What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. That old adage roughly sums up the idea of antifragility, a term coined by the statistician and writer Nassim Taleb. The term refers to how systems tend to become stronger after being exposed to stressors, shocks, and mistakes.
The same applies to humans. Although suffering for its own sake isn’t necessarily good, experiencing — and overcoming — stress and difficulty tends to make us stronger people in the long run. We shouldn’t always shy away from that which makes us uncomfortable.