The New Ascetics
Why it’s time you embraced the transformative power of pain
Pain disrupts this monotony and can amplify subsequent pleasure: a hot shower after a cold run, say. What’s more, relief from pain can make you happier than you would have been otherwise. As Bastian puts it, relief is not just the absence of a negative, but a positive in itself.
We adapt to pain as we do to pleasure: the pain of going for a run every day decreases, while the pleasure you feel afterwards does not. Crucially, this process also works in reverse. When we adapt to pleasure, we still feel shock at the pain of deprivation – which may explain why we are so susceptible to First-world problems such as a lack of wifi or slowmoving trains. Our baseline has shifted.
GLAD TO BE UNHAPPY
You may see pain and pleasure as opposites, but the brain doesn’t draw such a neat distinction. Both trigger the release of neurotransmitters called opioids and dopamine. They make you “like” a pleasurable experience and “want” more of it, respectively. But opioids are also painkillers, and they remain in your brain for a while after you stop doing whatever was painful enough for them to be released: hence the runner’s high.
This partly explains our propensity for punishing exercise, as does research by William Bridel of the University of Calgary, Canada. He has interviewed amateur Ironmen to try to understand why anyone would choose something so gruelling as a “leisure” activity.
“A few of them conceptualised pushing their bodies to the limit as pleasurable,” he explains. “But I’d say the majority positioned it as a way to prove they could tolerate the pain they’d face.” Not so much masochism, then, as self-mastery.
Another principle at play is “hedonic reversal”. Sometimes described as “benign masochism”, it occurs when you trigger and override your body’s threat response, safe in the knowledge that there is no real danger: by watching a thriller, say, or scaling the final wall in an adventure race. Whether you view these activities as a challenge or a threat determines whether your pain becomes a positive. The greater your capacity for pain, the less threatening it becomes.
That capacity can be developed by exposure. In experiments at the University of Nebraska-lincoln, rats were subjected to repeated electric shocks. They quickly improved their ability to release adrenalin and noradrenaline, readying their body for fight or flight. However, those that received large shocks seemingly at random soon stopped trying to avoid zaps; their adrenalin was too depleted. Meanwhile, those that were exposed to milder shocks and allowed to recover in between – pain training, in other words – fought harder to escape. This sort of conditioning is also seen in humans. Exposure to pain – particularly that you can control – makes you more resilient, not just physically but also mentally, because the same areas of the brain are involved in both.
The effect can be profound, but it can also work in subtler ways. Matt “Thommo” Thompson is a former naval officer and coach at Reebok Crossfit Stockport. He describes himself as “a bit of an introvert” and credits ultra-intensive training with building his self-belief. “Through Crossfit, I’ve accomplished things I’d never thought I could do,” he says. “That gave me the self-assurance to pursue things in other walks of life. I have a lot more confidence now when it comes to meeting new people.” This brain-body connection is why taking paracetamol can relieve some forms of emotional pain, and working out can reduce symptoms of anxiety.
BITTER MEDICINE
For pain to be beneficial, the dose is important. Too much adversity is overwhelming, but too little doesn’t elicit toughening. Bastian likens this to immunisation. It is hard to imagine some kinds of pain – bereavement, for example – as having any positive value. But this can depend on the individual response.
A study at Bangor University into what separates medal-winning athletes from also-rans discovered that many had endured a childhood trauma, such as bullying or a death in the family. After the 2007 Virginia Tech campus shooting in the US, some students reported feeling less anxious. We adapt to our circumstances.
“A hundred years ago, people were comfortable at 17°C,” says Scott Carney, the author of What Doesn’t Kill You: How
“Exposure to pain is like immunisation – the right dose will make you stronger”
Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength. “Because of central heating, that number is now 22°C.” Technology has been making us more comfortable and less capable ever since the invention of fire, which caused us to shed our body hair and shrank our mouths because we didn’t need to chew our newly cooked food as much.
Carney’s book began as a commission from Playboy. He set out to debunk the claims of Wim “Iceman” Hof, the eccentric Dutch guru (previously profiled in MH) who is apparently able to control his body temperature and immune system through breathing exercises – but he couldn’t debunk him. Soon, Carney was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro wearing only a swimming costume, wool cap and boots. He also ran Tough Guy – the original and still one of the most sadistic obstacle course races, held every January in Staffordshire – without a shirt, forcing himself to interpret the pain of the cold as pleasure. “I imagined I had a fire in my belly,” he says.
Avoiding pain makes us less able to cope with it when it arises. “These days, people don’t have physical stresses and dangers,” says Carney. “We engage our fight-or-flight response when we worry about taxes, instead of letting it do what it was evolved for: making us physically more resilient. People are paying money for these events because they want the stress and to feel the accomplishment that comes with it.” Pain, he says, has become a “luxury good”.
The price of pain is what can really sting. The fee for the full 10-mile Tough Mudder is in the region of £100. An unlimited membership of a Crossfit box can set you back more than £200 a month. The cheapest tier for the 2018 UK Ironman is £385, and that’s without the gear (the average Ironman forks out £2,790, according to Multisport Research). Not for nothing are these predominantly white- collar activities, says Bastian. “The more comfort we have, the more we will actively seek out discomfort.”
The Oxford English Dictionary defines asceticism as “characterised by severe self- discipline and abstention from all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons”. We associate it with flagellation, fasting and other such rituals, but the word comes from the ancient Greek for “exercise”. The connection is most explicit in the Sri Chinmoy SelfTranscendence 3,100-Mile Race, named after the Indian spiritualist who believed that running was a path to enlightenment, which is held on a single New York city block and can take up to 52 days to complete. For those who struggle with conventional forms of meditation, pain can be an alternative route to mindfulness. Like meditation, pain increases focus, but in a way that is almost impossible to ignore. Whether we can inhibit our impulse to avoid pain has implications beyond boosting fitness. “Completion of endurance events reflects people’s discipline, their ability to sacrifice,” says Bridel, who bears an Ironman tattoo. “For me, it’s about using sport as a form of social capital. People enjoy the recognition that they get from completing these events that others perceive as impossible.”
THE MEANING OF STRIFE
As the Sufferfests documentary shows, social media has boosted the popularity of obstacle course races, which provide participants with free, professionally taken photos. Yet this form of pain-seeking is more profound than performative. Speaking of his experience of competing in Tough Guy, the film’s director, Keneally, says: “I felt like quitting with every step. It was, at that point, the single most miserable experience of my life.”
When he crossed the finish line, he felt nothing but cold and exhaustion. “Then, a couple of hours later, when I finally thawed out, I felt like a goddam king – like an entirely different person. In retrospect, Tough Guy was one of the most transformative experiences of my life.” He returned the next four years.
The other, non-hedonic kind of happiness is “eudaemonic”, from the Greek for “the meaningful life”. Yougov polls suggest that 37% of UK workers think their job is pointless. Painful endurance, even if it’s equally arbitrary, can fill that void. The paradox of hedonism is that you can’t pursue happiness directly: only by doing other things that you deem important can true happiness be felt. “Expending immense effort can be very rewarding,” says Bastian. “It shows us our abilities and gives us pride. People want to be challenged.”
Bastian’s research, involving subjects holding their hands in ice buckets before helping themselves to sweets, has corroborated what religions have known for centuries: pain can assuage guilt and make you feel more deserving of rewards. “I don’t know if fitness cults are taking the place of religion, but I can see why that could be the case,” he says.
Ultimately, the true power of pain is to remind us of our mortality. That might not seem like an especially happy thought, but nothing makes us grateful for what we have like the very real prospect of losing it. It’s why survivors of trauma or disaster are often shown to switch their focus from extrinsic goals, such as wealth and career success, to intrinsic ones, such as love and friendship. “Our awareness of death is what makes life meaningful,” says Bastian. Instead of running from pain, then, perhaps we should run through it.