Pleasure pain principle.

The Pleasure-Pain Principle

Humans are hard-wired to avoid pain and seek pleasure. This is part of our nature and is built into everyone.

This instinct helped our ancestors survive, but now it’s making you miserable.

Choosing pleasure and comfort over pain ensured survival in prehistoric times. Today, it’s why we:

• Avoid difficult conversations.

• Fear rejection.

• Choose convenient, unhealthy meals.

• Snooze the alarm.

• Scroll on our phones for hours.

• Buy things that we think will make us happy.

• Skip workouts we promised ourselves we’d do.

We choose comfort and pleasure, avoiding discomfort.

By avoiding difficult conversations, we’re left with lingering anxiety. By choosing easy, convenient foods, we’re eating our way to obesity.

When we choose to sleep in, scroll our phones, or spend our money impulsively, we trap ourselves in a cycle of short-term comfort, pushing discomfort further down the road.

The pleasure-pain principle rules our micro-decisions and slowly steers the course of our lives—until we take control of it.

Constant pleasure results in misery. Quick, easy pleasure leaves a void of pain that can only be filled with more short-term pleasure, trapping us in a loop as we seek a way out.

While the pleasure-pain principle will always be a part of us, learning to recognize it and control it is a crucial step toward better well-being.

We must embrace pain and discomfort as necessary parts of our growth and experience.

Actively choose discomfort instead of avoiding or fearing it:

• Have the difficult conversation.

• Sign up for the class.

• Go alone.

• Leave your phone at home.

• Introduce yourself.

• Put down the snacks.

• Get up when the alarm goes off.

• Admit when you're wrong.

Stop letting the fear of uncomfortable things rule you—fear is a terrible liar.

When we incorporate difficult or uncomfortable habits into our lives, we exercise our minds and strengthen our ability to endure discomfort.

By leaning into discomfort, we rewire our minds to enjoy overcoming challenges.

We can't change our basic nature, but we can attach new meaning to discomfort. The reward is found in the process of doing hard things.

Action:

Journal prompt.

Look back at the last week.

Look at what you avoided, ask yourself why. What reasons did you give for avoiding it.

Did you avoid doing simply because it was uncomfortable ?

Now choose a task you have been putting off and get to work.

Write down how you feel once it’s done.