I hate running, Reader. Like really dislike it.

For years, I hated exercise in general specifically because I hated the feeling of the tightness in your chest when you're struggling to breathe and it feels like your body is screaming at you to stop. Why would I want to voluntarily subject myself to that feeling? (Other than the obvious long term health benefits of cardiovascular health, I know, I get it...)

Well at the (not that) old age of 32, I had hit my breaking point on saying I was going to make exercise a priority and realized I actually needed to do it. Why? Well our bodies don't react the way they do at 32 as they did at younger years in more ways than one.

So in my annual board meeting with my best friends (if you're curious about this tradition that we do, shoot me a reply and I'll share more), I set a goal to exercise consistently this year. I gave myself a prize I would get if I went to 50 workout classes and we created an accountability system for them to hold me accountable.

As I write this email to you, I've done 27 hot yoga classes and am now pretty naturally in a 3-4x a week workout routine. Why does this matter to you?

In my hot yoga, I still absolutely get that feeling that I hate of heart pounding, chest heaving. And I still hate it. This is not some magical transformational tale of falling in love with exercise (at least not yet)! What has shifted for me is how I think about that feeling.

When you're trying to be more confident, manage anxiety, heal codependency or anxious attachment, you often hear about "managing the discomfort." In life, we're not going to be able to 100% eliminate times where things don't go our way. We're going to get rejected, get bad feedback, be put in new situations and many other things that are going to make us feel uncomfortable.

Our instinct is to get out of the discomfort as quickly as possible. We often do this by retreating to the safe place we were before and it's no wonder then why we often look at our New Year's Resolutions from last year and realize that we'd made no progress.

Once you've seen this pattern play out one too many times, you realize that the key is in the discomfort.

Building resilience so that a rejection doesn't derail your self-esteem. Learning a new skill through trying and failing over and over again. And yes, building cardiovascular health or muscle, all these things come from us being uncomfortable and sticking with it.

I even see how this has played out in running my own business - there are so many moments where it feels like things are going wrong or not working and I've seen how all the big successes in the last three years have come from periods of time when I felt uncomfortable but just kept going. (Side note, but if you're considering starting your own business, I just published an article that might be helpful to you.)

It's not just our minds at play trying to get us out of the discomfort - our nervous system is sent into fight or flight whenever we push our own boundaries. It has an idea of how much you can handle and it tries to remind you of that by yelling in your inner thoughts about how you can't handle this and need to go back. Just like staying in a hard pose is building a muscle, not bailing out because you're uncomfortable is training your nervous system to be able to manage more discomfort than it currently thinks you can.

You don't have to enjoy the discomfort. You just have to stay in it to feel the growth.

So when I have sweat dripping down my back and my quads are burning because the instructor is asking us to sit lower into Warrior 2 for the seventeen millionth time in one class, I don't try to talk myself into being like "isn't this fun?!" All I'm saying to myself is "if you can survive this, you will be stronger for it" or "the longer you can last here the faster you'll see results."

The next time you hear that voice telling you that you can't handle it, maybe you can try to remind yourself that the joy is in the discomfort, if you can stay with it. I'll be reminding myself that in a dark 95 degree room sometime tomorrow :)

Love your internet big sis,

Samantha

P.S. We have two weeks until the next Ask a Big Sister issue of the newsletter. If you have a question for me or something you'd like advice on, make sure to submit it here so it can be considered for this month's issue!