In 55 improvisation classes at The Second City, students told that their goal was to feel awkward held their focus longer and took more risks than students given the standard instruction, which is a different thing from learning to tolerate discomfort

Most advice about getting comfortable with discomfort is really advice about endurance. Tolerate the bad feeling, wait for it to pass, do the thing anyway. That is a reasonable description of one skill, and it is not the one a pair of experiments published in 2022 were testing.

Those studies asked what happens when the discomfort stops being the obstacle and becomes the target.

The instruction that changed what people did

Kaitlin Woolley of Cornell and Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago published Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort in Psychological Science in 2022. Five experiments, 2,163 adults.

The manipulation is a single sentence. In the first experiment, run across 55 improvisation classes at The Second City in Chicago with 557 participants, one group was told: your goal for the next exercise is to feel awkward and uncomfortable, and feeling uncomfortable is a sign that the exercise is working.

The comparison groups were told, in effect, to develop their skills. Same class, same exercise, different definition of what counts as it going well.

The group told to seek discomfort held their focus longer, by 0.44 standard deviations, and took more risks, by 0.24. In a second experiment, on expressive writing about difficult life events, that group rated their goal achievement at 5.28 against 4.82 for the comparison group, and reported stronger motivation to do it again. The effect sizes there are small, around 0.33 and 0.26.

These are moderate effects, not transformations. What makes them worth attention is the mechanism. Nothing about the task changed. Only the reading of the unpleasant feeling changed, from evidence that this is going badly to evidence that this is going.

It is worth separating this from the more familiar idea, because they ask for opposite things. Tolerating discomfort means holding a feeling you would rather not have while you get on with the actual objective. The feeling is a cost you are paying. In the seeking version the feeling is the objective, or at least the thing you are checking for, which means an exercise that felt fine would count as a failure rather than a success.

That is an odd instruction to give yourself, and it is probably why it had to be tested rather than assumed.

Where it stopped working

The later experiments are the ones that keep the finding honest, because they are where it runs out.

In the third experiment, seeking discomfort raised interest in COVID-19 information but not in unrelated articles. In the fourth, it increased engagement with opposing political viewpoints but had no detectable effect on viewpoints participants already agreed with. In the fifth, participants seeking discomfort chose more articles about gun violence than the comparison group, roughly two and a half against one and a half.

Read those together and the pattern is narrow rather than general. Reframing discomfort did not make people more motivated across the board. It moved them specifically towards material that was uncomfortable and relevant.

Where nothing was at stake, the instruction did nothing.

This is one paper from one research group, five experiments and a reasonable sample, but not settled consensus. It is the kind of result that needs independent replication before anyone builds much on it.

The same signal shows up in how people learn

There is a separate literature, developed by different researchers over a longer period, that arrives at a related point from another direction.

Robert and Elizabeth Bjork at UCLA have spent decades on what they call desirable difficulties, set out in a 2011 chapter titled “Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way”. Study conditions that make learning feel harder in the moment, such as spacing sessions out or testing yourself rather than rereading, tend to produce better retention later than conditions that feel smooth.

The companion finding is the more uncomfortable one. In work with Asher Koriat published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2005, Bjork described illusions of competence: learners judging their own progress by how fluent the material feels while they are studying it, and getting it systematically wrong.

The mechanism is fluency. Rereading a chapter you have already read makes the material feel familiar, and that familiarity gets misread as knowing it. Closing the book and trying to recall the same material feels laboured and produces a lot of gaps, which feels like evidence of not knowing it. The second one is the condition that holds up when you are tested weeks later.

The easy session feels productive and is not. The difficult one feels like failure and is not.

Two independent lines of research, one on motivation and one on memory, both landing on the same structural problem. The in-the-moment feeling of difficulty is a poor guide to whether something is working, and in some contexts it points the opposite way.

When discomfort is information rather than progress

None of this generalises into a rule that bad feelings mean you are on the right track, and the authors are careful about this themselves.

Woolley and Fishbach state the limit plainly in the paper: there are times when discomfort should be a cue to stop rather than a sign of progress. Sharp pain during exercise can signal injury. Extreme emotional pain during expressive writing can signal something that needs attention rather than persistence.

That caveat is doing more work than it appears to. The reframe is useful precisely because it overrides a signal, and a signal you have trained yourself to override is one you can no longer read. The research does not offer a way to tell the two cases apart. It only offers evidence that in the specific contexts tested, treating awkwardness as progress changed what people did.

All participants were US residents, which the authors also flag. Whether the same reframe works where the social meaning of awkwardness differs is an open question.

What we find useful here is how much narrower the finding is than the advice it resembles. The instruction that worked was not a disposition or a way of being. It was one sentence, applied to one task, aimed at one specific feeling, in situations where the uncomfortable thing was also the relevant thing.

The version of this that circulates as general life advice has the sentence and none of the conditions attached to it.