Why doing hard things actually changes you
When I crossed the finish line of that Spartan race, something shifted.
It wasn't just a feeling. It was real.
Although in terms of feelings, I was an emotional wreck when I crossed the line! Both physically and emotionally.
Turns out there's a name for it. A specific region of your brain, the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, or aMCC for short, gets physically stronger every time you push through discomfort.
I won't pretend I knew any of that from a technical point nor did I know that specific part of the brain, but I understood it from a personal perspective.
There are even brain scans to confirm it.
Get this...
Avoid the hard stuff, and it shrinks.
Push into it, and it grows.
It sits deep in the middle of your brain, and its job is to keep you going when things get hard.
When you don't want to get out of bed for that workout.
When you want to quit the last set.
When you want to avoid the difficult conversation, the email, the cold shower, the solo dinner in a foreign country.
That's your aMCC firing.
Ain't that a conversation starter 😂
What the research actually shows
In 2020, a team led by Dr Alexandra Touroutoglou at Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School published a major review in the journal Cortex (1).
They pulled together decades of brain imaging research to figure out exactly what the aMCC does.
Their conclusion?
The aMCC is the brain's hub for tenacity, the persistence required to keep going when something is uncomfortable.
Brain scans show it lights up whenever a person chooses to push through difficulty rather than quit.
People with higher scores on measures of grit and persistence have measurably stronger connections in this region.
But the most striking finding comes from a different line of research.
There's a group of older adults researchers call "superagers", people in their 80s and 90s whose memory and cognitive function match those of healthy 50-year-olds.
They're rare, making up around 10% of older adults who appear sharp.
A 2016 study from the same Harvard research group, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, scanned the brains of these superagers and compared them to those of typical older adults (2).
The result?
Their aMCC was significantly thicker. Not just compared to other people their age, but also thicker than middle-aged adults, too.
The part of the brain responsible for pushing through discomfort had resisted the normal age-related shrinkage everyone else experiences.
I want you to read that again because that makes for truly remarkable reading.
So not only can you push the boundaries of what's possible in your life, maybe in your career or business, but you're also improving your health at the same time.
That should be making you all tingly in your insides!
The people with the sharpest minds at 80 had the strongest tenacity centres.
The flip side
Here's the uncomfortable part.
A 2012 paper in Nature Neuroscience by Drs. Richard Davidson and Bruce McEwen showed that the opposite is also true (3).
When people consistently avoid discomfort, the aMCC weakens.
Stress resilience drops, and anxiety becomes easier to trigger.
Every choice between comfort and discomfort is a small vote.
Skip the workout → small vote for atrophy.
Do the hard set → small vote for growth.
Avoid the difficult conversation → vote for atrophy.
Have it anyway → vote for growth.
None of these individual choices matters much on its own, but repeated thousands of times over the years, they shape a brain region that determines how you handle every future challenge.
Why this matters for you
You don't need to run a Spartan race or rent a scooter in Albania to train this.
Most of the training happens in much smaller moments.
Getting out of bed when the alarm goes off for the first time.
Finishing the workout you wanted to skip.
Having the conversation you've been avoiding.
Eating dinner alone instead of ordering in.
Taking the cold shower instead of the warm one.
Doing the thing you said you'd do when you don't feel like doing it.
That's the work.
So don't think for one second that it has to be dramatic.
But do start thinking that it has to be consistent.
Because when you're consistent with this, I can say something with utter conviction...
Your life will begin to change for the better, and you will NEVER look back!
When you hear people say "embrace the suck," they're not just being philosophical.
They're describing a measurable biological process, even if they don't know it.
The discomfort you push into today is literally building the brain you'll have tomorrow.
Avoid it, and you don't just miss out on the experience; you lose the capacity to handle the next one.
Push into it, and you don't just get the result; you build the part of yourself that makes every future challenge easier.
That's the deal.
Comfort feels good in the moment.
Discomfort builds the person you want to become.
So please choose accordingly 🙏🏻
Right, go have a cracking week.
Oh, and by the time you read next week's newsletter, I'll be back in Barcelona with my dog Bella!!!
Can you tell I'm excited 😆
Take care,
Mark ✌️
