The Discomfort of Learning Is Not a Psychological Crisis
Part of the ‘Not Quite What You Meant’ series
By: Ezra Nadav
Somewhere along the way, we began to confuse learning with comfort.
In adult learning environments especially, training rooms, university lecture halls, continuing education seminars, there’s a growing expectation that the space must feel safe. And while this sounds admirable on the surface, the concept of “safety” is increasingly being distorted into a demand for emotional ease, familiarity, and insulation from challenge.
It’s not that psychological safety doesn’t matter—it does. But psychological safety does not mean the elimination of discomfort. It means the absence of humiliation, dehumanisation, or abuse. It means being treated with dignity while encountering ideas, facts, and conversations that may challenge you to reconsider your assumptions.
This distinction is crucial—and increasingly misunderstood.
The Rise of the “Safe Space”
The term safe space originates from marginalised communities, particularly queer and feminist circles, where it served as a way to carve out havens for expression, support, and survival in a world often hostile to their existence. These spaces were not designed to be free from difficult truths; they were designed to be free from violence while grappling with them. They were spaces where people could let down their armour because the conversations were honest, not despite them.
But as the language of safety entered mainstream education and workplace culture, it began to be repurposed, often by those in relative positions of power, to mean protection from emotional friction or ideological discomfort. The result is that the safety being demanded is no longer about the conditions necessary for learning, but about preserving emotional familiarity, even if it obstructs the learning process itself.
The Reframing of Discomfort as Distress
The heart of learning is transformation. And transformation is, by nature, uncomfortable. It asks us to confront the limits of our knowledge, the biases we didn’t know we held, the privileges we hadn’t yet examined. It forces us to realise that some of the stories we’ve told ourselves—or been told by institutions, communities, or cultures, are partial, outdated, or simply untrue.
That realisation can sting.
But increasingly, discomfort is being reinterpreted as harm. Instead of being seen as the ordinary turbulence of growth, it is treated as a sign that something has gone wrong, that the facilitator has erred, that the course material is inappropriate, that fellow participants have overstepped.
What once signalled the beginning of learning now sounds the alarm bell for avoidance.
This creates a pedagogical paradox: how do we teach adults about complex, layered, and often painful realities, race, gender, power, trauma, systems of oppression, when the moment someone feels uneasy, the conversation is expected to stop?
Emotional Outsourcing: When Discomfort Becomes Everyone Else’s Problem
In these moments, a subtle shift often occurs. Instead of turning inward and asking “What am I feeling, and why?” the learner turns outward: “You made me feel this way.” The discomfort is no longer owned, it’s outsourced.
The burden is placed on the educator or facilitator to adjust their tone, language, or pace. The group is asked to “hold space” for the distressed learner, not in the name of empathy, but in the name of avoidance. And more often than not, the learning arc of the entire group is bent around the discomfort of the most emotionally resistant participant in the room.
This is where things become quietly dangerous.
Because this kind of emotional outsourcing can be a form of microaggression. It re-centres dominant identities under the guise of care. It expects that marginalised facilitators or learners, people who may already have a long history of navigating discomfort in systems that weren’t built for them, will now temper themselves so that someone else doesn’t have to reckon with their own inner conflict.
This isn’t just unfair. It’s regressive. And it costs everyone.
The Educator’s Dilemma
Facilitators, especially those leading sessions on diversity, equity, health justice, or structural disadvantage, are now required to be more than just instructors. They are also expected to be emotional regulators, trauma-sensitive listeners, defusers of tension, and, most dangerously, gatekeepers of everyone else’s emotional safety.
It’s a demand that not only leads to burnout, but undermines the very credibility of the learning environment.
Because here’s the truth: good educators don’t eliminate discomfort. They guide people through it.
They create conditions where difficult content is presented clearly, where questions are welcomed without shame, and where reflection is encouraged—but they do not cushion every blow of insight, and they should not be expected to pacify every discomforted learner.
When educators yield to the micro-panic that arises from discomfort, they reinforce the false idea that learning should always feel good. That’s not only pedagogically unsound, it’s intellectually dishonest.
The Fragility Feedback Loop
In many cases, the learner who expresses discomfort isn’t acting maliciously. They’re genuinely unsettled. But the issue isn’t the feeling of discomfort, it’s the meaning we attach to it.
When we interpret discomfort as a red flag rather than a yellow light, we shut down inquiry. We never reach the next step, which is where the discomfort becomes metabolised into clarity, insight, and new capacity.
We also create a feedback loop where the learner learns not to stretch, but to signal distress.
They may come to expect that the environment will always shift to accommodate their emotional state, rather than building the resilience to explore what that state reveals about their beliefs, values, or blind spots. Over time, this fragility, especially when reinforced by institutional responses, limits not just personal growth but collective progress.
Psychological Safety Is Built, Not Given
To reclaim learning environments as spaces of transformation, we need to reorient the idea of “safety” toward integrity and trust, not comfort.
Safety in learning doesn’t mean avoiding risk. It means knowing that you can make a mistake without being exiled. That you can sit with an uncomfortable truth and be invited to wrestle with it, not be rescued from it. That your educator will be fair, but not apologetic for the necessary intensity of the content.
It means a collective agreement that discomfort is not pathology. It is a process.
This requires courage, not just from facilitators, but from learners, institutions, and systems. It requires a cultural reset that views learning not as the acquisition of pre-approved ideas, but as an encounter with the unknown.
The Risk of Not Risking
If we continue to prioritise comfort over candour, we risk producing learners who are well-meaning but shallow in understanding, fluent in language, but unseasoned in practice.
We’ll create professionals who attend training after training without ever shifting their framework. Leaders who know the right acronyms but not the lived experiences behind them. Clinicians who can list social determinants but shy away from real conversations with their patients. Policy writers who speak of “lived experience” but never ask how power is redistributed in their own process.
In other words, we risk creating informed bystanders rather than transformative actors.
Discomfort as Dignity
There is a strange grace in discomfort. It signals that something important is happening. That the inner world is being rearranged, the familiar is being questioned, and that perhaps we are being called into something larger than what we’ve known.
This is not something to fear. It is something to honour.
To be entrusted with someone’s discomfort, as an educator, facilitator, or peer, is a sacred responsibility. But that responsibility is not to remove it. It is to witness it, to contextualise it, and when appropriate, to help move through it.
That is the task of adult learning. That is the promise of real education.
We do not need fewer discomforts in learning.
We need fewer barriers to courage.
We need less fragility, and more reflection.
We need safer expectations of discomfort—not safer distancing from it.
On second thought, maybe the question is not how do we avoid discomfort in learning, but rather, how do we create the kind of space where discomfort becomes the beginning, not the end, of real growth?
Shalom Aleichem
On Second Thought 
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