Pain Vs Suffering

A few months ago, I was at the dentist having something quite routine done. I hadn’t given the procedure much thought, and turned up in my naivety expecting to be in and out within 5 minutes.

Upon starting, though, I started experiencing some pain. Quite quickly, I went from cool, calm and collected to being in quite a bit of discomfort. I felt myself beginning to sweat and even considered asking the dentist to stop.

The problem wasn’t the pain itself, it was my relationship with that pain.

I have several tattoos across my body, some on my arm, some on my legs. During my most recent visits, I began to fall asleep on the chair, which I never thought would’ve been possible.

The interesting part is that, objectively, the pain of having that tattoo was much worse than the pain I experienced at the dentist, and yet during one, I could barely sit still in discomfort and in the other I was falling asleep.

The only difference between the two is the understanding, expectation, anticipation and relationship with the pain, and nothing to do with the pain itself.

I wasn’t expecting the dentist to be painful, not once did I anticipate pain, and so when that pain eventually kicked in, it quickly escalated to something more. My perception of that pain was that it shouldn’t be there, something must be wrong, and all of this only increased the perceived level of pain I was feeling.

I know all this because when I was still in that chair, with the dentist's hands in my mouth, I purposefully shifted my expectation of what I was experiencing and asked myself: “If I knew this was coming, would it be this bad?”

Almost instantly, the level of suffering shrank tenfold. The pain was still there, but I was no longer uncomfortable and instantly stopped flinching.

I tell you this story because the lesson goes far beyond tattoos and dentists, and proves that what causes our suffering is our perception and rejection of our experiences, instead of the experiences themselves.

Delayed flights, sitting in traffic, failing, being judged or rejected. None of these things by themselves are painful enough to cause as much fear as they do. It’s the story we tell ourselves about them that causes that suffering.

This doesn’t mean you should go into every situation expecting the worst, it just means that when something does eventually go wrong, or you do eventually experience pain and discomfort, to actually pay attention to the experience itself, look at it in isolation, without the rejection you apply, and reset your own expectations.

You could be a person late for an event because your wife wasn’t ready on time, meaning you ran into traffic and now your boss might think less of you and not give you the promotion you want, and you can forget about going on that dream holiday of yours.

Or you can just be a person late for an event, who’s sat in a nice car with your own music playing and the aircon blowing.

Same situation, different experiences. 

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.