Seeking Discomfort

Routh Address 16th September 2024

Abstract from Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort

Achieving personal growth often requires experiencing discomfort. What if instead of tolerating discomfort (e.g., feeling awkward or uncomfortable), people actively set out to make themselves uncomfortable? Because discomfort is usually experienced immediately and is easy to detect, we suggest that seeking discomfort as a signal of growth can increase motivation.

Five experiments involving 2200 adults tested this prediction across various areas of personal growth: taking acting classes to increase self-confidence, writing to process difficult emotions, becoming informed about the COVID-19 health crisis, opening oneself to opposing political viewpoints, and learning about gun violence.
Across these areas of personal development, seeking discomfort as a signal of self-growth increased perceived achievement relative to standard instructions. Results showed that these effects occurred only in areas of personal growth that cause immediate discomfort.

I was talking to a pupil recently and they told me that they had decided to make a change to an aspect of their life in School. Why is that I asked, I thought things were going really well? That’s true they said but I find that I perform better when things don’t get too comfortable.

When pupils, and indeed staff, join Bromsgrove, one of our wishes is that they soon find that they are comfortable here. There will be a period during which everything seems new and big and different to where they were before, but after a while, things settle down and I hope that is starting to be the case for those who joined us new in September. After a couple of weeks, the layout of the campus becomes familiar, we get used to our classes and the rhythm of the School day and importantly, I hope we are starting to meet others with whom we get along and become friends. As I said at the start of term, it is important that those who are old, help those who are new, just as others did when we were new here too…and so with time and help and us going out of our way to get to know how things work, I hope we do become comfortable and start to feel at home…just as we did in our previous setting.

So why then, would someone who has been here a little while, go out of their way to deliberately make themselves feel uncomfortable?

The reading that Farid shared with us a few moments ago is the abstract from a paper entitled Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort. As you may know, and particularly those of you who have worked on EPQs, HPQs or EEs and the like, an abstract is a brief summary of an academic research paper and typically tells us in a couple of hundred words, the purpose, results and conclusion of the work that is described in the paper itself. In this case, the researchers carried out experiments with 2200 adults and you can read the full results of their findings for yourself.

In essence, they said that while we often see discomfort as a sign to stop doing something, discomfort may well mean that we are making progress. The time we are encouraged to read in Routh, may well be a very uncomfortable prospect, but having practised and ultimately done so really well, we discover that we have that ability, and we are better prepared for doing something similar next time. Before we go on stage to perform that piece of music which we have played over and over again to ourselves, but never to large audience in which everyone is gazing at us, may well make us tremble and sweat, but actually the sense of doing it – and doing it really well – is superb.

So, as we progress through the term, I hope all of us feel happy and settled here and able to be ourselves. However, there will be occasions when we are strongly encouraged to try activities or take risks that extend us beyond what makes us feel comfortable. On other occasions, it might be that we recognise that there are positive opportunities available to us that we might think twice about taking, but they’ll stretch us in a good way even if they cause us some discomfort at the time.

Whether it is the result of the encouragement of others, or us pushing ourselves, I suspect that when we take our courage in our hands and do something that is out of the ordinary for us, three things will happen: firstly, we will feel uncomfortable before and as we begin this new activity, but then we will find that it is not be as bad as we feared and finally, we will enjoy achieving more than we thought possible.

So, embrace the odd opportunity to be uncomfortable. As someone said If you want to achieve something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.