How to Increase Pain Tolerance by Changing Your Mindset Towards Pain
The mindset you need to increase pain tolerance starts by conceding the fact that pain never goes away. Growth causes pain, conditioning causes pain, and pursuing difficult goals causes pain. In addition, trauma causes pain, injury causes pain, and disease causes pain. There is no way to magically just make the pain go away by increasing your tolerance in any of these circumstances.
Unquestionably, pain is a part of life. Some causes of pain are good for you while others are bad for you. So, when it comes to increasing pain tolerance you must separate the good pain from the bad pain. Moreover, I’m only qualified to suggest how to increase pain tolerance for the causes of pain that are good. I must leave the trauma, injury, and disease aspects of pain tolerance to the doctors.
With that said, there is a proven formula to increase pain tolerance for the pain that comes from growth, conditioning, and pursuing difficult goals. Coaches like to simplify this formula as the process of changing your mindset to get comfortable being uncomfortable.
The Mindset You Need to Increase Your Pain Tolerance
The process of increasing pain tolerance by adopting the mindset of getting comfortable being uncomfortable is just that, a process. A process that is repeated with intention and consistency. The fact about processes in general, and the process of increasing pain tolerance specifically, is that change doesn’t happen overnight.
By definition, a process requires a series of interrelated actions to create transformation. Therefore, when the transformation you want to make is to increase pain tolerance, then those interrelated actions to create the transformation must include experiencing pain. But not just any pain, it must be what is called positive training pain.
Positive training pain is the mindset of intentionally putting yourself through a non-threatening painful experience to push yourself just beyond your pain threshold. The pain is non-threatening because 1) it’s under your control to stop at any point and 2) it doesn’t threaten injury. What’s more, the pain is “positive” because the specific intent of the painful experience is to improve your performance by increasing your pain tolerance using a progression.
That last word “progression” is ultimately the secret sauce for increasing pain tolerance. Being that positive training pain is a form of pain under your control, you must know your limits. Consequently, to know your limits you must test your limits. This is why increasing pain tolerance requires a progression. A progression is the process of starting with your current abilities and gradually layering on new abilities as you improve.
In short, this means you must be willing to test your absolute maximum limit. Then as soon as you recover and not a second later, do a little more than you did the last time. Repeat this over and over and your pain tolerance will increase.