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These shorter wavelengths are believed to penetrate less deeply into the skin, Dr. Sanan said, where they can kill some types of bacteria and reduce oil gland activity, helping to control acne.

萨南博士指出，这些较短波长的光穿透皮肤的程度较浅，可以杀灭某些类型的细菌并减少皮脂腺的分泌，有助于控制痤疮。

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The mental pain of failure per se can also stimulate you to become better at the activity in which you lack proficiency—if you can reframe the adverse experience as an indicator of personal growth. This is what researchers found in 2022 when they conducted a field experiment at an improvisation club. One group of amateur improvisers was instructed to actively seek the feeling of awkwardness. The scholars found that, compared with improvisers who were not given this instruction, the first group was more engaged in the exercise. Instead of seeing the discomfort as something to avoid, they saw it as central to the process and leaned into it.

Another helpful way to turn the discomfort of failure into a source of progress is what psychologists call “action rumination.” Ruminating on failure is widely recognized to be a destructive waste of time, because this type of reflection focuses on self-worth and what failure says about one as a person. Action rumination is different: It is task-focused and involves replaying the exact missteps that one made and how they could be rectified in the future. Scholars have shown that thinking through something you have done poorly in this deliberately corrective way can lead to learning and improvement as opposed to frustration and chagrin .

The research is clear that although we hate to fail, doing so can be beneficial for learning a new skill and mastering an old one. This has implications for how to improve ordinary life. You can put failure—or subpar performance, at least—to good use in many other areas of life. If you’re a student, take a class far outside your area of skills and interests, knowing that the struggle to cope with a very novel challenge may improve studying what you do like. Revel in the difficulty of it and dissect the mistakes you make—and you will almost certainly find that you’re doing even better at your preferred subject.

Employers can apply these principles as well. I like the “75/25 rule,” according to which employees spend three-quarters of their time on their assigned task and one quarter helping others outside their area. The short-term cost of this is friction as people wrestle with novelty and difficulty—and bosses should take care not to make this worse by being punitive or overly critical. But I have seen the long-term benefit of better motivation in the core assignment, as well as a better flow of information and distribution of new skills across different activities within an enterprise.

The embrace-failure principle can even be applied to happiness itself. None of us wants to be unhappy. But inviting sources of unhappiness into life can be extremely beneficial. Resolve not to be afraid of fear, anger, or sadness. They are normal and natural parts of life, after all. Dealing with them openly, though uncomfortable, will improve your skills at doing so. And if you let them, they will help you savor the joys of life all the more.