I Started Choosing More Pain and Somehow Suffered Less

For much of my life, I thought of suffering as something like weather. It arrived from somewhere outside me, often without much warning. There was not necessarily anything to do with it. You prepared as best you could, endured whatever came, and waited for the sky to clear. Anxiety could work this way. Depression could work this way. So could the obsessive replay of something that had happened already, or the anticipation of something that might happen and could not yet be influenced. The experience was not only painful in itself. Part of what made it painful was the sense that I was being acted upon. Suffering was a hurricane, and I was the house.

Over the last few years, though, something in that relationship has changed. The strange part is that the change has coincided with my deliberately introducing more pain into my life. I lift weights almost every day. I run a lot. Since getting rid of my car in late March, I have made walking, running, biking and public transit the machinery of ordinary mobility, sometimes adding a cargo wagon when I need to move more than my back can sensibly carry. There are now many more occasions on which my legs ache, my lungs burn, my muscles reach the point where they would strongly prefer that I stop, or I discover that the place I need to reach is inconveniently several miles away.

And yet I suffer less.

That sounds contradictory until I distinguish pain from suffering. The discomfort of a long run is perfectly real. So is the final repetition of a difficult set. There are moments when every physiological signal available to consciousness seems to be voting for rest. But those sensations do not feel anything like the old experience of psychological suffering. They can even feel life-giving while they are unpleasant. There is an odd simultaneity to strenuous exercise: I can want the hill to end while also being glad that I am climbing it. I can experience something that hurts without experiencing it as something bad.

That has made me wonder whether what changed was not the amount of pain in my life, but the grammar of it.

When the reason changes

I did not start lifting weights because I had developed some elaborate theory about controllability, resilience or the psychological uses of physical hardship. The initial motivations were much more ordinary. I felt out of shape. I was self-conscious about that. I wanted my body to look and feel different.

Those reasons were effective enough to get me through the door, but they turned out to be surprisingly unimportant in keeping me there. Something much more immediate began to happen. I noticed how I felt when I left the gym. Whatever had been going on in my head before the workout had usually become quieter. The world seemed more tractable. There was a small but unmistakable feeling of accomplishment attached to having encountered resistance, literally in this case, and having done something with it.

Eventually another mechanism joined the first: habit itself. I tend to be a creature of habit, sometimes almost comically so, and once there was a streak to maintain, maintaining it became rewarding for its own sake. Going to the gym gradually changed from something I was persuading myself to do into something whose absence would have felt stranger than its presence. The original external motivation had not exactly vanished. I still cared about being in shape. But it had been overtaken by motivations internal to the activity: the immediate psychological effect, the accumulation of competence, the satisfaction of continuity, and eventually the simple fact that training had become part of the architecture of my days.

Psychology has a useful way of thinking about this. Self-Determination Theory does not divide motivation into two perfectly sealed boxes labeled extrinsic and intrinsic. It describes a process through which reasons can become increasingly internalized. A person can begin doing something because of appearance, approval, health, obligation or some other outcome outside the activity itself, and over time come to value the activity for reasons that feel increasingly self-authored. Research on exercise motivation has generally found that these more autonomous forms of motivation are associated with better persistence, with intrinsic motivation becoming particularly important for long-term adherence.[1]

My experience of running developed in almost the opposite direction, because running had been mine for so long that I can barely remember constructing a motivation for it. My dad began encouraging my brother and me to run when we were in middle school, originally by going with us. By my freshman year of high school I was already running by myself because I had discovered that it was an extraordinarily reliable way to regulate stress. That never really stopped. Long before I had language for any of the psychological ideas in this essay, I had apparently stumbled into one of its central practices.

What did change recently was what running represented.

The body as infrastructure

When I got rid of my car, physical fitness became something more than fitness. It became infrastructure.

A car collapses distance. Without one, distance returns to the landscape. A grocery store is no longer simply “nearby”; it is a certain number of minutes on a bicycle or a certain number of miles on foot. Carrying something heavy becomes a logistics problem. A musical setup might involve a bike, a bus, or a wagon rolling along behind me. Weather matters again. Terrain matters. The physical capabilities of the person doing the traveling matter.

At first glance this sounds like the addition of inconvenience, and objectively it sometimes is. But I discovered another sensation underneath it that I had not anticipated: an unusual form of independence. The stronger my legs became and the greater my endurance became, the larger the radius around me that could be reached under my own power. Running was no longer merely something I did after ordinary life. It enlarged what ordinary life itself could contain.

There is an economic dimension to this. A body capable of walking or running miles, cycling across town and hauling what it needs to haul reduces the number of situations in which mobility requires money. But the feeling goes beyond saving on gasoline, insurance or repairs. Automobility connects a person to an enormous technological, financial and geopolitical apparatus: petroleum markets, manufacturing networks, parts suppliers, repair shops, insurance companies, financing, road infrastructure and supply chains stretching around the planet. None of those things are inherently sinister, and bicycles and running shoes have supply chains of their own. But the difference in scale is enormous.

When transportation increasingly comes from my own muscles, the machinery involved becomes strangely legible. Eat. Sleep. Recover. Move.

There is something deeply reassuring about possessing part of one's infrastructure inside one's own body.

This is where the different threads of the experience begin to converge. Exercise gives me control over the immediate difficulty of a workout. Fitness gives me greater control over the practical geography of my life. Going without a car reduces one category of financial dependency. And every additional mile that becomes easy represents territory that I can cross without asking very much from anyone else.

What I had initially thought of as exercise had quietly become a practice of self-determination.

What control does to difficulty

There is a body of psychological and neuroscientific research that makes this personal observation more interesting, although I think it would be a mistake to claim that the research proves exactly what has happened inside my own head.

Some of the most influential work concerns the difference between controllable and uncontrollable stress. The older phrase learned helplessness comes from experiments in which animals exposed to unavoidable aversive experiences later became unusually passive even when escape became possible. The research has become considerably more sophisticated since those early experiments, and the original explanation has itself been revised. More recent work by Steven Maier, Martin Seligman and others suggests that control is not merely the absence of helplessness. Detecting that one's actions can influence an aversive situation appears to recruit neural systems that modify the response to the stressor itself, and experiences of control can alter responses to later challenges.[2][3]

Much of the detailed neural work comes from animal research, which makes it important not to tell an overly neat story about human brains. But human studies also suggest that perceived control can change both the experience of aversive events and patterns of neural activity associated with them. At minimum, there is good reason to take seriously the possibility that difficulty under conditions of agency is psychologically different from otherwise similar difficulty experienced as inescapable.

This distinction captures something I recognize immediately.

During a hard run, I may not control the fact that exertion hurts. But nearly everything surrounding that pain belongs to a field of agency. I chose the route. I chose the pace. I can slow down. I can stop. I can continue. I know why I am doing it. I can watch myself become capable of something that was previously harder. The difficulty has boundaries and rules.

Weightlifting makes the structure even more explicit. There is the weight. There is the attempt. There is success or failure. Then the weight goes down.

The entire episode tells an unusually clean causal story:

I chose this.

I entered it.

What I did affected what happened.

It ended.

I recovered.

Over time, I adapted.

Psychological suffering often tells a much less satisfying story. Something happens. I think about it. I think about my thinking about it. I imagine possible consequences. I construct alternate histories. I predict futures that do not yet exist. Eventually the original problem may occupy only a small portion of the suffering generated around it.

The difference may not simply be that one experience is physical and the other psychological. One produces repeated evidence that action matters. The other can produce repeated evidence that action is impossible.

This makes me wonder whether the most useful lesson of a difficult run is not actually I can tolerate pain.

Maybe it is something broader:

Difficulty does not imply helplessness.

Why doesn't a dog need any of this?

There is an obvious problem with this theory, and I encounter it every day in canine form.

A happy dog does not seem to require a philosophical program of elective suffering. A dog does not wake up concerned that life has become too comfortable and schedule an unpleasant workout to rebuild its character. Give a dog safety, affection, food, play, opportunities to explore, interesting smells and enough exercise, and it seems perfectly capable of constructing an enviable existence while generally avoiding needless suffering.

It would be tempting to solve this by saying that dogs simply “live in the present,” while humans are burdened with memory and anticipation. But that is too simple. Research has found evidence of episodic-like memory in dogs, including the ability to recall human actions that they had no reason to expect would later be tested.[4] Dogs remember. They anticipate. They can experience fear and frustration. Animal-welfare research also increasingly emphasizes the importance of choice and control, suggesting that agency is not some peculiarly human psychological luxury.[5]

Still, there seems to be an important difference of degree.

A dog encounters effort constantly, but usually in a world where effort and its purpose remain close together. Run after the thing. Tug on the thing. Smell the thing. Dig here. Follow this person. Find the treat. Climb the hill. Rest.

The objective may be absurd from the human point of view, especially if it involves a squirrel, but the causal chain is mercifully short.

Humans possess an extraordinary capacity to leave that chain entirely.

We can suffer because of something that happened ten years ago. We can suffer because of something that might happen ten years from now. We can suffer because of what another person may privately think of us, because of whether our life matches an imagined alternative life, because of interest rates, professional status, mortality, politics, unrealized potential or the trajectory of civilization. We can build simulations of worlds that do not exist and then undergo real physiological responses to events taking place exclusively inside those simulations.

A dog may not need to invent a practice that returns difficulty to the body because a dog has never become quite so alienated from the body in the first place.

This may be part of why hard physical activity can feel so clarifying. For a while, abstraction loses its monopoly over attention.

You are not thinking about next year. This is the hill.

You are not relitigating yesterday. These are your legs.

You are not trying to resolve your entire life. Get to the next intersection.

Human beings have developed cognitive machinery capable of spending most of Tuesday inside an imagined Thursday. A run can be an extraordinarily effective way of informing the mind that Tuesday is still in progress.

Giving stress something to do

This brings me back to an idea I initially framed somewhat differently. I wondered whether physical pain had somehow displaced psychological pain, as though there were some reservoir of suffering that needed expression and could be emptied harmlessly through exercise.

I no longer think that is the right model.

There is no obvious reason to believe that a human being possesses a fixed daily allotment of pain that must emerge somewhere. And exercise has well-established effects of its own. A large 2024 network meta-analysis of randomized trials found that exercise reduced depressive symptoms, with walking or jogging and strength training among the modalities showing meaningful effects, although the authors also emphasized limitations in the certainty of parts of the evidence.[6] Sleep, physiology, social experience, neurochemistry, routine, expectation and a sense of mastery can all contribute. There is no need to invent a single mechanism where many probably interact.

But I still think the intuition behind “displacement” points toward something real.

Perhaps physical challenge gives stress a form in which action is possible.

Anxiety often contains an impulse toward action attached to a situation that cannot actually be acted upon. The mind keeps turning because it is searching for the move that resolves the position, and sometimes no such move exists. A difficult run gives that same organism a remarkably coherent problem.

Move.

Breathe.

Adjust.

Continue.

Stop.

Recover.

The stress has somewhere to go, not because it has been magically transferred from the mind into the quadriceps, but because the relationship between stress and action has temporarily become intelligible again.

That may also explain why the psychological effect often outlasts the workout itself. The immediate reward is not only that I feel physically tired. I have just spent an hour inhabiting a world in which effort had consequences, discomfort had boundaries, and my own actions mattered.

Not all chosen pain is useful

There is an important boundary around this idea.

Elective suffering is not automatically healthy because it is elective. People can choose things that damage them. Exercise itself can become compulsive. Bodies can be injured. The desire to demonstrate toughness can become another form of insecurity. And there is an obvious difference between accepting pain as an incidental cost of building capacity and deliberately seeking pain as punishment.

The distinction I am trying to draw is therefore narrower than “voluntary suffering is good.”

The useful category seems closer to chosen, bounded, meaningful and recoverable difficulty.

The pain is not the objective. The adaptation is.

The run has an end. The muscle is allowed to recover. The difficult thing enlarges some capacity rather than merely proving one's willingness to endure damage. And crucially, the person retains meaningful agency over the process.

That last condition may be the most important one. A cult of suffering can easily reproduce the exact feature that makes involuntary suffering so destructive: loss of control. The point is not to become better at obeying pain. It is to accumulate experiences in which difficulty and agency coexist.

I would not want to universalize the particular form this has taken for me. Someone else's constructive difficulty might be climbing, gardening, martial arts, learning an instrument, building furniture, caring for land, hiking, dancing, creating something technically demanding or any number of activities in which frustration and effort serve a purpose. Running happens to fit my nervous system exceptionally well. Weightlifting happens to give resistance a literal physical form.

The principle, if there is one, lives underneath the activity.

The storm still comes

I do not think I have discovered a way to abolish suffering.

The weather metaphor still matters because some events really are weather. Loss happens. Illness happens. Other people make choices that we cannot control. Economies change. Accidents occur. Bodies eventually fail. No amount of running turns the world into something obedient.

Nor does resilience mean that painful things stop hurting. If anything, that interpretation would turn resilience into another impossible demand, requiring a person to remain unaffected by everything that matters.

What seems to have changed for me is quieter.

Suffering used to contain a second message inside itself. Not only this hurts, but this is happening to me. Not only this is difficult, but I am trapped inside the difficulty until something outside me changes.

I hear that second message less often now.

Thousands of miles and thousands of repetitions have supplied a competing body of evidence. I know what it feels like to remain inside discomfort without panicking about its existence. I know that sensations rise and fall. I know that fatigue can coexist with capability. I know that an unpleasant state does not automatically represent danger. I know what it feels like to discover that the distance remaining is greater than I hoped and nevertheless continue moving through it.

Most importantly, I have accumulated repeated experiences in which the answer to difficulty was not simply endurance, but participation.

That may be why the metaphor of the hurricane no longer feels quite complete. I still cannot choose the weather. I still cannot command the storm to change direction.

But I am no longer only the house.

Sometimes I am also the person who has spent years learning what the house can withstand, what can be repaired, which doors can be opened, how far I can travel under my own power, and what I am capable of doing while the wind is still blowing.

I started choosing a little more suffering.

What I may actually have been choosing was a little more agency.

Further reading

1. Teixeira, Pedro J., et al. “Exercise, Physical Activity, and Self-Determination Theory: A Systematic Review.” International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 2012. doi:10.1186/1479-5868-9-78. A review of research connecting autonomous and intrinsic motivation with exercise adoption and long-term persistence.

2. Maier, Steven F., and Martin E. P. Seligman. “Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience.” Psychological Review, 2016. doi:10.1037/rev0000033. A reconsideration of the classic learned-helplessness model emphasizing the importance of detecting and learning control.

3. Baratta, Michael V., Martin E. P. Seligman, and Steven F. Maier. “From Helplessness to Controllability: Toward a Neuroscience of Resilience.” Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2023. doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1170417. A more recent review of the neuroscience of controllability and later resilience.

4. Fugazza, Claudia, Ákos Pogány, and Ádám Miklósi. “Recall of Others' Actions after Incidental Encoding Reveals Episodic-like Memory in Dogs.” Current Biology, 2016. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.09.057. Experimental evidence that dogs can recall unexpectedly tested events from the recent past.

5. Englund, Maisy D., and Katherine A. Cronin. “Choice, Control, and Animal Welfare: Definitions and Essential Inquiries to Advance Animal Welfare Science.” Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 2023. doi:10.3389/fvets.2023.1250251. A useful review of why agency and environmental control matter in the welfare of nonhuman animals.

6. Noetel, Michael, et al. “Effect of Exercise for Depression: Systematic Review and Network Meta-analysis of Randomised Controlled Trials.” The BMJ, 2024. doi:10.1136/bmj-2023-075847. A large review examining different forms of exercise as interventions for depressive symptoms.