Latest / The Beauty Edit: Skincare, Makeup, Wellness & Confidence / Stop Running: Why Sitting With Discomfort Is Your Best Self-Care | The Beauty Edit
Transcript
- You know that specific kind of anxiety that hits right when you finally sit down? The one that makes your hands itch to pick up your phone, scroll through feeds, or start cleaning the kitchen just to feel something else? Let’s get real for a second: we are terrified of being alone with our own thoughts. I want you to picture your last five minutes of downtime. Maybe it was on the couch after dinner, or maybe it was in the car before you went inside. What did you do? If you were like most people, including me just a few years ago, you probably reached for your phone. You opened Instagram, checked your email, watched a quick video, or started mentally planning tomorrow’s schedule. We have become experts at filling every silent gap with noise. And I’m not saying this to judge you. I’m saying it because I see how exhausting it is. We treat silence like a problem to be solved rather than a space to be inhabited. But here is the thing about silence—it doesn’t stay quiet for long once you let it breathe. Feelings start to surface. Worries pop up. Memories resurface. And our immediate instinct is to run. We distract ourselves because sitting with discomfort feels dangerous. It feels like if we stop moving, we’ll fall apart. But what if staying still is exactly what we need to put ourselves back together? Let’s bring this back to where I usually live: skincare. Think about a new active ingredient you’re trying for the first time. Retinol, maybe, or a strong vitamin C serum. When you first introduce it, your skin might get red. It might sting. It might peel. What is your immediate reaction? You panic. You wash it off immediately. You say, 'This isn’t working. This is hurting me.' So you switch products. You try something gentler. Then you try another. You never give your skin the time it actually needs to adjust and build tolerance. We apply this same logic to our emotional lives all the time. When a difficult emotion arises—a wave of sadness, a spike of anger, a moment of profound loneliness—our instinct is to scrub it away. We use distractions as our exfoliant. We scrub until the feeling is gone. But emotions aren’t dirt on your face. They are signals from within. Just like your skin needs a moment to acclimate to change, your mind needs a moment to process what it is feeling. If you constantly interrupt the process with distraction, you never learn how to regulate. You never learn that you can survive the sting. You only learn that you must escape it. I love saying 'glow from the inside out,' but I think we often misunderstand what that means. We think it means drinking water and getting sleep, which is true, but it also means allowing yourself to feel things deeply without rushing to fix them. When you sit with discomfort, you are essentially doing deep conditioning for your psyche. It’s messy. It’s not always pretty. Sometimes it looks like crying on the floor. Sometimes it looks like staring at the ceiling wondering why you said that thing three years ago. But in those moments, you are building resilience. You are proving to yourself that you are safe even when you are uncomfortable. That is a powerful message to send to your nervous system. Most of us are walking around with tight shoulders and clenched jaws, waiting for the next distraction to arrive. We are so busy avoiding pain that we miss out on peace. Peace doesn’t come from having no problems. Peace comes from knowing you can handle whatever comes up without needing to flee the room. That is true confidence. Not the kind that comes from a filter, but the kind that comes from sitting in a quiet room and realizing you are still whole. We live in a culture that celebrates multitasking. We cook while we watch TV. We work while we listen to podcasts. We scroll while we talk to friends. We treat our attention like a scarce resource that must be maximized. But emotional processing is not a task you can batch. It requires full presence. When you try to multitask your feelings, you end up diluting them until they lose their meaning. You numb yourself instead of understanding yourself. I remember a time when I would drive home from work and blast music so loudly I couldn’t hear myself think. I needed that noise to keep the day’s stress at bay. But one day, my car broke down in traffic. I had no choice. I sat there for twenty minutes in complete silence. At first, I felt frantic. My heart raced. I wanted to call someone. But then, slowly, the panic subsided. I started to notice the sound of my own breathing. I noticed the light hitting the dashboard. I realized I hadn’t truly listened to my own voice in weeks. That twenty minutes of forced stillness was more restorative than any spa day I’d ever booked. It reminded me that I am capable of being alone with myself, and that I don’t need external validation to fill the void. So, how do we actually practice this? How do we sit with discomfort without seeking distraction? It starts small. I want you to try something radical today. Pick one mundane activity and do it without any audio input. No podcast. No music. No audiobook. Maybe it’s washing the dishes. Or folding laundry. Or just standing in line at the grocery store. Just be there. Notice the temperature of the water. Notice the texture of the fabric. Notice the boredom. Let yourself be bored. Boredom is not the enemy; it is the gateway to creativity and clarity. When the urge to check your phone comes—and it will, trust me, it will—pause. Take a breath. Acknowledge the itch. Say to yourself, 'I am feeling restless, and that is okay.' Do not act on it. Just watch the restlessness rise and fall like a wave. You will find that the intensity peaks and then fades. You don’t need to push it away. You just need to witness it. This is not about achieving a state of zen. It is about building the muscle of tolerance. Every time you resist the urge to distract, you strengthen your ability to handle life’s harder moments. You are training your brain to say, 'I can handle this.' And that is a skill far more valuable than any skincare routine. We spend so much time curating our outer appearance, optimizing our routines, and following trends. But our inner world deserves the same care. Trust your skin, not the algorithm, but also trust your feelings, not your fear. The algorithm wants you engaged, scrolling, buying, consuming. It profits from your discomfort because an uncomfortable user is a distracted user. But you are not a metric. You are a human being with a rich, complex interior life. When you choose to sit with yourself, you are reclaiming your attention. You are deciding that your peace is more important than your productivity. That your well-being is more important than keeping up. This is an act of rebellion. It is slow. It is quiet. And it is profoundly empowering. You begin to realize that you are enough, not despite your flaws or your bad days, but because of your capacity to endure them. You become softer, yes, but also stronger. You stop running from the parts of yourself that hurt and start holding them with compassion. That is the ultimate glow up. Not brighter skin, but a lighter spirit. Thank you for showing up for yourself today, even if it was just for a few minutes of silence. I’m Ashlee Nunez, and I’ll see you in the next edit. Be gentle with yourself.