I did yoga some years ago. I got stronger (which I lost) and taller (which I kept), but what that stuck with me more than either of those was the microsuffers.

The instructor didn't call them that. Instead she said something about "breathing through the discomfort" and "being present with all your sensations". In particular there is a pose called Revolved Half Moon (Parivrtta Ardha Chandrasana if you're feeling precise) which had me standing on one straight leg, bent forward with the other leg kicked out behind me, with my torso wrenched so that I could touch the ground with my opposite hand.

"You're going to want to drop out of this pose really fast," she said. "But try holding it for just one breath. Now one more. You don't like it, but that's OK. Be in it for a moment."

It was a lesson in microsuffering. I learned that I don't have to rush to escape right away. I have the option of stopping for a breath, of acknowledging that a thing is happening that I don't like.

I realized I could do the same thing outside of class. There are a hundred uncomfortable moments in a day.

None of these are a danger to my health. I am free to take a moment before reacting to them. I can notice the sensation. I can sit with it for a couple of breaths. And then I can fix it. I don't know why, but breaking the chain of instant reaction and inserting a link engraved with "notice it" gives me a sense of power and peace. I'm are no longer a puppet, controlled by whatever small discomfort decides to pull my strings.

This felt good, so I started looking for other ways to embrace microsuffers. There are plenty.

Even when discomfort doesn't cross over into the physical pain, it's still a chance to pause before reacting. Of course, I'm not going to spend a whole bus ride sitting awkwardly if I can avoid it, but pausing before shifting my pose is a way to assert my power over it. I'm reacting because I choose to, not because I must.

You can also find microsuffers that don't touch your body. There are things about my surroundings that I reflexively move to change.

These things irritate me like a paper cut. Of course I want to set them right. But I also have the option to do a microsuffer. I can notice the irritation. Sit with it for a couple of breaths. Then do something about it. Or not. For some weird reason, that completely changes the experience for me.

There are also plenty of microsuffers avaialable in the stuff that we have.

One option is to launch into repair mode when things like this happen. Another option is pause first. Feel the full weight of the disappointment. Then feel guilty about feeling so much disappointment for something so superficial. And notice that guilt too. Let it all flow through you and even fill you up. I find that it's hard to hold onto. Saying out loud that I'm sad about the hole in my pants robs it of its intensity. I'm still sad about it, but it doesn't have the same grip on me.

Suffering is personal. What causes me small discomfort can cause another debilitating pain, and you might not notice it at all. For some, the possibility that they offended someone is grimace inducing, but for others it is all consuming. And there are others still that would never think twice about it. Or imagine a scratchy clothing tag. It is a mild irritant for one person, completely unnoticeable to another, and a fate worse than death for a third. The things that cause us microsuffers are as unique as a fingerprint. Brains work very differently.

(Personal note: I hesitated before publishing this post because the examples I give say a lot about what makes me tick. I had to think about whether I wanted to share this much detail. They're not all taken from my experience, but a lot of them are.)

Some of the best microsuffering experiences come from being with other people. These vary a great deal from person to person. These are some of mine.

My natural reactions are to jump in, to be helpful, to smooth the waters, to "fix" the situation. But I can do a microsuffer. I can sit with the urge, acknowledged but unexecuted. I can wait before I respond. 3 seconds. 10 seconds. 2 minutes. Then I can help. The delay diffuses the urgency. What was automatic and mindless becomes deliberate.

A funny thing happens sometimes between the stimulus and procrastinated response: sometimes I realize I don’t need to do anything at all. This happens a lot when the microsuffering is caused by a niggling voice in my head, like when

The voice in my head says "you messed up!" and my reflex is to find a solution. Should I write an apology? Change my name and leave the country? How do I fix this?? The microsuffer approach is to slow down and change that internal message to "Wow, so maybe I messed up. OK. How about that. That kind of bites. I don't like this." The question of what to do about it is put off for a moment.

This pause is especially helpful when my first reactions are misdirected. Very often when I rush to fix something, the solution I jump in with is not particularly helpful. A lot of times it only makes things messier. When there is an awkward silence, filling it with empty words is not an improvement. And sometimes in the rush to say something, the unvetted thing that comes out of my mouth is regrettable. It’s so much better for me to take one more breath and wait for someone else to say something or for an actual idea or question to take shape in my head.

I find that a lot of my microsuffers actually end up with me doing nothing to “fix” them. Loud sounds stop on their own. The annoying pain in my shoulder lessens. The trolling post fades into the history of my timeline. They rise up and then roll away, all on their own. A microsuffer pause gives them the opportunity to sort themselves out.

One category where the delay is exceptionally helpful are the microsuffers of wanting.

Desire is a classic source of suffering at all scales. Wanting something and not having it can grow until it takes us over. But microsuffering can break the power of desire, or at least set it at one step's remove. The act of microsuffering is fully accepting that I want the thing, and sitting with the fact that I don’t have it, that I won’t get it soon, and in some cases, I may not ever get it. That bleeds the want it of its strength. It becomes a small sadness, a dull ache, but does not burn so bright and ring so loud that it robs me of the ability to see and feel.

A cousin to desire is disappointment—when there was a thing I wanted to happen, but it didn't.

A lot of disappointments are caused by events outside of our control, and are also beyond our power to fix. At any rate they are in the past, which is beyond anyone's reach. Yearning for something different to have happened has no effect. Wishing that you had done something differently doesn't change where you are right now. But for some reason we are particularly susceptible to getting caught in this trap.

One way out is to embrace the disappoinment in a microsuffer. Stare it in the face. Admit to myself that the thing I wanted did not happen. Feel sad. Swear. Maybe throw something. But hold that uncomfortable feeling in my chest for a few breaths at least. That seems to bleed off some of the pressure of the disappointment and makes it more bearable. It pokes a pinhole in the balloon and lets it slowly deflate.

One really useful ability our brains have is that they can think several steps ahead. This helps us anticipate outcomes and set things up so that they break in our favor. They also give us the unfortunate capability to be disappointed in advance for things that haven't even happened yet. Disappointment in advance is also known as worry and often manifests as "I hope".

Just because the disppointments haven't happened yet doesn't mean they have any less of a hold on us. The worries with the tightest grip are the ones that I avoid facing, the ones where the outcome I want to avoid is too horrible to consider. But still I find in the end that the best way to live with these torments, rather than be ruled by them, is to accept the badness as real and possible. To suffer it, albeit briefly, and in my head. To acknowledge that the bad thing might happen and it might be awful. In a backward way, that down payment on grief for whatever might be lost makes all the rest feel less threatening. The future greif becomes a part of the landscape, something to plan around, rather than an avalanche about to crash down.

A special flavor of disappointment is being disappointed in ourself, for not meeting our own expectations.

These disappointments can be poignant and vast. We are very good at knowing our own weak spots and slicing at them with perfectly aimed swipes. Before they grow to life-threatening proportions, these can also be microsuffered into a more manageable size.

When my teammates use vocabulary and methods that are way outside my comfort zone, my instinct is to go right from disappointment in myself ("I really should know that. I'm not really qualified to be working with these folks!") to planning a fix ("I'm definitely going to do some reading on that tonight and practice coding it up on this weekend.") That instant plan comes with a panic, a fear that if I don't close this gap that I'll be discovered and somehow get in trouble. But when I instead go with a microsuffer—when I take a slow breath and make a moment to sit with the unpleasantness ("Wow. I don't know any of those words. I wish I did. My teammates do. But I most definitely don't.") then the sense of constriction fades and the panic recedes a little. I'm still uncomfortable, but I'm no longer blind.

As a bonus, microsuffers free me from jumping to fix someone else’s problems too. I can listen to them and sympathise a bit, but not feel the weight of needing to find a solution or make the suffering go away.

They may be angry or annoyed. They may be reactively grabbing for an instant solution. But that doesn’t have to be my anger. It doesn’t have to be my urgency or my burden. I’m still free to pause, to wait, to see what happens. And then I can fix it, or help, or sympathize, or do nothing. But whatever the case it's a choice, not a compulsion.

The ability to microsuffer is power. If we lose the ability to microsuffer, we are vulnerable. There will always be someone ready to sell us a pill or an app or a membership card that promises to make the badness go away. Of course there is absolutely nothing wrong with avoiding things that cause suffering. Taking time to remove the pebble from my shoe, to trim the fingernails that have grown annoyingly long, to oil the hinges that have developed an irritating squeak— these are all excellent and healthy things to do. But it is so very freeing to do these on my own time, and not to be controlled entirely by the reflex to avoid suffering.

This is not an essay about sucking it up or toughing it out. There is a difference between microsuffers and genuine suffering. It’s an observation that the small things are unavoidable and we don’t have to let them call the shots. If you have an eyelash in your eye, that is a legitimate source of discomfort, but if you ignore it, it will probably sort itself out. If you have a broken arm or a kidnew stone, no amount of breathing through the pain is going to make it go away. These are things that we will not stop to acknowledge or sit with. We will escape them as fast as possible every time. When something fills your awareness and you can’t let it go, it needs attention, whatever it is.

Microsuffering is the opposite of "don't sweat the small stuff". It is both "suffering" in the sense of being uncomfortable and "suffering" in the sense of enduring. It is a speed run through the five stages of grief for small grievances, skipping denial, perhaps a glance at anger, neglecting bargaining, a microdose of depression, and soon easing into acceptance. It is embracing the uncomfortable thing, accepting that it’s there, and accepting that at least for this brief moment, you’re not going to do anything other than see it.

Weirdly, the more I admit microsuffers, the more I notice things that are off kilter, out of sorts, and irritating, and this gives me even more microsuffering opportunities. It’s as if I’ve removed the penalty for noticing things. Since I’m no longer obligated to instantly fix every tiny thing that’s wrong, I don’t have to work so hard to subconsciously filter them out.

When I expect myself to fix every problem I see and address every wrong I discover, it feels like being in an extremely un-fun video game where someone is throwing glass baubles in my direction, and I have to catch them each time or get an electric shock. In a game like this it’s a natural coping mechanism to reduce your field of view. The smaller you make your sphere of influence, the fewer baubles you are responsible for and the fewer shocks you get from dropping them. But it’s still a losing game.

The game changes entirely when I introduce microsuffers. The electric shocks go away. The glass baubles turn into the falling leaves of autumn. I'm still welcome to catch as many as I want, but the others just fall quietly to the ground.

When this happens, there’s no longer a need to narrow my field of view. I can open my eyes wide and see the world around me more fully. This lets me even more things that could call for my attention. I see things that should have bothered me before, but I didn’t let myself notice them until now.

After leaning into microsuffers I started noticing so many more mistakes in what I did and said. More things about my apartment that needed fixing. More aches and tweaks and strains. More flaws in a company, my neighborhood, my neighbors, my friendships. It felt very much like standing under a shower of falling leaves. Everywhere I looked there were more of them. I wasn’t obligated to catch a single one.

I won’t lie, this relentless flow of unpleasantness can be overwhelming, especially at first. It’s a lot to take in. But each time I microsuffer my way through one more unpleasantness, I realize more completely that it doesn’t hold me hostage. I don’t have to hop just because it seems to say jump.

It’s a little unnerving to realize just how heavily I was filtering my experience before. I expect that I will continue to be unnerved as my perception returns.

Microsuffering is a natural baseline. Moments of everything being aligned and feeling unflappable joy are delightful, but they are not a sustainable state. Like getting all green lights, it's great when it happens, but if that's what you need to feel like your world is good then your world is not going to feel good very often.

Microsufferings can be informative, tiny signals that something just beneath the surface is a little out of whack. I wouldn’t notice it if I didn’t stop to attend to the pokes and tickles. Counterintuitively, stopping to be aware of minor annoyances gives my brain space to catalog them, and sometimes to cut them off at the source.

One unexpected upside effect of deliberate microsuffering is that it has also opened me up to good things that I was missing before, pleasures and happinesses and small satisfactions. Previously they were outside of my field of view.

I've seen this whole cycle plays out on a beach. After their harrowing adventures and journeys of self realization, Hollywood loves to show the heroes relaxing on beach chairs in the sand sipping tiki drinks. It is the picture of pleasure and contentment. On vacation, it's tempting to try and recreate this, but the reality can be disappointing. The sun is too hot on my right side, the sea breeze is blowing my towel away, my Mai Tai is watery, and there is sand in places where it absolutely should not be. The little annoyances were not what was promised in the brochure. It's tempting to eliminate as many irritants as possible and forcibly ignore the rest. The drive to get back to the "ideal" experience is strong, and it's frustruating and draining to struggle for it.

As an alternative, it's possible to acknowledge the annoyances and make a temporary peace with them. Yes that sun sure is hot. Yes the towel is blowing, but it's caught on a tree and won't go far. Yes that drink is not as punchy as I would like. And Yes, there is sand in my shorts. All of that will be there for one more breath. And another. Yep, still there. But also, the drink is cold, which is nice. There is a gull doing a really cool dive against the waves. And the crash of the surf is almost as soothing as listening to a dog snore. So it's not all bad. In fact it's pretty OK. For a while. Which is really the best we can hope for most days.