Take one comfort away

The stories say Diogenes rolled in hot sand in summer and hugged snow-covered statues in winter. As with most Cynic stories, some of this is probably legend. The idea behind it isn't: you get hardy by practice, as an athlete gets fit, not by thinking about it. The Cynics called this askēsis, training, the word that later gave us "ascetic".

The Stoics took the idea from them. Seneca, a rich man who knew how comfortable his life was, told a friend to practice poverty for a few days at a time:

It works in two ways. The first is like any exposure. The fear of going without something predicts far more misery than going without it delivers. A week without the taxi or the headphones is mildly annoying, and then it's normal. Once you know that from experience, losing it stops looking like a threat.

The second is about enjoyment. We get used to good things, so they stop feeling good. In one study, people who gave up chocolate for a week enjoyed it more when they ate it again than people who carried on as usual, and more than people told to eat lots of it. Taking a comfort away for a while gives it back its taste.

Keep it safe. Don't use food, sleep, medication or keeping warm for this, and if you've had problems with eating, leave anything to do with food or your body out of it. Choose something that is really optional. The aim is a small, slightly uncomfortable experiment, not a test of how much you can take.

Ollie's mornings run on rails: a flat white from one particular café, noise-canceling headphones for the whole commute, and an Uber whenever it rains. When the café closed for a week, he was rattled until lunchtime every day. Now he has a work trip coming up, three days in a city he doesn't know, and he keeps worrying about how he'll cope without his routine.