The Difference Between Pain and Suffering

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Exposure therapy is a technique where people subject themselves to something they're afraid of. Stenzo: It's interesting that on the one hand you can have a situation where like you're terrified of spiders, but the spiders are actually harmless. On the other hand, suffering actually is bad for us, right? And so maybe you'll never acclimate to the suffering. You'll never stop fearing it because it actually is as bad as you predict unlike the spiders.

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To increase our chances of success (in whatever domain and using definition of success), should we focus on boosting our strengths or shoring up our weaknesses? Are we harsher in our critiques of ourselves than in our critiques of others? What should an ideal inner monologue be like? What are some useful taxonomies of pain? Are there times when irrational, magical, emotionally-driven, and/or delusional types of thinking are useful?

Anna Paley is insatiably curious about how best to live our lives. She is a behavioral scientist and marketing professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She received her PhD from New York University, Stern School of Business in 2017. You can reach her at a.paley@tilburguniversity.edu.

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