone that you need to do to get to the life that you desire. If you stay stagnant for a long time you start feeling that deep insatisfaction, you start questioning your choices, what you are doing with your life and even sometimes if you are worth it or lovable. It can go real far. And all that because you are not flexing that resilience muscle.

I have a got a random parallel idea to illustrate this... So I have been having a sort of trapped nerve pain on my left side most of time during my pregnancy, and this pain would get worse after periods of time where I would not do my strengthening/Pilates exercises and I would privilege rest or just stretching. The thing is some days the pain would be really bad and I would think "surely it would not be wise to do my exercise, it is going to hurt during" so I would not do them I would stretch instead. As I learned then, it is not helpful to stretch a trapped nerve, but strengthening the muscles around will help take the pressure off of that nerve. So then I would force myself to stick to my exercises even if during it it would hurt a bit and guess what... after it I would feel much less pain and this alone encouraged me to keep going. Maybe this parallel is too farfetched, but sometimes what you think is going against "feeling good" is the actual thing that will help you feel better. So next time you are about to do something difficult, or are on the edge of going out of your comfort zone... think of that trapped nerve pain... and think "Strengthening my resilience muscle".