Recently, the area of sensation I’m focusing on is pain. It’s not life-threatening levels of physical/mental pain. If painlessness is 0 and pain requiring narcotic painkillers is 1, it’s pain in the range of about 0.1 to 0.3.

Easily avoidable pain

We frequently encounter this kind of pain in daily life. The thought of not wanting to wake up early in the morning, the thought of really not wanting to exercise today, the pain in leg muscles and knees during consistent exercise, the tiredness endured because I have to finish this work today before sleeping, etc.

This kind of pain is very easy to avoid. Just turn off the alarm and go back to sleep, make excuses about being tired and skip exercise, or think you’ll do it tomorrow after waking up and go lie down.

You must accept pain

However, these easily avoidable moments accumulate to create differences. From a longer-term perspective, exercising today will help with physical strength and health, and waking up early becomes the driving force for better focus throughout the day.

Have you ever done consistent running? Up to 6 minutes per km pace, you can somehow just sprint to achieve it. However, to extend this to 4km and also shorten the time to 4 minutes 30 seconds, you have to give up the existing running method and run differently. You can only run fast by approaching it with the mindset of running only with lower body muscles.

This is a very painful process. Since it’s a way of running I’ve never tried before, there’s a lot of muscle soreness, and because it’s awkward, there are many moments at first where I think “is this right?” But after all this time passes, running speed becomes much faster and stamina consumption also decreases significantly. In other words, after passing through the pain, I got better results.

Redefining pain

Ironically, this type of pain that leads me to a better direction has no difference from pain that can be understood as a danger signal except in intensity. In other words, an appropriate level of pain actually functions as a signal that I’m moving forward. It’s easy to understand if you think of the principle of action and reaction.

Of course, when running too, if you overdo it, your back, knees, or ankles will get injured. In other words, to consider pain as an appropriate signal of progress, you paradoxically need to focus on pain. If you set a range of pain you can tolerate and push yourself as hard as you can within that line, you can grow quickly.

Ways to make yourself not avoid it

But since we are all inefficient beings, it’s good to design various devices to make ourselves not avoid it. I’m gradually moving toward a life of not avoiding and focusing through 3 main triggers.

1. When the pain of “I don’t want to do it” comes to me, use that as a trigger to think once more.

Don’t just not do it because you don’t want to; think once more about “why don’t I want to do this? What’s good about doing this?” If you judge it to be beneficial to you in the long term, just do it. Most of this “not wanting to do it” is observed when sitting or lying down. That is, when physically comfortable, so get up and push away from your seat and then think again.

2. Start every day with success

If you start the day with success (wake up before 10 AM, drink water and go outside, start work right away and focus for more than 30 minutes, start doing what you need to do within 1 hour of waking up without watching webtoons etc.), you can see yourself better coping with the “not wanting to do it” that occurs 1-2 hours after waking up.

3. Remember many success stories from daily life and recall them.

This is related to #2. Instead of looking for rewards for overcoming pain, think “Right. I even exercised, so this much is nothing!” If you transfer success to other successes like that, you can bring about change more easily.

Lastly

The carrot-stick diagram doesn’t seem to work well on myself. Rather than thinking that enduring pain is some great achievement, thinking of it as the price that should naturally be paid for growth actually made my mind more at ease.