The other day someone offered me a xanax after a night full of excessiveness "you'll wake up and you'll feel great" they said, reluctantly I tried it. To my surprise I did wake up feeling great, but also confused. In my daily life I optimise so much for pain, that it felt wrong to use a hack, a cheat, to not feel any.
When you optimise for pain, everything else becomes easy. It's because relative to your life problems, the pain you face up to will make other "pains" smaller. So I seek it a lot, being a hustling entrepreneur there's always so much "pain", so I seek it a lot.
This week I went running in my shorts -5c outside 15K, then I got home and my eyebrows were frozen, then hopped straight in a cold shower (just putting the shower at the coldest possible). I stayed under it for 3 minutes. It was longer than I usually do it.
You stop feeling the cold after 1 minute, but those extra minutes do count, the rest of the day i felt undercooled, basically like a mild hypothermia. So why did I do this? Because in that day not a single person, situation or problem could stop me. When you take in pain (exercise, endurance, ice baths, etc) it increases your will power.
And you can take much more pain than you think you can take. But we usually we stay away from it, because its uncomfortable. If you don't have stress, you don't do hard things. But if you try hard things in life then seeking pain is mental resilience training. Oddly, the things that stress you out in life, can then become a source for mental strength training. It's fascinating, isn't it?
So whatever obstacle comes your way, don't walk away from it. Embrace obstacle, endure pain, and your world will expand. No judgement for people "taking a Xanax", heck I might even do too, but as a society (Europe) we shy away too much from hard work, grit and a drive to success- so let me have my pain.