Pain

I wanted to share with you a passage from Tony Robbins book, Awaken the Giant Within:

“Though we’d like to deny it, the fact remains that what drives our behavior is instinctive reaction to pain and pleasure, not intellectual calculation.

Intellectually, we may believe that eating chocolate is bad for us, but we’ll still reach for it.

Why?

Because we’re not driven so much by what we intellectually know, but rather by what we’ve learned to link pain and pleasure to in our nervous systems. It’s our neuro-associations— the associations we’ve established in our nervous systems— that determine what we’ll do.

Although we’d like to believe it’s our intellect that really drives us, in most cases our emotions— the sensations that we link to our thoughts— are what truly drive us.”

In this part of his book he talks about pain vs pleasure in association with why we do the things we do. I found it fascinating and frustrating all at the same time.

Fascinating because we ultimately have control.

Frustrating because we don’t take control.

We stay in bad relationships because we fear the pain of the unknown. We eat things we know we should not or consume too much because we feel pleasure in the moment and fear the feeling of deprivation.

Many times, we can override the emotions but to truly win we have to address the behavior associated. We have to link the sensation of pleasure with a different behavior.

This is not easy.

With practice we can rewrite our thinking.

When it comes to eating better, we have to get past the emotions we have with the behavior. Do not fear the unknown, you know you are winning when you eat something not so good and feel crummy.

You realize the pleasure from the food item is not always worth it.

Tony’s book is fantastic and highly recommend reading if you have not already!

Let me know if you want to talk more about this topic. It’s a difficult process and painful, but always worth it.

We can help, just shoot me a message back,

Arin