Editors’ note: Today’s post is by Chef Ashutosh Ghildiyal and Holly Koppel. Holly is a consultant with AIP Publishing and an active member of the SSP Mental Health Community of Interest (CoIn).
Trigger warning: This post includes discussion of pregnancy loss, gun violence, grief, and death.
In our previous Mental Health Awareness Mondays article, “The Courage to Be Uncertain,” we explored how many forms of psychological suffering, including impostor feelings, are rooted in our struggle to live with uncertainty. Rather than trying to eliminate doubt, we argued that genuine growth begins when we become willing to remain with the unknown.
In this article, we explore the deeper relationship between avoidance, attention, and healing, suggesting that psychological discomfort is not simply an obstacle to overcome, but a signal to understand. The courage to be uncertain ultimately depends on something even more fundamental: the courage to feel.
Discomfort, Avoidance, and Suffering
Ashutosh: The idea for this article began with an uncomfortable realization about my own health. I was sitting alone one day, reflecting on how I had been feeling physically, when it struck me that I had become skilled at ignoring discomfort. I had neglected aspects of my health, from posture to fitness and overall well-being. The discomfort was there, but I had learned to tune it out, to stay busy, distracted, or focused on other things rather than paying attention to what my body was telling me.
That experience led me to a broader question: How often do we do the same thing with psychological discomfort , and what issues that unacknowledged discomfort might be causing?
Holly: It’s easy to ignore psychological discomfort. We’re busy with our jobs, our social lives, our children and families, and so many other things. Anytime we take a moment to breathe and sit in silence, the discomfort we’ve buried deep down springs up, and we’ll do anything to stop it. This is how we end up reaching for another snack, doomscrolling in the wee hours of the night, or binge-watching familiar shows: anything to keep ourselves distracted from the feelings that wants to be acknowledged and dealt with.
When we try everything to avoid psychological discomfort, we give it more power, not less. Instead of disappearing, it resurfaces in our moods, our relationships, our sleep, and eventually our health. Healing often begins in a much simpler place than we expect: acknowledging that the discomfort is there. Not analyzing it, not fixing it, just noticing it and allowing it to be present without immediately trying to push it away. We often treat a bad feeling as a personal failing rather than a signal to be heard.
Ashutosh: When we allow ourselves to feel the discomfort fully, without rushing to escape it, something counterintuitive happens: our relationship to these problems shifts. Facing discomfort does not change what we observe, but it changes how we feel about what we observe. That creates a space between ourselves and the external situation.
When Unfelt Pain Resurfaces
Holly: Unmanaged psychological discomfort rarely stays in its lane. A new loss can reactivate an older grief, and a difficult situation at work can bring up feelings rooted in earlier experiences of feeling controlled or unseen.
This has happened to me. Back in 2018, a gunman opened fire on a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. For weeks after this event, security was increased around synagogues, and I found myself sitting in the parking lot of my children’s bus stop with a police officer guarding us. It was especially difficult for me when I learned from our rabbi that the officer was the son of the officer who was involved in the car accident that caused my mother’s death. I tried to bury those feelings and ignore the pain they brought up by focusing on work and family, but I became irritable, depressed, and even angry for no apparent reason until I spoke to someone and began sitting with the discomfort. I took walks in the woods at lunchtime each day to give myself space to process what I was feeling.
The size of the reaction rarely has much to do with the event itself; it has more to do with everything that was never felt the first time.
The Body and the Capacity to Feel
Ashutosh: It would be a mistake to treat psychological discomfort as something that exists only in the mind, separate from the body. The two are closely connected, and physical health affects our capacity to face psychological discomfort. When the body is demanding attention through fatigue, poor posture, inflammation, or other unresolved needs — less mental bandwidth remains for self-observation. A depleted or distressed body keeps the mind occupied with managing that distress.
Holly: This can be particularly difficult because we are often told to do more, be more productive, volunteer more. But sometimes we need to quiet the body and mind to deal with psychological discomfort. Taking time to step back from social obligations and work can be viewed as antisocial when we are actually creating space to deal with psychological discomfort.
Ashutosh: There is a useful parallel here with the immune system. A healthy immune system is not one that remains constantly activated; it responds when needed and then settles back down. An immune system that is chronically overactive can produce autoimmune conditions, in which the body’s defenses begin working against the body itself. A mind running on continuous output, constantly generating thoughts about worries, concerns, and stories, is not necessarily a sign of strength or productivity. It can instead resemble an overactive response, one that never gets the chance to rest and recalibrate.
Holly: I learned this lesson the hard way and will be forever grateful to my chemistry tutor in high school. She taught me about the mind-body connection and helped me understand how unresolved grief can affect us physically. Years later, when a car accident brought the pain of my mother’s death back to the surface, I realized that I had never fully dealt with that grief. Once I began facing it, my physical illness eventually went away.
When Avoidance Becomes Numbness
Ashutosh: Prolonged avoidance of discomfort and pain can produce insensitivity rather than resolution. But the underlying damage does not go away simply because we have stopped noticing it. It continues beneath the surface, even when we have become numb to it. This resembles the effect of a strong painkiller, which can dull our sensitivity more broadly, including our sensitivity to things that matter, such as beauty, connection, and meaning. A life organized around avoiding discomfort can end up feeling flat, not because nothing bad is happening, but because the capacity to feel has been dampened along with the discomfort.
Holly: When I was grieving a pregnancy loss, I experienced this firsthand. Reading and exploration are among my greatest pleasures, and combining the two in a bookstore trip makes for a perfect day. After my loss, I went right back to work days later and buried the grief. That numbed me to the point where my perfect day became nothing. I would go to bookstores and just sit looking around while waiting for my daughter to finish looking through picture books. I felt no joy in exploring books and had no interest in interacting with others or even reading to my daughter.
Sometimes avoidance is as simple as not telling other people that we are hurting. Many of us have never developed the habit of discussing difficult feelings openly, even with people we are close to. I recently lost a close friend, and despite all I’ve learned about community and talking about grief; I still found it difficult to tell my colleagues about the loss. I wanted so badly to keep going and ignore what had happened, but I knew I needed to tell others, not only to help myself deal with it, but also to give them the opportunity to be supportive.
Seeking support from friends, colleagues, or professionals can be an important part of acknowledging what we are feeling, both to ourselves and to the people around us. The goal is not to suffer for its own sake, but to develop a more accurate picture of what is happening so that whatever response follows, whether rest, conversation, treatment, or simply time, can be the right one.
Making Space for Emptiness and Uncertainty
Ashutosh: Part of developing greater sensitivity is becoming comfortable with periods of emptiness, not seen as deprivation, but spaciousness. An empty stomach between meals and an empty mind between thoughts are natural states. The instinct can be to immediately fill the space: to eat, scroll, worry, or plan. But when we stay with that discomfort, both body and mind begin to learn that nothing is wrong.
An empty mind between thoughts is not necessarily a problem that needs to be solved. The same is true of uncertainty. Much of psychological growth involves increasing our tolerance for not knowing and learning to stay present with the moment as it unfolds.
Intention and Psychological Change
Ashutosh: Learning to tolerate discomfort rather than avoid it eventually raises a deeper question: discomfort about what, exactly, and in service of what?
If our intention is to become healthier and more at ease, the mind tends to move in that direction, even when the path is uncomfortable or the progress is slow. But if our intention, even unconsciously, is simply to obtain relief in the present moment, sustained discomfort can begin to feel intolerable, making the process itself seem futile.
We encounter this distinction in ordinary situations. We may know that a difficult conversation needs to happen, that a habit is no longer serving us, or that something in our lives needs to change. Yet if our immediate intention is to avoid discomfort, we may find reasons to postpone the conversation, continue the habit, or convince ourselves that nothing needs to change. I believe the issue is not that we lack the willpower to act; our immediate intention is simply pulling us in another direction.
The turning point comes when we decide that understanding and longer-term well-being matter more than immediate relief. Once that intention becomes clear, discomfort is no longer viewed solely as something to escape.
Genuine intention is not purely an intellectual exercise. It takes into account thoughts and feelings, including fear, excitement, anxiety, and subtle impressions that do not easily reduce to words. Understanding what we actually intend to do means considering all of that rather than filtering it out in favor of whatever sounds most reasonable.
Clarity of intention is not a one-time decision. It is something we return to and refine as we learn more about ourselves and our circumstances.
Identity and Conditioning
Ashutosh: This also raises a question about identity. Much of what we call our identity consists of accumulated experiences, beliefs, opinions, and knowledge acquired from others. Language, culture, values, memories, and assumptions have all been inherited in one form or another.
We can see this in the small decisions we make every day. What we believe we should want, how we think we should behave, what kind of work we believe suits us, or even what we consider success can seem like personal choices. Yet many of these preferences have been shaped by family, culture, education, experience, and the expectations of people around us.
If our sense of self is less fixed than we imagined, then we are not required to defend it. We can become more open to learning, more willing to see things afresh, and less trapped by old conclusions about who we are supposed to be. Rather than certainty, we find possibility. Rather than rigid identity, we find adaptability.
The result is not confusion but greater freedom. When the mind is less occupied with protecting an image of itself, attention becomes available for something more creative: direct perception and the emergence of new possibilities that could not be seen through the lens of old assumptions.
Sensitivity, Joy, and Wonder
Holly: When we numb ourselves to discomfort, we often numb ourselves to other experiences as well. Beauty, connection, wonder, gratitude, and joy all require the capacity to feel deeply.
Perhaps this is one reason we find it more difficult, as adults, to experience wonder and beauty in the world. These are qualities we often associate with childhood, perhaps because children have not yet learned to suppress their emotions. Children are allowed to rage, to cry, and to feel their emotions, but as adults we often feel we need to suppress what makes us angry and hold back our tears so we are not viewed as weak.
By increasing our sensitivity and allowing ourselves to feel again, we regain the capacity for greater joy and wonder. We no longer need to wish for the wonder of childhood; we can find it now, in the present.
The Transformative Potential of Discomfort
Discomfort is not simply something to overcome. It is closer to a messenger, one that is easy to dismiss but costly to ignore.
The courage to feel is not about seeking out discomfort or dwelling in it. It is about being willing to let discomfort and pain be present long enough to understand what they are pointing to. In doing so, we create space to see more clearly, respond with intention rather than react out of fear, and make decisions from a place of steadiness rather than panic.
Psychological growth does not require a life without discomfort. It requires a different relationship with discomfort, one in which we can attend to what it reveals without fear. What matters is developing the capacity to remain sensitive to both the pleasant and the unpleasant. When we become sensitive only to what feels good and avoid what feels uncomfortable, we create an imbalance. What we ignore does not necessarily disappear; it can continue to affect us beneath the surface, gradually diminishing our sensitivity, responsiveness, and capacity to perceive what is happening within and around us. When we no longer need to numb ourselves against what is difficult, we become more open to the full range of experience. That is what the courage to feel makes possible.
Authors’ note: This article was edited with the assistance of generative AI for proofreading and language refinement. The ideas, arguments, experiences, and final editorial decisions are those of the authors.
