One Really Good Reason Pain Can Be Life's Greatest Teacher
Take a minute and think about your teachers growing up. Which ones were your favorites? The easy ones? Not likely. You may have liked them, but chances are they didn’t leave much of an impression on you. The favorites—the teachers you ended up liking—are the ones who challenged you. Not just in academics but in life. It was the coaches who got in your face and pushed you to be better. The history teacher made you read more than you ever thought you could. You hated it but learned so much. It was the English teacher that never let a single grammar mistake slide. But now, you find yourself holding others to the same standard. Yes, in the moment, we cursed them—even hated them. But the older you understands and appreciates the investment they made in your life. You knew they cared and wanted you to succeed more than anything—even if that meant a little pain to make progress.
Be honest with yourself for a moment. When was the last time you learned a valuable lesson that wasn’t accompanied by even a little pain? You’re going to struggle to find one. Those teachers you now appreciate were great not because they possessed some unique teaching prowess. But because they mastered the art of allowing life to teach you more than the lesson itself. Because the pain we experience is often the best possible teacher, we can have.
If I Ignore It, Will It Go Away?
However, when we experience life’s greatest teacher—the pain we go through—many of us bear the unnecessarily heavy load. We blame ourselves, sink into a state of shame, grow depressed and defeated, and lose motivation. Sometimes we fail to appropriately navigate the world of loss or heartache, allowing us to create a lasting and unhealthy impact on our minds. Emotional pain can create a myriad of emotions, including depression, anxiety, panic, rage, shame, and worthlessness—to name a few.
But I am sorry to say that the news gets worse. While the pain of life and the lessons that follow can create intense emotional distress—sometimes leading to mental health issues that need to be addressed—avoiding the pain creates a much larger problem. But the reality is, that is precisely what many of us do. We mask it, cover it up, avoid it, deny it, create a busier schedule to ignore it, and seek out anything to numb the pain and discomfort.
This past school year, RemedyLIVE’s Get Schooled Tour Escape program served more than seven thousand students, helping them understand why and how our minds are prone to attempt to avoid pain and its impact on their mental health. Of the students surveyed, we asked how they deal with stress, pain, and the worries of life. The top answer wasn’t surprising at all. 37% of the students said they simply ignore it, avoid it and wait for it to disappear.
We would rather numb the pain than allow it to shape us into better people.
Be Like The Buffalo
At least that’s what our Mental Health Advocate, Richele Groeneweg told us. It turns out that buffalos have a great lesson to teach us. When the buffalo sense a storm is coming, rather than run from the storm, they run to it. Why? It’s simple, really. They can minimize the time they experience the discomfort of the storm. We don’t do that do we? It’s the storms of life that we are actively trying to avoid. Perhaps it’s fear. Or maybe we hope that if we get far enough away, we can somehow avoid the pain altogether.
But the reality is that the pain of life will always find us. Fortunately, there is always something to be learned, some way in which we can grow.
However safe and productive it may seem to suppress, avoid, and ignore pain; where there is unprocessed pain, anxiety lurks around the corner. It’s your brain’s response and effort to prevent more pain. A process that can create greater mental health struggles in the long run.
So What Is The Answer?
Let’s go back to those teachers I made you think about. They were hard, caused pain, and much weeping and gnashing of teeth. However, that pain often translated into a lesson, making you more resilient, a better student, and likely a better person.
Great teachers let the consequences of life do the teaching. So what might happen if we allowed pain to be our teacher? What could we learn? How would we benefit in the long run? There is only one way to find out. The result is not just a lesson learned but a path that leads to greater mental health.
