Outside work, I run. I love it, mostly – it’s my own form of mindfulness. But aching legs and bleeding toes are inevitable. So I was intrigued to hear the ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter describe in a recent short film how she overcomes pain during a 100-mile race.

Research suggests that ultrarunners like Dauwalter have a higher pain tolerance than the general population. Perhaps their bodies are different, but it also appears to be mental. Dauwalter describes how her mind helps her push through pain. After hours on her feet, she explains, she enters her ‘pain cave’: a place where only mental grit is left.

What particularly struck me was Dauwalter’s approach when inside the cave. Initially, her instinct was to leave. Indeed, she quit her first 100-miler. But now she applies curiosity instead: she explores the cave’s walls, and expands them. ‘I put on my hard hat, I grab a chisel and I imagine going into the very back corners of that cave and just digging into the work,’ she says. ‘Each time I go in the cave, it’s getting bigger for the next visit.’

I find that helpful. Now, when running gets uncomfortable, I remind myself I’ve felt similar before, and survived. Through this, I’m reaching ever-longer distances, curious about how far I can go.

I’m reminded of an observation the novelist Haruki Murakami makes in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007) – ‘Say you’re running and you start to think, Man this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself.’

You don’t need to run to find insight from these runners. In life, we all spend some time in our own personal pain caves, especially when stretching ourselves. Pain is unavoidable. The good news is that our tolerance can rise.

It’s fun stumbling upon psychological concepts in unexpected places. I remember first learning about the Johari Window (an obscure framework for thinking about the limits of self-knowledge) in the Robert Galbraith novel The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013). It happened again the other day. I was enjoying the action thriller Nobody’s Hero (2024) by M W Craven – my middle-aged version of brain rot – when the hero Ben Koenig invoked the ‘Peter Principle’ – the idea that people tend to get promoted to the point of maximum incompetence.

Koenig is already a curious character for anyone interested in psychology. He has Urbach-Wiethe disease, which has calcified his right amygdala – apparently rendering him incapable of feeling fear (a handy attribute for an action hero). By dint of his training with various special forces, he’s also a repository of fun psychological wisdom, such as the Peter Principle, which he draws on to explain why the assassins have chosen to murder a bunch of mid-ranking infrastructure experts, rather than their superiors.

I checked it out, and the Peter Principle is a genuine concept that originated with a bestselling, semi-satirical book of the same name in 1969, co-written by two Canadians, the educationalist Laurence J Peter and the playwright Raymond Hull. There’s a simple logic to their idea – you keep performing well, you keep getting promoted, until you reach a managerial role at which you struggle and so you don’t get promoted again. Various studies have confirmed there’s a truth to the logic, at least in the context of sales, the military and academia.

I’m going to add the Peter Principle to my mental dictionary of psychological concepts – and use it as a reminder not to rest on my laurels. We can’t assume that the skills and knowledge that served us well in the past will be enough for whatever challenges we face in the future.

Is there more than one kind of curiosity? I found myself reflecting on this after reading a recent study about different curiosity styles. An analysis of 483,000 Wikipedia users found that people pursue their curiosity in three ways. Some browse articles as ‘hunters’, targeting ‘specific answers in a projectile path’, and their interests are more likely to be in science and technology. Others are nomadic ‘busybodies’, who explore more, building broad, loose networks of knowledge; they gravitate toward arts, culture and the humanities.

A third group are the ‘dancers’ – a little harder to define, they tend to leap ‘in creative breaks with tradition across typically siloed areas of knowledge’, taking an unstructured and inventive approach to information-seeking, across radically different subjects.

This made me wonder what kind of curious I am. When I’m reporting as a science journalist, I tend to adopt the ‘hunter’ style. This helps me meet deadlines, but am I missing out on the serendipity of discovering knowledge like the busybody or the dancer? I’d like to believe I’m curious about the world, but realising that other people’s curiosity might be more nomadic or creative gives me pause.

Another downside to the hunter style is that it’s associated with what’s called ‘deprivation curiosity’. This is the desire to banish the discomforts of uncertainty and lack of knowledge. It can lead people to accept easy answers or false facts. It also correlates with overconfidence in one’s worldview, and lower wellbeing. I hope I’m not motivated by deprivation curiosity when I’m hunting knowledge, but I can’t guarantee that’s always true.

The psychologist William James described curiosity as ‘the impulse towards better cognition’. If I take his words and the Wikipedia study to heart, perhaps I ought to be more curious about my curiosity.

Recently, I got food poisoning on holiday. I guzzled a glass of water from the hotel bathroom tap, after missing a sign saying it wasn’t drinkable. I regretted that decision, but what nagged at me more was something else: my choice of hotel in the first place.

Before a holiday, I often agonise over where to stay, weighing up every hotel I can find, with the goal of finding the very best option. Psychologists would call me a ‘maximiser’. Other people (like my partner, for one) are ‘satisficers’ who evaluate fewer options and choose one that’s ‘good enough’. Since the 2000s, maximisers have become of interest to psychologists because they often report greater regret and dissatisfaction with their choices afterwards. It seems their forensic searching for the ‘best’ reveals more options, but also inflates expectations of perfection and, once they’re locked in, they are painfully aware of all the rejected alternatives. One paper from 2024 suggested such habits can spoil a holiday.

In my nausea, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, in a parallel universe, I was enjoying another hotel sickness-free. So, since then, I’ve tried not to maximise so much, especially for semi-arbitrary choices. I might not find perfection but, according to the research, I’ll feel better about it.

My tactical satisficing has felt even more justified since I learnt recently about the work of the historian Sophia Rosenfeld. In an essay for Psyche’s sister site Aeon, she traces how and why choice became a fundamental right in Western societies – and why that right has created many problems. Choice, she argues, is not the same thing as freedom.

Clearly, it’s a luxury to have choices in life: many people don’t. But what I take from all this is that I could decide to be more mindful about how I choose.