When you push through discomfort during hard exercise, your brain increases its sensitivity to endorphins. This rewires you to feel stronger pleasure from small things later: a friend's smile, a small win. A minute of deliberate discomfort primes your brain to amplify happiness.
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That uncomfortable feeling that you feel when you are getting to that vigorous type of exercise, whether it's doing a run or it's, you know, doing some resistance training where you're really doing hard things, that uncomfortableness, there's also a neurochemical reaction going on in your brain. So we have an endogenous, that just means in our body, opioid system, okay? Opioids, we're usually thinking of, you know, maybe exogenous ones that people take to help with pain relief, right? Like morphine, for example. We make our own opioids, endorphins, right? Endorphins are something that we make. Those are the feel-good opioids that we make in our brain. You do make that with exercise, but you also make a type of opioid that makes you feel uncomfortable. It's called dynorphin. It's responsible for that uncomfortable feeling, that feeling that's like, ugh, I want to stop. I can't do this. It's hard, right? Dynorphin is is that uncomfortable, like, neurochemical that's being produced. And what that does is when your brain is making that and you don't give up, you keep pushing past it. It has this feedback loop in your brain where then your brain goes, oh, this is that bad. Now it's— I don't want to call it bad. It's the dysphoric feeling. I better figure out a way to deal with that and adapt and make something good so that later when I have that uncomfortable dysphoric feeling, I don't feel so uncomfortable. And so what happens is your brain starts to make more of these receptors. Receptors are things that neurochemicals and neurotransmitters and things like that bind to, to have an effect. So they make more of the receptors that bind endorphins. They're called mu opioid receptors, and they become more sensitive to endorphins. This happens only when you're getting that uncomfortable dinorphan, you know, flooding your brain. And so what happens is then later on, when anything happens that's a little bit pleasant, you're going to feel it better and for a longer period of time. And so that just makes everything easier when you have that sensitive— that sensitization to these endorphins, which we are making all throughout the day. Little things like, you know, seeing your friend smile, like all these little things they're making, you make endorphins. And it's just a matter of how powerful are you going to feel that endorphin? And so the uncomfortableness of the dynorphin is what is doing that. But you have to engage in the hard, uncomfortable thing that makes you feel that dysphoric feeling.
That makes so much sense. So if you force yourself to do some form of exercise, even just for a minute, even for 3 minutes, even for 10 minutes, it paves the way for you to now really magnify all of the beautiful and wonderful and comfortable things that follow it, 'cause you got the discomfort out of the way.
