How emotional avoidance keeps us stuck and what happens when we stop running
Most of us grew up thinking that pain meant something needed to be solved. Like any time we felt sadness, anger, or fear, the goal was to fix it, fast. Make it go away. And if we couldn’t, we felt broken. Weak. But over time I’ve realised that discomfort isn’t a problem. It’s just part of being alive.
I used to hate feeling things I couldn’t explain. That twist in the stomach that shows up out of nowhere. The lump in the throat when someone says something too close to the truth. The fog that hangs over you even when everything in your life looks fine on paper. It felt like failure. And failure needed to be managed, organised, solved. That’s how I treated my own heart for years.
Our addiction to fixing everything
There’s something in us that wants things to make sense. We want clear lines and easy answers. So when emotions don’t fit neatly into categories, we panic. We rush to control. To analyse. To distract.
We work more. We scroll endlessly. We joke. We tidy the house. We help someone else with their problems. And all the while, we’re avoiding the one thing that actually needs our attention: our own discomfort.
But what I’ve learned slowly, painfully, repeatedly, is that trying to fix everything only makes the feeling hang around longer. Like it’s waiting for you to stop fighting it. Like it knows it won’t be heard until you stop and say, “Okay, I’m listening.”
Sitting with it doesn’t mean giving up
When we talk about sitting with discomfort, it doesn’t mean giving in to it or drowning in it. It means noticing it. Naming it. Letting it exist without forcing it to justify itself. It means saying, “Yeah, I’m sad today,” without rushing to change the subject or crack a joke.
The truth is, most uncomfortable feelings pass through us when we let them. But when we resist them, they get stuck. They tighten in our chest. They show up in headaches and bad sleep and short tempers. And then we blame ourselves for being “too emotional” or “too sensitive” when we’ve just been ignoring a very normal part of being human.
Why this matters more than we think
When we don’t learn to sit with discomfort, we start organising our whole lives around avoiding it. We stay in jobs, relationships, patterns that keep us safe from pain, but also far from joy. Because you can’t numb selectively. If you shut down one part of yourself, the rest dims too.
I’ve done that. I’ve avoided conversations. Buried emotions. Distracted myself into silence. And it looked fine from the outside, but inside it was grey. Heavy. Lifeless. It wasn’t until I started letting the discomfort speak that anything started to change.
And it’s not glamorous. Sometimes it means crying in the shower. Sitting in your room with your arms around your knees. Feeling like you’re falling apart without knowing what triggered it. But those moments matter. They open something up. They soften what’s been hard for too long.
Let it be hard
It’s okay for life to feel hard sometimes. It’s okay to not understand what you’re feeling. You don’t have to fix it. You just have to feel it. Even a little bit. Even when it’s messy and slow and uncomfortable.
So next time discomfort shows up, don’t push it away. Don’t pretend it’s not there. Just sit with it. Offer it a chair. Let it stay for a while. And trust that you won’t break. You’re not too much. You’re just finally letting yourself feel.