The Cold Shower metaphor
Taking a cold shower – dealing with discomfort in the service of a valued life. Noticing Willingness and Unwillingness and how to make Willingness easier.
Two scenarios:
You are thinking of taking a shower but you discover there is no hot water:
1. If you had the choice to have a cold shower…or not to, you might choose not to. Because it’s cold, it’d be uncomfortable, you could do without the shower, I will be cold afterwards, I’m not that smelly I’ll do till the morning etc. You might not be bothered because there’s no point in putting up with that much discomfort for no good reason.
2. If a close relative or friend was getting married that day, you wanted to be clean and fresh but again you find there is no hot water. If you stopped for a few minutes and you thought about the person getting married and how much you care about them, and the great time you were going to have sharing in that special day, wouldn’t you put up with a few minutes of discomfort of the cold shower? Because it was Important to You. Mightn’t you be able to put aside your feelings of discomfort, because you wanted to be fresh and clean for the great day ahead? In this instance, we are prepared to make room for the uncomfortableness. We chose discomfort in the value of feeling better after the shower.
In both scenarios, the water is the same unpleasant temperature.
Which of the 2 scenarios would ‘feel’ better? And why?
When we increase Willingness to make room for uncomfortableness it can increase our bandwidth to be able to take on experiences we might previously have avoided.
In the second scenario, I made room for the uncomfortableness and I let it be there, and I still went ahead and had the shower because it was important to me. In the first scenario, I only focused on the uncomfortable feelings and I preferred to avoid the shower altogether.
Finding out what’s important to us in life can really help manage uncomfortable feelings and make room for them by focusing on What’s Important in our lives.
So if someone was socially anxious, yet they wanted to go to a gathering. They could choose to make room for some uncomfortable feelings (to have the cold shower as it were) because What’s Important is that I move forward towards things I enjoy, What’s Important to me, like socialising with others.