Comfortable with the Uncomfortable

Welcome to Wellness Wednesday! By the middle of the week, we tend to focus on getting through the week and push aside our wellness. 

Let's continue to work on our intention by focusing on a dimension of wellness that tends to be popular with the beginning of the year - physical wellness. 

With any change, discomfort is always a part of this. We tend to stay in our “comfort zone” and this will never push the results we are searching for. 

Embracing the uncomfortable allows us to normalize the emotions that tend to follow with being in discomfort: anxiety, anger, frustration, fear, jealousy, sadness, etc. When we don’t normalize these emotions, we start to shame ourselves for things that happen naturally when feeling uncomfortable. This will push us to numb, ignore, or escape when we experience these feelings. With anything that we tend to push away, it will always come back and not in the way we intend. 

Exercise is a great way to create wellness in the physical dimension. With exercise, discomfort is something we must embrace. We put ourselves in uncomfortable situations such as running, lifting heavy weights, and doing strenuous stuff in order to promote cardio health or increase muscle mass. In order to create this, we must embrace the discomfort of the exercise routine or the soreness we may feel the day after. 

Changing our mindset about this discomfort will help us with sustainability and the lifestyle changes and scarifies we make in order to reap the rewards of physical exercise. 

Part of this change and discomfort is the loss of our old lifestyle. Even though we are doing something positive, the loss and the feelings associated with this can cause us to want to retreat back into our “comfort zone.” This keeps us stuck and complacent. 

By accepting this as a normal part of change and discomfort allows us to predict the pattern and ultimately decrease the intensity of these emotions. Part of living is feeling everything - good or bad. This doesn’t mean we ever have to “love” or “like” it but accept that it is. 

So let us embrace discomfort and watch the growth as we balance together.