Why Making Yourself Uncomfortable Can Be Motivating

Discomfort, both physical and emotional, can be a major deterrent to self-growth. That’s why plenty of behavioral researchers treat it as an obstacle to maneuver around.

But could discomfort be an important tool for self-development? Cornell’s Kaitlin Woolley and Chicago Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach tested this idea in a series of experiments involving hundreds of subjects, and they find that discomfort can be a motivator rather than an obstacle.

“Instead of seeing discomfort as unrelated to the goal or as a signal to stop, people will start perceiving it as a sign of progress,” the researchers suggest.

Across a field experiment involving the famous Chicago improvisational comedy enterprise the Second City and four online experiments, the researchers asked some participants to seek out discomfort and take it as a measure of progress toward their goal.

In the field experiment, Woolley and Fishbach partnered with the Second City Training Center. They recruited 557 improv students from 55 classes and tested whether instructing the participants to lean into awkwardness or discomfort led them to take more risks. The students in the discomfort group were told that “feeling uncomfortable is a sign that the exercise is working” and that “your goal is to push past your comfort zone.”

Two other groups got different instructions, with one group told simply to “see if the exercise is working” and another to “push yourself to develop new skills and feel yourself improving.” The researchers then watched each class play a game called “Give Focus,” in which one person who “has focus” moves around the room and acts at will while other players are frozen in place. The person who has focus can pass it to someone else after some duration, short or long. Most learning happens when people are holding focus, says Woolley, so the longer they hold it, the more they learn.

Woolley and Fishbach analyzed video recordings of each class. They find that those who were asked to seek discomfort inhabited the focus role longer and took more risks—for example, by walking fast and jumping around rather than walking normally—thus providing evidence that leaning in to the awkwardness allowed them to make more progress.

The researchers replicated the findings in four follow-up experiments involving participants they recruited online. Each scenario that participants were placed in—writing expressively about an important emotional issue in their lives, reading headlines and synopses of COVID-19 news articles, and being open to and reading about political views different from their own—allowed the researchers to examine the role of seeking discomfort. As with the improv setup, the follow-up experiments demonstrate that participants who were asked to seek discomfort were more motivated to continue whichever emotionally difficult task they were asked to do.