In his book When Life Is Hard, pastor and author James MacDonald shares a valuable lesson he learned during his days as a basketball player. He writes:

I played a lot of basketball back in the day. I sprained my ankles many times, and I learned too late that the best way to handle all that black-and-blue is to fill a wastebasket with ice and top it off with water. Then, while the injury is fresh, put your wounded foot deep into that cold water and leave it there.

If you can last for one minute, it's just crazy painful. But if you can keep it in there for two minutes, the injury and its recovery time will be cut in half. … If you can hang on for two and a half minutes, you can be playing basketball again by Thursday, but the pain of holding your foot in that arctic water will have you crying out for someone to bring you a sharp object. Even with my worst injuries I seldom made it two and a half minutes.

But here is the amazing thing about "remaining under the pain" of having your foot in that cold bucket: If you can hang in there for three minutes, you'll be walking on it tomorrow. The pain will be consuming those last thirty seconds, worse by far than the injury itself now. But you will walk tomorrow.

MacDonald concludes: "It is just that way with trials. You can come to the place where the circumstance itself is less painful than the commitment not to give up."