There is a philosophy practiced in certain religious circles to subject oneself to poverty. The result is to force humility, or at least a realization of the need to be grateful. By recognition of an impoverished experience we can gain greater appreciation of what we have and who we are.
Some will go so far as to introduce deliberate suffering into life, magnifying this effect. Now I woild not recommend extreme suffering, but you may want to consider practicing discomfort. I interviewed a young man from the UK a year ago and he indicated that he would wake up every morning at 4am and immediately jump out of bed and run into the cold ocean. He actually swore by this practice, indicating tremendous health benefits.
Perhaps the best benefit to forcing yourself to practice discomfort in aome way is to reduce the influence of stressors in your life. By deliberately experiencing something that causes great discomfort, that you willingly do, creates separation. A gap between the thing that triggers your feeling of stress and your emotional reaction.
With practice you can get to the point where aomething happens and you can suspend your emotional response. This will give you resilience to not let things influence you and make you feel stress.
Guy Reams
