The Allure of Pain: Why We Sometimes Pay for Our Own Discomfort

Wednesday, October 29, 2025.

You can measure a culture’s hunger for meaning by how much it pays to be terrified for fun.
A woman runs mile twelve of her first marathon, breathing fire, half-crying, half-exalted.

A group of women kneel breasts-deep in an ice bath, filming their shivers for Instagram. Someone else queues for a haunted house that promises a “trauma-simulating experience.”

This is our current state of wellness, 2025. It’s not that we like pain.
It’s that we no longer completely trust comfort.

New research on psychological richness suggests that people increasingly value variety, intensity, and perspective-change over comfort or even happiness.

The choice to suffer — within limits — is not masochism but a wager: perhaps discomfort will leave us feeling more alive, more awake, more human?

Beyond Happiness and Meaning

For decades, psychologists offered two versions of a good life: happiness (pleasure, security) and meaning (purpose, virtue).

But now, a third has quietly entered the room — the psychologically rich life (Oishi & Westgate, 2021). It’s less about comfort or contribution than about curiosity, strangeness, and transformation.

Recent work validates this idea across cultures.

Studies show that psychological richness correlates with openness to experience, self-compassion, and lower anxiety (Mauro, Di Trani, & Simione, 2025), as well as cognitive flexibility and complexity (Konishi et al., 2025). In short, those who chase rich lives aren’t thrill-addicts — they’re collectors of perspective.

After years of global constraint, people aren’t craving safety. They’re craving range.

Haunted Houses and Sour Chicken

A 2025 series of ten studies (Lee, Saini, & Minchael) examined why people willingly choose discomfort. Participants high in psychological richness were more likely to:

• buy a haunted-house ticket.

• order an intensely sour chicken dish.

• and choose a disorienting “dark maze” over a blissful garden.

Even when controlling for thrill-seeking and happiness, the pattern held.

When researchers primed participants to focus on self-growth, the effect grew stronger. When growth motivation was met, baseline richness mattered less — as though the mind simply wanted assurance that the pain would mean something.

Growth, not novelty, was the true currency.

What the Body Knows

Physiology tells the same story.
During challenging or “edge” experiences, the body toggles rapidly between sympathetic arousal and parasympathetic recovery — a rhythm that teaches resilience (Kreibig, 2010). In other words, discomfort trains flexibility in both the nervous system and the self.

From a therapeutic standpoint, this mirrors trauma healing: when clients safely revisit sensations they once avoided, the nervous system learns to stretch rather than collapse. Discomfort becomes the rehearsal space for freedom.

In therapy, I sometimes hear: “I don’t want peace if it means numbness.”
Psychological richness values vitality over calm — it’s aliveness as a metric of healing.

That’s why growth work can feel worse before it feels better: the body interprets change as threat before it registers it as liberation.

Growth as Currency

We’ve learned to schedule our suffering between Pilates and oat-milk lattes. Discomfort me, but make it artisanal and special.
The marketplace caught on fast: cold plunges, silent retreats, “gritty” boot camps.

We now buy pain with packaging — proof that endurance itself has become a new source of identity.

Once happiness felt shallow and meaning became exhausting, growth took over as social currency.

Boomers chased security. Millennials chased purpose. Gen Z, denied both, now chases psychological richness — not from nihilism, but necessity. If life won’t be safe, it might as well be interesting.

Cultural Contrasts: When Pain Is a Teacher

Not every culture treats hardship as pathology. In many East Asian and Indigenous traditions, difficulty is the apprenticeship to wisdom.

Western societies, by contrast, sanitize suffering while romanticizing grit. We love transformation montages but cut the part where the hero vomits halfway through yoga teacher training.

The idea of a psychologically rich life may be our secular reconciliation — a way to make peace with difficulty by rebranding it as design.

The Art of Feeling Everything

A “good life” may not always be a comfortable one.

Research shows that people high in psychological richness experience both more positive and more intense negative emotion (Konishi et al., 2025). The same nervous system that flinches from pain lights up with learning.

Pain, as it turns out, is informative.
It tells us we’re still plastic.
Still capable of surprise.

Maybe that’s why people are retiring from the pursuit of happiness in favor of the pursuit of story.

Happiness feels like a report card; psychological richness feels like a plot twist. It doesn’t ask that we be content — only that we stay in contactwith what being alive actually feels like.

FAQ

Is a psychologically rich life better than a happy one?
Not “better,” but broader. Recent research indicates that happiness, meaning, and psychological richness together predict the most resilient form of well-being (Oishi & Westgate, 2021; Mauro et al., 2025). Think of richness as emotional cross-training — a life intentionally built to deftly handle surprises.

Therapeutic Takeaway: Practicing Psychological Richness Without Burning Out

You can cultivate richness gently. Research on coping strategies in counter-hedonic behavior (Péronne, 2025) shows that deliberate, mindful engagement with discomfort — not reckless overexposure — predicts growth.

Try this instead:

• Mindful novelty: once a week, do something unfamiliar enough to provoke curiosity, not panic.

• Controlled exposure: choose challenges with clear recovery windows.

• Reflective meaning-making: ask, “What changed in me?” rather than, “Was it worth it?”

Each builds tolerance for uncertainty — the raw material of both therapy and transformation.

Be Well, Stay kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Brown, B. (2023). Atlas of the heart: Mapping meaningful connection and the language of human experience. Random House.

Kashdan, T. B. (2022). The art of insubordination: How to dissent and defy effectively. Avery.

Konishi, N., Kimura, M., Kihara, K., Akamatsu, M., Hosono, M., Sugimoto, F., Choi, D., Fuseda, K., & Sato, T. (2025). Psychological richness as a distinct dimension of well-being: Links to mental, social, and physical health. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp000####

Kreibig, S. D. (2010). Autonomic nervous system activity in emotion: A review. Biological Psychology, 84(3), 394–421. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.03.010

Lee, S. S. L., Saini, R., & Minchael, S. (2025). The Allure of Pain: How the Quest for Psychological Richness Drives Counterhedonic Consumption. Psychology & Marketing. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.####

Mauro, F., Di Trani, M., & Simione, L. (2025). The Psychologically Rich Life Questionnaire: Italian validation and exploration of its relationships with mindfulness, self-compassion, and cognitive fusion. Frontiers in Psychology, 16,Article 1525300. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1525300

Oishi, S., & Westgate, E. C. (2021). A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning. Psychological Review, 128(4), 612–637. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000245

Péronne, S. (2025). The central role of coping strategies in counter-hedonic consumption. Journal of Business Research, 162, 113598. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2025.113598