Blog #4 - I'm Uncomfortable Being Uncomfortable

Hi there, and welcome back to Voices for Wellness!

Maybe you can relate, but typically, the first thing I do when I come home from work is reach for my phone and scroll. I do the same when in awkward social situations, after hard days at school, or in moments where I am the most depressed, anxious, or sad. Hoping that a quick scroll through some mindless TikToks or Reels will give me a moment to decompress. 

“I just need to turn my brain off for a second,” I tell myself.

But this scroll is rarely “brief,” and it rarely makes me feel better after a long day or a hard moment. But it does allow for distraction in times when I want to avoid discomfort. This negative cycle, paired with algorithms that are designed to be addictive (Roberts, J. A., & David, M. E., 2025), keeps me sucked into my phone for hours, doing nothing but negatively impacting my self-esteem, numbing my brain, and ignoring the source of discomfort. 

I’ve recently deactivated all of my social media in acknowledgment that these apps were doing nothing but harming me. I’ve been aware of social media's negative effects on me for quite some time, and I've tried many times to get off the “big three”: TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. Ultimately, after about three years of deleting, then redownloading and deleting again, it took a breakup and graduating from college for me to really get off social media and deactivate my accounts. 

While my screen time and my ability to compare myself to others have drastically decreased, I still find myself looking for something to scroll through. Especially in moments after a tiring day at work, when something feels hard, when I'm bored, or in an awkward social situation. Suddenly I'm checking my email for the fifth time or scrolling through pictures I've already seen in my own camera roll.

Although I’ve removed the apps with the algorithms that kept me hooked for hours on end, I still haven't broken the habit of picking up my phone in moments of discomfort. 

This experience, combined with what I've been learning through my work and research on addiction at AES, has made it apparent that the real issue for me is that I am uncomfortable being uncomfortable. 

Of course this makes sense for physical discomfort; human beings naturally want to move away from things that cause us pain. If we're experiencing physical pain, our brains and bodies motivate us to do something about it, to move away from the source, protect ourselves, or seek relief.

But discomfort isn't always physical. Rejection, loneliness, embarrassment, anxiety, and social exclusion can hurt, too. Neuroscience research has found overlap between some of the neural systems involved in physical pain and those involved in experiences of social pain (Sturgeon, J. A., & Zautra, A. J., 2016). If our brains respond so strongly to both physical and social discomfort, it makes sense that we would look for ways to make those uncomfortable feelings stop.

And maybe that's where discomfort deserves a little more attention. Because, as unpleasant as it can be, being uncomfortable is often how we grow.

Before we get further into discomfort, though, I think it's important to distinguish between stepping outside your comfort zone and experiencing the kind of prolonged social or emotional pain that can negatively affect your mental and physical health (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2024). Chronic loneliness, isolation, anxiety, or depression aren't things we should simply force ourselves to “sit with” in the name of personal growth. Seeking support, connection, or professional help when we're struggling is important.

But I do think there is something preventative about teaching ourselves how to tolerate manageable discomfort. If we learn from a young age that boredom, awkwardness, stress, sadness, or anxiety don't always require immediate relief, we can begin building healthier ways to respond to difficult emotions. This becomes especially relevant to addiction education. While learning to tolerate discomfort certainly cannot prevent every case of addiction, it can give us another tool for coping with difficult feelings rather than automatically looking for something outside of ourselves to make those feelings disappear. 

The discomfort I'm talking about is different. It's the smaller, everyday discomfort we can often tolerate but increasingly find ways to avoid. It's sitting alone in a waiting room without immediately pulling out your phone. It's going to an event where you don't know many people and allowing yourself to feel awkward. It's sitting with boredom, having a difficult conversation, trying something you might fail at, or allowing yourself to feel sad after something doesn't go the way you hoped.

Those moments don't necessarily feel good, but feeling good isn't always the goal. Sometimes discomfort tells us we're doing something unfamiliar, confronting an emotion we've been avoiding, or learning that we can handle a feeling we once thought we needed to escape.

And maybe that's an important skill in itself: learning that discomfort can exist without immediately needing to make it disappear.

That doesn't mean we should never seek comfort. Comfort, distraction, and relief all have their place. The question I've started asking myself is whether I'm choosing something because it will actually help me move through what I'm feeling, or because it will help me avoid feeling it altogether.

For me, I reach for my phone when I’m uncomfortable, even though I know that, more often than not, it ultimately makes me feel worse. More importantly, it stops me from actually doing something with the discomfort I’m feeling.

Maybe you can relate to that feeling, whether it's through your phone or another habit you instinctively turn to. After a long day at work or school, instead of scrolling to “turn my brain off,” I could go for a walk or a run, something I know almost always makes me feel better. Maybe what I actually need is rest, and I could take a nap or go to bed earlier. If something is upsetting me, I know I usually feel better after talking to my mom about it or writing it down in my journal. None of these things necessarily makes the uncomfortable feeling disappear immediately, but they give me a healthier way to work through it rather than simply distracting myself.

And sometimes, maybe I don't need to do anything at all. If I'm standing awkwardly at a social event or sitting alone in a waiting room, perhaps the answer isn't finding a new distraction. Those uncomfortable social situations will always arise, and the only way I'll become more comfortable navigating them is by actually experiencing them. Like most things, that takes practice. And, at least in my experience, those situations are almost never as bad as I imagine they're going to be.

These are the things I want to practice turning toward instead of automatically reaching for my phone whenever discomfort appears. More than anything, I want to change the way I think about being uncomfortable. Rather than treating every uncomfortable feeling as a problem that needs to be fixed immediately, I want to start seeing some of those moments as opportunities to understand what I'm feeling, practice healthier ways of coping, and sometimes simply prove to myself that I can sit with discomfort and be okay.

So, I encourage you to try it too. The next time you feel the instinct to immediately reach for your phone, or whatever your go-to distraction may be, give yourself a moment before you do. 

Sit with the discomfort. Then practice. Because maybe becoming more comfortable with discomfort begins by allowing ourselves to experience a little of it—while also learning to recognize when that discomfort calls for support, and how to ask for it.

Tune back in next time, for how to ask for that support. 

Samara - Advocate for AES :) 

References: 

1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024, May 15). Health effects of social isolation and loneliness.https://www.cdc.gov/social-connectedness/risk-factors/index.html

2. Roberts, J. A., & David, M. E. (2025). Technology affordances, social media engagement, and social media addiction: An investigation of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 28(5), 318–325. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2024.0338

3. Sturgeon, J. A., & Zautra, A. J. (2016). Social pain and physical pain: Shared paths to resilience. Pain Management, 6(1), 63–74. https://doi.org/10.2217/pmt.15.56