The Mathematics of Misery: Why Resistance is Multiplying Your Pain

The air conditioner above my head has a rhythmic rattle. Tak-tak-tak. It is the only sound in the room after the Zoom window closes.

107 minutes. That is exactly how long I sat with a participant today, watching them hold the invisible weight of a history they cannot change.

My own chest feels tight. Not from stress, but from resonance.

We didn't talk about quarterly goals. We didn't talk about "crushing it." We talked about the things that wake you up at 3:14 AM.

Grief. The uninvited guest that refuses to leave.

I used to treat sadness like a leaking pipe. Something to be patched. Something to be fixed so the "real" work could continue. But today, witnessing someone try to wrestle with their own timeline, I remembered the fundamental error in that logic.

We are taught to move on.

We are taught to get over it.

But biology doesn't work that way. The heart is not a machine you reboot.

Just weight.

Nothing else.

The Mathematics of Human Misery

Suffering is not a random emotion. It is a precise equation.

The meditation teacher Shinzen Young proposed a formula that changed how I view my own anxiety: Suffering = Pain × Resistance.

Pain is the raw data. It is the biological reality of loss, the sting of a failure, or the chemical flush of fear. It is inevitable. It is the tax we pay for being conscious.

Suffering is optional. Suffering is the variable we control.

When we argue with reality—when we scream "this shouldn't be happening"—we are not altering the event. We are multiplying the psychological load.

If your resistance is zero, your suffering is zero. The pain remains, but the agony dissolves.

The Etymology of "Suffer"

To understand the mechanics, look at the word itself. It stems from the Latin subferre.

Sub (up from below) + ferre (to bear).

To suffer literally means "to bear up from underneath." It is the act of carrying. When we resist, we try to hold the weight away from our bodies, defying gravity. We exhaust ourselves pushing it away, rather than pulling it close where it can be carried.

Into the quiet I went.

The Distinction: Feeling vs. Feeding

Radical acceptance is the active decision to stop fighting reality to conserve the energy needed to survive it.

During the session, we mapped out a distinction. That is the critical difference between experiencing an emotion and amplifying it.

The Act of Feeling (The Guest)

This is somatic. It is the tightness in the throat or the heat in the belly. Biologically, a chemical flush of emotion lasts roughly 90 seconds. The goal here is observation. You notice the sensation. You breathe into it. The energy dissipates because it is allowed to flow.

The Act of Feeding (The Hostage)

This is narrative. This is when the mind grabs the sensation and builds a story around it. "This will never end." "I am weak for feeling this." "What if this happens again?" Feeding turns a 90-second chemical event into a 10-year personality trait.

The Bear in the Field

We use a specific metaphor in the 12 Journeys to explain this.

Imagine a bear is sitting in a field. You are safe in your car.

The "Bear" is a difficult reality (a diagnosis, a loss).

Resistance is getting out of the car to scream at the bear, demanding it leave.

Acceptance is staying in the car. You lock the doors. You respect the bear's existence. You do not let it eat you.

You create your own suffering when you jump the fence to fight a bear that was content to just sit there.

The Architecture of the Heart

I learned this the hard way.

In the session, we discussed the story of Soraya. She carried a weight. She didn't lose the weight. She didn't "fix" the weight.

She grew.

She stretched around it.

The insight that hit me today, the one I am scribbling down in my own notes, is this: You don't want to feel good. You want to get good at feeling.

If you are waiting for the grief to shrink, you will wait forever. The grief stays the same size.

You are the one who must get bigger. You make room. You treat the emotion like a guest in the house—you don't have to love them, you don't have to agree with them, but you do have to let them sit on the couch until they are ready to leave.

It is jagged work.

It is messy.

It is imperfect.

But it is the only way through.

This is the practice.

1. Where are you multiplying your pain by resisting it?

2. Follow along as I continue to walk this path of making room for the heavy things.

3. I explore this framework further in the Journeys of Grief module.

#emotionalintelligence #mentalhealth #stoicism #grief #psychology #fyp

Curious if the 12 Journeys are for you? Drop a comment with the word 'WISDOM' and I’ll send you the first week’s framework for free so you can test the methodology yourself. No strings attached.