The Function of Frustration

You know you can't quit, but how do you keep going?

Sometimes I wonder what my neighbors think of me during the late morning walks my kids and I often go on. We live in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, so even our very residential neighborhood is laden with hills. Our church leaders and long-time friends live a short walk away, and so often after our morning homeschool lesson my big kids will grab their balance bikes and I will strap the baby on my back, and we will make the trek to their yard with the allure of the large swing and trampoline to encourage us along the way.

My son and daughter differ in many ways, but our walks are marked with one resounding difference: my son is like a herding dog in his need for physical exertion to promote regulation, and my daughter is more like a butterfly meandering about and stopping to admire various flowers, sticks, leaves, and trees.

Due to her butterfly-like nature, she often falls far behind my son and therefore never gets the chance to choose the route of our walk. This almost always results in our path going “up the big hill.” She generally enjoys the initial descent, as evidenced by this being the one and only point in the walk where I have a moment of silence while she speeds down the hill past all of the nature treasures that would normally prompt incessant conversation. But quickly, as the slope of the road turns upward, the free-spirited joy is exchanged for complaining and whining that likely make the neighbors wonder if I’m harming her in some way.

In her defense, she comes by this lack of endurance-through-pain honestly. In gymnastics as a child and teen I regularly used to cut corners in our conditioning exercises, and even today I struggle to endure under the burn of muscles being worked to failure in yoga. To encourage my daughter to get to the top of the hill, while also encouraging some built-up resilience over time, I can generally be found doing a ridiculous dance while chanting “we are young healthy people and we can do hard things!”

Periodically in recent weeks, I’ve felt a strong tide of depression and anxiety at nighttime. After the bed-time hustle, instead of tending to the loose-ends of housework, therapy notes, or any other missed task of the day, I have generally been found laying on the couch with the quintessential doom-scroll face. After some prayer, I realized that much of this anxiety and depression is driven by feeling frustrated with the weight of worldliness.

If I was still four years old, you might catch me wailing at the top of my lungs in protest to this frustration, but instead I do the grown up thing and suppress the tantrum and channel all that energy into Instagram. Or Facebook Marketplace.

Yesterday, I prayed on the way to yoga about my frustration with the world—both within my own heart and in the world all around. I expressed a deep longing for Eden, and lamented that I wasn’t sure where to start with this tangled mess of yuck that I have both inherited and perpetuated.

Then, about an hour later, as I lay on the floor with my limbs sprawled in Savasana after a particularly challenging Yoga flow, my instructor spoke to my body and soul by referencing research that the point of frustration is the point in which our brains are most primed for learning. She was commenting on the difficult balance sequences we had attempted in class, but the Spirit nudged my heart as I honed in on my angsty prayer from that morning.

Frustration is the product of failure. We try new things, but they are awkward and difficult, and we become frustrated by that failure. It might be a movement from one yoga balance pose to another resulting in frequent wobbles and perhaps a full stumble off of your mat, or perhaps it’s a parenting wobble in which you express your frustration with more gusto than you hoped to that day.

Frustration feels negative. Frustration drives perfectionistic and productivity-oriented people to quit in search of a more profitable venture.

This research is maybe inspiring if you're feeling frustrated by yoga or calculus—a gentle nudge to lean into that frustration and let your brain really learn the skills you’re putting before it. Don’t quit at frustration; keep going.

But this research is life-giving when the thing that frustrates you is walking in the way of Jesus, or walking in the way of Jesus and being tasked with raising young lives.

For much of my life I’ve viewed frustration as the point to stop something—aching muscles? Stop before you finish your assigned reps. Difficult time in a job? Find a new one!

By the grace of God, though, the things in life that have brought much frustration—much disappointment at my own failure and the failures of others—are the things that aren’t so easily quit. Marriage. Discipleship. Church. Parenting. Love.

Yes, I’ve certainly imagined in a self-pitying tantrum what it would be like to get in my car and drive as far as possible away from my life and family to avoid the difficulties I find in the four walls of my house. But, to my credit, I’ve never done it. (And let’s be honest, I’d probably meet failure at the top of the mountain I’d land on so we’d be right back at square one).

What I felt the Spirit whispering to me in that sweaty, breathless Savasana yesterday is that my frustration is a sign that He is moving things around in my heart and preparing me for the kind of soul change that can’t be quantified and measured. As I read, pray, study, live, fail, and lament, my heart is coming to long for kingdom and more importantly notice what’s not kingdom both in my own heart and outside of it.

I don’t think I’m able to round the corner with a nice practical application of all of this. I guess I’m pretty certain I’m not the only one who’s ever felt frustrated when the stakes were high, and I’m hoping to share an encouraging perspective that might inspire you. The world we live in doesn’t like frustration—especially when it comes to matters of the heart.

We want love and life to be easy. Often we view frustration as a sign that something is wrong. (Sometimes we’re right about this).

But, I think I’m learning that frustration is the sign that something is about to be right—that my heart is on the brink of giving way, of releasing it’s grip on scar tissue that was never meant to be there in the first place. It’s a sign that we’re trudging through the wilderness on the way to Eden.

Perhaps our practical is this—in the moments of the kind of high-stakes frustration where you can’t simply walk away and get a break, let’s all close our eyes and imagine our Father God walking right alongside us. He’s welcoming the internal fit we’re throwing in acknowledgement that life is hard, and it’s hard to make our way back to him in the flurry of brokenness we have before and within us. But, he’s also doing a goofy dance and chanting “You are my precious people, and I am with you in the doing of hard things!”

That’s the kind of thing that will get us up the hill.