Life’s Biggest Motivators: Pain & Pleasure
The two biggest motivators in everyone’s life are pain and pleasure.
Emotions — the sensations we link to our thoughts, are the driving force behind the decisions we make every day. Pain and pleasure are the strongest emotions that drive us. Everything we say, think, decide, and do is a response to our deep and burning desires to eliminate pain and gain pleasure.
For example, If we feel an emotion we don’t like or are uncomfortable with we will react to that in a way that will ease that emotion such as suppressing it or actively trying to understand and heal it. It is a method we use to eliminate the pain of negative emotions.
On the other hand, If we feel an emotion that we like, that makes us feel good and safe, we will do whatever we can to keep feeling that way or to get it back when don’t feel it anymore. An extreme example is alcoholics or drug addicts. The pleasure of feeling a sense of peace and numbing out the pain drives these individuals to continue this addictive behavior.
The thing is, that example is only a short-term fix. You see our subconscious has a deep desire to experience pleasure over pain in general. However, our conscious selves want to experience pleasure immediately and think that the only way to get that is by eliminating pain as fast and as easily as possible. For some, that’s with drugs and for others, that’s by avoiding uncomfortable conversations. While this method may work short-term the pain will always creep back up because the pleasure focus is on now and not forever.
Additionally, we still haven’t actually eliminated the initial cause of the pain. It only feels better in the short term because we have only solved the problem for the moment in order to not have to feel that pain right now.
But nothing actually gets solved in doing that. The only way to permanently eliminate pain is by being able to associate more pain with what you are doing now and more pleasure with a new behavior. After repetitive conditioning of this, your pain and pleasure associations will change. However, that will take longer than getting drunk which is why it doesn’t seem like a great option to people whose urgency for pleasure now outweighs pleasure forever.
Sometimes it’s not always a drive to eliminate pain but rather to avoid pain from occurring that motivates us. In other words, our fear that something will lead to pain is just as big of a motivator as eliminating pain when you feel it.
For example, say someone has experienced a lot of pain from multiple breakups. They then have a choice to let the pain of previous breakups or the prospect of pleasure in the future guide their decisions in terms of relationships. If this person decides that it is more important to avoid the pain of another breakup than any pleasure they may receive from a future relationship they may be single for the rest of their life. To this person, being single means getting to avoid the pain of breakups which is a version of pleasure to them.
The reason this (most likely unconscious) choice is made is to protect themselves from having to experience that kind of pain ever again. Therefore, you do gain pleasure just by the simple act of avoiding pain. So although they may not have any pleasure from being alone they get enough pleasure from avoiding their biggest pain which can outweigh any other possibility for pleasure.
I could go on about this topic forever. There is so much to pain and pleasure because it literally shapes our life. Every single person in this world is driven by these same two motivators. The difference is that some let pain lead the way while others let pleasure.
The key to understanding what you do is by increasing your awareness of your actions and decisions. The next time you make any decision, ask yourself why you made that decision:
Was it primarily to avoid pain or to gain pleasure? Remember, you will get pleasure from avoiding pain but the type of pleasure you really want is a long-term pleasure and that does not come from avoiding pain it comes from healing it.
❤️🌻 Thank you for reading!
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