Vera Hart wrote a Substack article on May 10 that really delineated the difference between pain and suffering. The title of the article is Anticipation Is Its Own Kind of Suffering.

When something happens that hurts us, physically or emotionally, we feel pain.

When we anticipate that pain before an event that may or may not happen, or when we dwell on that pain long after it happened, we suffer.

We often don’t recognize suffering, because we think of it as merely waiting (for whatever it is to happen) or remembering (whatever happened). We fixate on the situation and it triggers our anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex to flood us with negative thoughts and feelings. And that’s what suffering is.

Prolonged suffering is especially hard because we cannot fix the event, it hasn’t happened yet or it happened in the past. Human beings are story-telling machines; that’s how we predict what might happen and how we remember what did. But prolonged suffering is storytelling changes the body and brain: chest tightening, nausea, anger, fear, restlessness.

The fact is what we remember or what we are waiting for are just stories. The stories are real because that’s what we tell ourselves, and we suffer.

Suffering hijacks the brain and is very difficult to interrupt. It has long-term consequences for mental and physical health, and in fact permeates all our decision making. Over the long-term people describe themselves as “foggy, depleted, emotionally brittle, physically off, or unlike themselves.”

Can we stop suffering?

As author Haruki Mruakami wrote, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” That quote is about running, and extending it to life is a little glib, but there’s a lot of truth in it.

I’ve talked with people who have read the MindShifting: Stop Your Brain from Sabotaging Your Happiness and Success book or taken the MindShifting: Mastering Your Resourceful Brain Course.

They point to quite a few concepts and techniques that help them reframe suffering, and I’d like to focus on a few connected techniques that are related to what Shirzad Chamine calls The Sage Mindset. The Sage Mindset is a way of being that is brought about through four questions.

No concept or technique works for every person, and no concept or technique works for every situation. Still, a lot of people have found these four questions helpful.

Question 1: In ten years will this make a difference?

The Pareto Principle states that only 20% of the things we concern ourselves with make 80% of the difference in our lives; and that 80% of the things we concern ourselves with make only 20% of the difference in our lives.

When we ask ourselves, “is this in the 20% or the 80%?” we can often reduce the intensity of the suffering. If it’s not going to make much of a difference, then our fears, anxiety, or concern diminish.

Question 2: What will I (or what did I) learn?

This question moves us from focusing on whatever the event was to what we learned from it. This reframe of our focus by itself often reduces the pain, plus, our brains are designed to emit dopamine and endorphins when we learn. Between the reframe and the pleasure hormones, our suffering is often reduced.

Question 3: What will I (or what did I) practice?

Maybe you didn’t learn something, but you got or will get a chance to practice something that you are working on, self-control, interrupting negative emotions, skillful questioning techniques, establishing rapport.

If you can make a game out of practicing, you take your mental and emotional focus away from the suffering and direct it to something positive. You can even map your progress and improvement.

Question 4: What will I do now?

Taking action is one of the best ways to redirect our attention. We can take an action that might improve our results next time (such as practicing, simulating, talking with others, researching, and so on) or we can just take an action that rewards ourself (such as doing some activity, buying ourself some little pleasure). In the book, I talk about how, when someone gets me upset, I buy a few bottles of wine; just saying to myself, “I’m going to reward myself by buying some wine,” has a calming effect on me.

Dr. Hart points out, “Most people can survive very hard things once they finally know what is happening… Even painful truth gives a person something solid to face, grieve, resist, accept, or begin adapting to.”

Or as my coach Robbi Nierenberg would say, “The Sage Perspective is to Accept or Convert. Accept what has or will happen, or convert it into a gift or opportunity.”

Speaking of suffering, the image is of a petrified waterfall. Not petrified in the sense of scared; it’s not water, this is a rock formation. Our minds make it seem like a waterfall.