 But the way to reduce or remove pain in your life is to accept it, which seems and feels so counterintuitive to accept it. Our natural go-to default system as humans is to do anything we can to avoid pain. It's an instinctive survival mechanism. I get it, but you can't outrun it and you can't outrun it for long if you try to. Resistance to our pain creates more pain because the resistance in the form of everything we do to numb it and ignore it makes you hyper-vigilant and hyper-vigilance in a prolonged time is exhausting. So you think you're beating your pain but actually you're forming a deeper attachment to it by avoidance.