Using pain and pleasure
If we want to understand human beings, it is useful to both delve deeply into our own psyche and experience, but also to examine various models of humans throughout history. The one I've spent the most time with, and love the most, is the Chakras. If the "Three Centers" of Belly, Heart, and Head are in some ways a simplification of the seven Chakras, they're still so very useful, but let's get to the base of it all--1st Chakra. Survival.
The primary instruction in all the human software is to survive. While it can be overruled (parents running into burning buildings to save children) such overrulings are rare enough to be worthy of comment and praise. A sufficient commitment to things like honor, duty, powerful ambition and so forth can induce the right kind of person to risk or even sacrifice life.
Pain is of course the signal our body-mind sends to warn us of damage. Fear warns us of risk of pain. Anger is one of the ways we mobilize fear for action.
If you look at pain as also discomfort, then you can understand why the capacity to tolerate discomfort is one of the doorways to success in ANYTHING, let alone specifically physical disciplines.
“I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’” - #MuhammadAli
That's it right there. Some can have difficulty understanding this. If we are wired to avoid pain, and no one ever voluntarily selects pain over pleasure, how to understand discipline and sacrifice?
An analogy is a day job where you get paid, in cash, fifty dollars a day. Compare that with a job that pays five thousand dollars a month….but you only get paid at the end of the month. The day worker can grin at you and ask "how much did you get today? I got fifty dollars!"
And they can legitimately feel that they are getting more…until the end of the month. Then the person who could POSTPONE THEIR REWARD gets five times as much. Clear winner. But you have to factor in the time frame, right?
Same is true with accepting discomfort (pain) to diet, exercise, submit stories for publication, ask a girl to marry you, save money, or any number of other things. Champions, experts, masters know to "eat bitter to taste sweet"--accept temporary pain in exchange for long-term pleasure that VASTLY outweighs the cost of the discipline.
One of the real signs that a dog has been trained is when they will associate the discipline of NOT eating a piece of meat for the pleasure of their owners approval and meat PLUS a treat…in five minutes.
An experiment I love has to do with offering children ONE cookie now…or THREE cookies if they can wait five minutes. Supposedly, those able to wait the longest for a greater reward have a skill that pays off hugely later in life.
Short term-long term. Smaller reward today, greater reward tomorrow.
If you can understand this, how this basic principle of living things works, you have the secret to motivate yourself to do ANYTHING: all you have to do is associate more pleasure with doing it than you do with NOT doing it. How do you know? IF YOU ARE DOING IT.
Simple. Once you get this, you can look at anything you have ever failed to do, any discipline you've ever broken. If it was something positive, and you didn't do it, the pleasure of inertia outweighed the pain of taking action. The short term pleasure of smoking MIGHT be shattered by a doctor showing you X-rays of ravaged lungs. Or by your daughter pleading with you to stop so that you can dance at her wedding. Pleasure of tobacco? Pain of withdrawal?
How to proceed? You can take a chemical antagonist that neutralizes the pleasure. Or wear a nicotine patch that eases withdrawal. Or increase your vision of a healthy life, perhaps dancing with your daughter at her wedding.
Or INCREASE your pain, by imagining that daughter crying at your funeral. Or really envisioning and feeling the pain of emphysema. Get the pain high enough, and you won't do it any more. Get the pleasure of the new behavior high enough to overcome resistance and inertia, and you can do that, too.
Wise people don't wait for it to hurt and damage their bodies or minds: they think long-term enough to see the disaster coming and find the resources to change course. And there are LOTS of resources, LOTS of ways to make it easier to change courses.
One beautiful thing here is that once you get this, you can reduce guilt, blame, and shame in your life: you can "blame" your neurology, your survival drives. Once you associate enough pleasure or pain with something, your nervous system locks it in. It can get worse (or better!) if you build your IDENTITY on being the kind of person who does uncomfortable things. It's who you ARE. The military, rugged martial arts schools, running or triathlon clubs, study groups…any number of forms of human organization use identity to motivate members to accept discomfort, risk, and even death in exchange for belonging.
If you are willing to play with this notion, you can ask yourself questions to get started CHANGING a behavior…
What PAIN do you associate to the action if you AREN'T doing it?
What PLEASURE do you currently associate with the negative behavior if you ARE doing it?
Does the long-term result justify the short-term sensations?
Think about times in your past that you changed behaviors, accepted disciplines. WRITE OUT the process you went through to increase the pain in the current situation, or increase the pleasure of the potential future?
What ASSOCIATIONS can you create between the current behavior and PAIN or the desired behavior and PLEASURE?
How can you increase the amount of LOVE you feel for yourself, so that you know you are worth the discomfort of change?
How can you INTERRUPT the current pattern when you begin to practice it (for instance…you notice yourself reaching into the refrigerator for a piece of pie. Instead, you walk around the block)
How can you CONNECT the new behavior to your highest values and deepest desires?
What new PEOPLE can you bring into your life, who naturally practice the new habits? What ROLE MODELS can you bring into your "Morning Ritual" to inspire and inform you?
What new TECHNIQUES AND TECHNOLOGIES, what new MODELS can you adapt.
BONUS QUESTION: Does this habit pass the Three Gates in your life? For yourself? Your family? Your tribe?
If you will look at any habit, changing it will be vastly easier as you increase the PAIN you associate with doing it, and the PLEASURE you associate with the new behavior. Whether these are internal or external, it works. Associate the new behavior with your personal identity MIGHT be the most powerful: people will kill their bodies to preserve their egos. A terrible thought, but if you can convince yourself of its reality, you can simply do your MORNING RITUAL "as if" you are the new person, such that the old behavior is actually a violation of your sense of being.
Incredibly powerful, and long lasting, once you've actually integrated it. All of this flows out of understanding that the "Machine language" of the body-mind, the Belly Brain, are personal, genetic, or tribal survival. Use it to your advantage, and take your life back!
Namaste
Steve
