40-Day Discomfort Challenge - and a path to self knowledge

Recently, Leo Babauta posted this Tweet:

I'm doing 40-day discomfort challenges this year, trying to face hard, scary things ... help me pick them! First challenge is cold swimming (today is Day 18) ... you can help me pick the rest ... (1/3)

He provided some examples:

* Meditation retreat * Learn a language * Public speaking * Martial arts * Eat only lentils & kale * Fasting (eat 1x a day) * Sleep outside * No Internet except creation & calls

On reader (maybe snarkily?) replied:

Why not just chill out and enjoy your one life for 40 days? What are you trying to prove and to who?

But Babauta took the question seriously:

I'm working with ideas about bringing inquiry & mindfulness practice with discomfort. I'd love to prove to the world that discomfort can be embraced and loved as much as any other experience, so we don't need to run from it

So, this isn't the same self-challenge that adds to our list of things done.  Because discomfort can be a form of self-hiding, a 40-day challenge can be a path to self knowledge.

  ———-

A couple days later, being more deliberate in his answer to the “why not just enjoy life” question, Leo wrote about the benefits of doing hard things

Hard challenges are incredible! They can:

• Teach us that we can adapt to discomfort
• Show us the beauty of uncertainty and not knowing
• Help us find growth in failure and loss
• Prove that we have the courage to do what we fear
• Give ourselves evidence of our resilience, grit, determination, commitment
• Help us to grow in new and unexpected ways
• Show us what our patterns are when we feel discomfort & uncertainty — if we don’t challenge ourselves to do hard things, it’s almost impossible to see what our patterns are, except of course the avoidance of doing hard things