The Capacity You're Not Using (And How Avoidance Stole It)

Written By Optimize Chiropractic

You used to be able to handle more.

Not physically, though maybe that too. I'm talking about the other kind. The capacity to sit with uncertainty. To tolerate discomfort without needing to immediately fix it. To face a difficult conversation, an ambiguous situation, or an uncomfortable emotion without your system hitting the emergency brake.

If you feel like you have less of this capacity than you used to, you're probably right. And the mechanism that stole it is the same one I see in my office every day with chronic pain patients—except it's operating with a different kind of discomfort.

The Same Principle, Different Territory

Here's what we know about pain: When someone protects an area for too long, avoiding movements that might trigger discomfort, two things happen simultaneously. The nervous system becomes more sensitive to any threat in that region, while the physical tissues become weaker and less capable of handling load.

The alarm gets louder.

The structure gets more fragile.

The very strategy meant to protect the person makes them more vulnerable.

This isn't a metaphor. It's measurable neuroplasticity—the brain literally reorganizing based on what you repeatedly do and avoid.

Now here's what I want you to consider: This same process doesn't stop at physical pain.

Every system in your body that evolved to protect you; your threat-detection system, your anxiety response, your discomfort signals—follows the same adaptive logic. Use it appropriately, and it calibrates to reality. Avoid it systematically, and it becomes hypersensitive while your capacity to handle the thing it's warning you about decreases.

The Modern Comfort Trap

We live in the most comfort-optimized environment in human history. Within arm's reach at any moment we have temperature control, entertainment, food, distraction, social validation, and a thousand ways to chemically adjust how we feel. The unprecedented efficiency with which we can now avoid discomfort is not a feature—it's the mechanism by which we become less capable of tolerating it.

Think about this carefully.

The person who always adjusts the thermostat the moment they feel slightly warm becomes genuinely more bothered by heat. The person who reaches for their phone whenever boredom arises loses the capacity to sit with unstimulated attention. The person who exits difficult conversations at the first sign of tension finds that smaller and smaller amounts of tension feel intolerable.

This isn't weakness. This is adaptation. The system is doing exactly what it's designed to do, calibrating to the environment it repeatedly encounters. And in an environment where discomfort is consistently escaped, the result is a nervous system that sounds the alarm earlier, louder, and longer.

Just like with chronic pain.

The Avoidance Spiral

The pattern looks like this,

You encounter something uncomfortable—a difficult conversation, an uncertain situation, an emotion you don't like. Your protective system activates, giving you an urge to escape. You escape. The discomfort goes away. Your brain learns: That worked.

Next time, the system activates a little sooner. The threshold for "uncomfortable" drops slightly. You escape again—maybe sooner, maybe more automatically. The discomfort resolves. The learning strengthens.

Fast forward through hundreds of these cycles, and you find yourself avoiding things that shouldn't register as threats at all. Your world has gotten smaller. Your capacity has shrunk. And the irony is that you feel more vulnerable than ever, despite having "protected" yourself so efficiently.

The protective system, left unchallenged, becomes the problem.

What Actually Builds Capacity

The solution isn't to white-knuckle your way through misery. The research on building stress resilience mirrors what we know about rehabilitating chronic pain: graded exposure works. Progressive loading works. Not too much, not too fast—but enough to send a clear signal to the adaptive system:

This is safe. You can handle this. Recalibrate.

What does this look like practically?

It means staying in the difficult conversation slightly longer than the urge to escape suggests—not because suffering is virtuous, but because the system needs evidence that the discomfort isn't dangerous.

It means tolerating small amounts of uncertainty without immediately seeking reassurance or information, teaching your threat-detection system that ambiguity isn't an emergency.

It means sitting with uncomfortable emotions for a few breaths before reaching for the phone, the snack, the distraction, not to punish yourself, but to rebuild the capacity that avoidance eroded.

Small doses.

Consistent exposure.

Just like we do with a deconditioned back or a sensitized nervous system.

The Body Already Knows How To Do This

Your system isn't broken. It's doing what adaptive systems do, adjusting to whatever you repeatedly expose it to. If you've spent years optimizing for comfort, it adjusted to that. The remarkable news is that it parallels everything we know about chronic pain, you can adjust it back.

The capacity is there, dormant. The nervous system is plastic, not fixed. The threshold can shift in both directions.

What it takes is the same thing it takes to overcome chronic pain: understanding the mechanism (so you stop fighting your own system), graded exposure to the thing you've been avoiding (so the system gets new data), and enough consistency to let adaptation happen.

Not once. Not in a dramatic moment of breakthrough. But repeatedly, in small doses, until the system recalibrates to a new normal.

The Question Worth Asking

Here's the question I'd leave you with.

What discomfort have you gotten too efficient at avoiding

What capacity have you lost that you didn't notice slipping away?

And what would it look like to start rebuilding it—not through suffering, but through intelligent, graded exposure to the kinds of challenges that would teach your nervous system you're more capable than it currently believes?

Your alarm system is trying to protect you. It just needs better data.

▸ Click to view Scientific References & Evidence

Maladaptive Plasticity & Structural Degradation

Experiential Avoidance & Cognitive Rigidity

Building Capacity: Inhibitory Learning & Vagal Tone

Pain Neuroscience Foundations

Optimize Chiropractic
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