Category: Josh Feingold Blog

We discussed yesterday that pain is the natural response to lack of pleasure.

As humans we are lucky to have metacognition which means that we are lucky enough to realize that we are.  (Site note: The downside of this realization is that many of us are not lucky enough to figure out exactly what that means – and end up thinking that we are lacking due to things that we are taught in our environment as a child.)

It is this metacognition that ends up complicating life for us humans since in our desire to prevent pain as children, we end up involving a very immature and simple sense of self in the process.  The problem for us is that this sense of self really doesn’t have enough information or skills to know how to manage things on its own.  Instead, it focuses on the messages that it gets from the person it trusts, it’s parents, who may or may not have improved on the messages that they received as children, themselves.  Which means that the net result is that the child is wholly unprepared to deal with the realities of the pain that they are presented with.

So instead of dealing with the pain, it creates a barrier to the pain, called fear, to prevent us from even approaching those areas that might cause us pain.  The problem is that in our adult years, the pain is lost, and all that is left is the fear.  That wouldn’t be so bad, but since pain doesn’t go away until it is dealt with, we end up dragging it around and carrying a feeling of being unhappy our whole life due to the fact that we never dealt with the issues – and in fact might not even know they existed.  So if we want to unlock the true issue (the pain) we must work to figure out the fear, and then work backwards.

So lesson two, is that you must identify your fears, since within these fears, you will be able to find those areas of pain that need to be addressed and tackled.  Chances are they are still preventing you from finding pleasure today.

Tomorrow we will discuss how to identify your fears.

Over the next few posts, I’ll try to build up a model that enables a better understanding of what motivates us to action and therefore makes us do what we do – or not do what we don’t do.

Underlying everything is the basic assumption that everything we do is motivated desire for pleasure weighed against the prevention of pain.

This means that our mind is constantly asking the question of will what I want to do cause me pain based on previous experience, and if so how much, and is it still worth taking the action or lack of action.

Rule number one about people is that we are pleasure seekers.  So far so good.  (Note to salesmen – first sales pitch needs to speak to this point right away – how does your item or service provide pleasure?)

However, in childhood, we quickly learn that the world is bigger than us, and that we don’t get everything we want since there are limited resources, and others vying for the same resources that we want.  The baby is hungry at 2AM, but the mom wants to sleep.  So along the way, we learn that we don’t always get what we desire, which is a lack and certainly a concrete form of pain.

We don’t like pain, so we start preventing pain as much as we can by manipulating our world.  First we cry, then we throw temper tantrums, then we ask nicely, and so on.

The net result is that we learn early on that in the desire for pleasure, if we don’t naturally get pleasure, to prevent pain and find pleasure, we manipulate the world through whatever means we find so as to help assuage our pain.

We talked yesterday about trusting your gut, however, another important skill is recognizing when our gut is trying to tell us something.

Now, I am clearly getting beyond my role as an armchair psychiatrist with only one class of Psyc 101 in College under my belt, however, I’m going to take a gut shot at gut.

We’ve talked about how the mind works in layers of some sort, and one of the bottom layers is gut.  Sometimes, there is a gut feeling that you have, but your higher mental capacities are at work silencing it because it serves some other important role.  However, there is still a nagging feeling that something is not quite right.

It’s happening somewhere in your life right now.  If you stop and journal, you’ll come to it.  Some incongruent place where you know something is off, but you just can’t put your finger on it.  Focus.  Focus.  There.  That’s it.  That’s where your gut is trying to get out, but you are forcing it down for some reason.

Figure it out, and free yourself.

 

The human mind is interesting.  It is able to process things subconsciously and serve it up as a gut feeling long before we can come to the same conclusion at a conscience level.

The problem is that many times, we either don’t trust ourselves, which means that we ignore our gut and instead listen to other fears from inside our head, or worse, suggestions from friends and family.

I know there are decisions that I have struggled with for years, only to end up going back to the original gut feeling that I had felt many moons earlier.  Think of all the headaches and heartaches, I could have saved if I had just listened to my gut the first time around.

Of course, it isn’t that easy.  In order to trust your gut, you first have to learn to trust yourself.  This involves realizing that you are your own best advocate, and that no one has your best interests in mind better than you, and that no one is better prepared to make decisions for you, than you.  For many of us, that is a tall order.  However, if we are not able to realize all of these things, in truth, we are not really whole, which is why we have trouble trusting our gut.  After all, why trust the gut of an unwhole person?

So work on having trust in yourself.  Make yourself whole.  Then bask in the warmth of making decisions with your gut.  You’ll thank yourself for it.  Trust me.

Wow, it sure is a small world.

Yup, you’ve said it, I’ve said it.  We all have.

But you know what, it’s really not.  We just make it small.

We are creatures of habit, and have limited time, which means that typically, we end up in patterns of action, and without realizing it find ourselves stuck in our own twilight zone.

Let me explain.  Suppose you need a suggestion for a plumber.  You call a friend, they give you a name.  The next day, you need a new dishwasher, so you ask the plumber for a suggestion, and he says, buy model X, it’s great.  A few days later, you hear from a friend that model X is great, so with two data points, you buy that dishwasher.  What you don’t know if that the plumber referred model X to him as well.

It happens all the time, and it is due to the fact that our networks aren’t as deep as we think they are.  We typically hang out with people like ourselves.  Be it in race, socioeconomic status, religion, or some other dividing grouping.  This in turn, means that our environment is homogenous, and not really all that broad.

You might think that if you go online, you can fix that, but in my experience, you end up with the same problem.  Typically, we end up haunting the same old websites and they link to the same old referring sites.  When was the last time you went to a new website?  Yeah, exactly.  Not that common an occurrence unfortunately.

So how do you get out of the rut?  Simple do something random.

Put your finger on a map a drive there and have lunch.  During lunch, close your eyes, put your finger on an entrée.  Try Stumple Upon or some other random website generator.  Open a AAA guidebook to a random page for the city near you and go there.  You get the idea.  The point is that if you want to create new experiences, you have to take a chance with random events and see where the lead you.

It’s worked for me, I hope it works for you.