“No pain, no gain,” might have fallen out of fashion as an exercise mantra but research shows that it can help us to achieve our goals
Finding ourselves outside our comfort zone is a common experience in our professional lives – and we’ll also face it outside the office. You don’t have to have signed up for a skydiving course or have agreed to give blood to experience anxiety when aiming to achieve a goal or do something for the first time.
The chances are that we’ll also feel discouraged at some point. Perhaps we fail to make ourselves understood in that language we’ve started to learn or the first presentation that we deliver after doing a course on the subject doesn’t go particularly well. In the face of such disappointment and discomfort we might be tempted simply to give up.
But what if we change how we view this discomfort? What if we reframe it, thinking of it as a sign that we’re progressing and learning? A step forward rather than a step backwards in our attempts to learn something new, increase our skillset and achieve a goal? The idea sounds simple but there’s evidence to suggest that it works.
Feeling uncomfortable
In a study conducted by Cornell University and Booth School of Business at Chicago University, around 550 impro students were signed up for a series of beginners’ workshops in improvisation. In one of these workshops, one person moved around while their fellow participants stood still. After a while, the mover handed over to another workshop student who moved around the others as they remained static.
But here’s the trick – before they performed these actions, half of the participants were informed 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 told simply to “see if the exercise is working” and another advised to “push yourself to develop new skills and feel yourself improving.”
Achieving their goals
The exercise was then videoed and analysed to identify both how long participants took in the role that required them to remain still, and how innovative and daring they were as they improvised their movements around the static person. Those who had been told to embrace discomfort and awkwardness were more likely to throw themselves into the improvisation – for example, by walking faster and jumping around rather than walking normally – and they appeared to be more motivated by the task than the control group. They were also more likely to report that they had achieved their goals as part of the exercise.
In another study, participants were encouraged to take part in a writing exercise to help them to work through a difficult and emotional issue. A number were told that if they felt discomfort and some distress they would benefit from the experience. Here too, compared with the control group, these participants were more likely to report that the writing exercise had help them to cope with the emotional issue. They also said that they were more likely to use it in the future.
“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,” write the researchers, Kaitlin Woolley from Cornell and Chicago Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach.
“No pain, no gain,” might be something of a cliché when it comes to exercise. However, according to Woolley and Fishbach’s research it seems that if we can embrace the idea of discomfort and awkwardness (within safe boundaries, obviously) and see it as a marker of progress rather than running away from it, we can improve our motivation to hang in there and achieve our goals.
