“I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.”

Remember a hunger striker confined to jail. Fasting for a cause, he survives thirty days without food. The physical pain he experiences is considerable, but it’s offset by the pleasure and validation of drawing the world’s attention to his cause. On a more personal, everyday level, individuals who follow intense physical regimens in order to sculpt their bodies have learned to link tremendous feelings of pleasure to the “pain” of physical exertion. They have converted the discomfort of discipline into the satisfaction of personal growth. This is why their behavior is consistent, as are their results!

Through the power of our wills, then, we can weigh something like the physical pain of starvation against the psychic pain of surrendering our ideals. We can create higher meaning; we can step out of the “Skinnerian box”* and take control. But if we fail to direct our own associations to pain and pleasure, we’re living no better than animals or machines, continually reacting to our environment, allowing whatever comes up next to determine the direction and quality of our lives. We’re back in the box. It’s as if we are a public computer, with easy access for lots of amateur programmers!

Our behavior, both conscious and unconscious, has been rigged by pain and pleasure from so many sources: childhood peers, moms and dads, teachers, coaches, movie and television heroes, and the list goes on. You may or may not know precisely when programming and conditioning occurred. It might have been something someone said, an incident at school, an award-winning sports event, an embarrassing moment, straight A’s on your report card—or maybe failing grades. All of these contributed to who you are today. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that what you link pain and pleasure to will shape your destiny.
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“Men, as well as women, are much oftener led by their hearts than by their understandings.”
—LORD CHESTERFIELD

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.

Many times we try to override the system. For a while we stick to a diet; we’ve finally pushed ourselves over the edge because we have so much pain. We will have solved the problem for the moment—but if we haven’t eliminated the cause of the problem, it will resurface. Ultimately, in order for a change to last, we must link pain to our old behavior and pleasure to our new behavior, and condition it until it’s consistent. Remember, we will all do more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure. Going on a diet and overriding our pain in the short term by pure willpower never lasts simply because we still link pain to giving up fattening foods. For this change to be long-term, we’ve got to link pain to eating those foods so that we no longer even desire them, and pleasure to eat more of the foods that nourish us. People who are fit and healthy believe that nothing tastes as good as thin feels! And they love foods that nourish them. In fact, they often link pleasure to pushing the plate away with food still on it. It symbolizes to them that they’re in control of their lives.

The truth is that we can learn to condition our minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly change our behaviors. With smoking, for example, all you must do is link enough pain to smoking and enough pleasure to quitting. You have the ability to do this right now, but you might not exercise this capability because you’ve trained your body to link pleasure to smoking, or you fear that stopping would be too painful. Yet, if you meet anyone who has stopped, you will find that this behavior changed in one day: the day they truly changed what smoking meant to them.

IF YOU DON’T HAVE A PLAN FOR YOUR LIFE, SOMEONE ELSE DOES

The mission of Madison Avenue is to influence what we link pain and pleasure to. Advertisers clearly understand that what drives us is not so much our intellect as the sensations that we link to their products. As a result, they’ve become experts in learning how to use exciting or soothing music, rapid or elegant imagery, bright or subdued color, and a variety of other elements to put us in certain emotional states; then, when our emotions are at their peak, when the sensations are their most intense, they flash an image of their product continuously until we link it to these desired feelings.

Pepsi employed this strategy brilliantly in carving out a bigger share of the lucrative soft-drink market from their major competitor, CocaCola. Pepsi observed the phenomenal success of Michael Jackson, a young man who had spent his entire life learning how to heighten people’s emotions by the way he used his voice, his body, his face, and his gestures. Michael sang and danced in a way that stimulated huge numbers of people to feel incredibly good—so much so that they’d often purchase one of his albums to re-create the feelings. Pepsi asked, How can we transfer those sensations to our product? Their reasoning was that if people associated the same pleasurable feelings to Pepsi as they did to Michael Jackson, they’d buy Pepsi just as they bought his albums. The process of anchoring new feelings to a product or idea is the integral transference necessary to basic conditioning, something you’ll learn more about in Chapter 6 as we study the science of Neuro-Associative Conditioning. But for now, consider this: any time we’re in an intense emotional state, when we’re feeling strong sensations of pain or pleasure, anything unique that occurs consistently will become neuroiogically linked. Therefore, in the future, whenever that unique thing happens again, the emotional state will return.

You’ve probably heard of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian scientist who, in the late nineteenth century, conducted conditioned-response experiments. His most famous experiment was one in which he rang a bell as he offered food to a dog, thereby stimulating the dog to salivate and pairing the dog’s sensations with the sound of the bell. After repeating the conditioning enough times, Pavlov found that merely ringing the bell would cause the dog to salivate—even when food was no longer being given.

What does Pavlov have to do with Pepsi? First, Pepsi used Michael Jackson to get us in a peak emotional state. Then, at that precise moment, they flashed the product. Continuous repetitions of this created an emotional linkage for millions of Jackson’s fans. The truth is that Michael Jackson doesn’t even drink Pepsi! And he wouldn’t even hold an empty Pepsi can in his hand on camera!
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Advertisers understand how to change what we link pain and pleasure to by changing the sensations we associate to their products. If we want to take control of our lives, we must learn to “advertise” in our own minds—and we can do this in a moment. How? Simply by linking pain to the behaviors we want to stop at such a high level of emotional intensity that we won’t even consider those behaviors any longer. Aren’t there things you would never, ever do? Think of the sensations you link to those. If you link those same feelings and sensations to the behaviors you want to avoid, you’ll never do them again, either. Then, simply link pleasure to the new behavior you desire for yourself. Through repetition and emotional intensity, you can condition these behaviors within yourself until they are automatic.

So what’s the first step in creating a change? The first step is simply becoming aware of the power that pain and pleasure exert over every decision, and therefore every action, that we take. The art of being aware is understanding that these linkages—between ideas, words, images, sounds, and sensations of pain and pleasure—are happening constantly.

“I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.”
—MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

The problem is that most of us base our decisions about what to do on what’s going to create pain or pleasure in the short term instead of the long term. Yet, in order to succeed, most of the things that we value require us to be able to break through the wall of short-term pain in order to have long-term pleasure. You must put aside the passing moments of terror and temptation, and focus on what’s most important in the long term: your values and personal standards. Remember, too, that it’s not actual pain that drives us, but our fear that something will lead to pain. And it’s not actual pleasure that drives us, but our belief—our sense of certainty—that somehow taking a certain action will lead to pleasure. We’re not driven by the reality, but by our perception of reality. 

Most people focus on how to avoid pain and gain pleasure in the short term, and thereby create long-term pain for themselves. Let’s consider an example. Say someone wants to lose a few extra pounds. (I know this has never happened to you, but let’s just pretend anyway!) On the one hand, this person marshals a host of excellent reasons for losing weight: they would feel healthier and more energized; they would fit into their clothes better; they would feel more confident around members of the opposite sex. On the other hand, though, there are just as many reasons to avoid losing weight: they’d have to go on a diet; they’d continually feel hungry; they’d have to deny their urge to eat fattening foods; and besides, why not wait until after the holidays?

With the reasons balanced in this way, many people would tip the scales in favor of the pattern of putting things off—the potential pleasure of a slimmer figure far outweighed by the short-term pain of dietary deprivation. Short term, we avoid the pain of feeling a twinge of hunger, and instead we give ourselves that immediate morsel of pleasure by indulging in a few potato chips, but it doesn’t last. In the long term, we feel worse and worse about ourselves, not to mention the fact that it causes our health to deteriorate.

Remember, anything you want that’s valuable requires that you break through some short-term pain in order to gain long-term pleasure. If you want a great body, you’ve got to sculpt that body, which requires breaking through short-term pain. Once you’ve done it enough times, working out becomes pleasurable. Dieting works the same way. Any type of discipline requires breaking through pain: discipline in business, relationships, personal confidence, fitness, and finances. How do you break through the discomfort and create the momentum to really accomplish your aims? Start by making the decision to overcome it.

Anthony Robbins
Awaken the giant within