diff --git a/src/plugins/data/public/index_patterns/index_patterns/index_pattern.tsx b/src/plugins/data/public/index_patterns/index_patterns/index_pattern.tsx
index 3c1af2a4810e4..ad7458a77fbe6 100644
--- a/src/plugins/data/public/index_patterns/index_patterns/index_pattern.tsx
+++ b/src/plugins/data/public/index_patterns/index_patterns/index_pattern.tsx
@@ -360,6 +360,13 @@ export class IndexPattern implements IIndexPattern {
   }
 
   async popularizeField(fieldName: string, unit = 1) {
+    /**
+     * This function is just used by Discover and it's high likely to be removed in the near future
+     * It doesn't use the save function to skip the error message that's displayed when
+     * a user adds several columns in a higher frequency that the changes can be persisted to ES
+     * resulting in 409 errors
+     */
+    if (!this.id) return;
     const field = this.fields.getByName(fieldName);
     if (!field) {
       return;
@@ -369,7 +376,15 @@ export class IndexPattern implements IIndexPattern {
       return;
     }
     field.count = count;
-    await this.save();
+
+    try {
+      const res = await this.savedObjectsClient.update(type, this.id, this.prepBody(), {
+        version: this.version,
+      });
+      this.version = res._version;
+    } catch (e) {
+      // no need for an error message here
+    }
   }
 
   getNonScriptedFields() {