Pascal on pain/pleasure principle

All men seek happiness. To this there is no exception, what different means soever they employ, all tend to this goal. The reason that some men go to the wars and others avoid them is but the same desire attended in each with different views. Our will makes no steps but towards this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of him who hangs himself.

And yet after so many years, no one without faith has arrived at the point to which all eyes are turned. All complain, princes and subjects, nobles and commons, old and young, strong and weak, learned and ignorant, sound and sick, of all countries, all times, all ages, and all conditions.

A trial so long, so constant and so uniform, should surely convince us of our inability to arrive at good by our own strength, but example teaches us but little. No resemblance is so exact but that there is some slight difference, and hence we expect that our endeavour will not be foiled on this occasion as before. Thus while the present never satisfies, experience deceives us, and from misfortune to misfortune leads us on to death, eternal crown of sorrows.

This desire, and this weakness cry aloud to us that there was once in man a true happiness, of which there now remains to him but the mark and the empty trace, which he vainly tries to fill from all that surrounds him, seeking from things absent the succour he finds not in things present; and these are all inadequate, because this infinite void can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God himself.

He only is our true good, and since we have left him, it is strange that there is nothing in nature which has not served to take his place; neither the stars, nor heaven, earth, the elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, pestilence, war, famine, vices, adultery, incest. And since he has lost the true good, all things can equally appear good to him, even his own destruction, though so contrary to God, to reason, and to the whole course of nature.

Some seek good in authority, others in research and knowledge, others in pleasure.

Others, who indeed are nearer the truth, have considered it necessary that the universal good which all men desire should not consist in any of those particular matters which can only be possessed by one, and which if once shared, afflict their possessor more by the want of what he has not, than they gladden him by the joy of what he has. They have apprehended that the true good should be such as all may possess at once, without diminution, and without envy, and that which none can lose against his will. And their reason is that this desire being natural to man, since it exists necessarily in all, and that all must have it, they conclude from it . .

Leopardi - Theory of Pleasure

[165] The sense of the nothingness of all things, the inadequacy of each and every pleasure to fill our spirit, and our tendency toward an infinite that we do not understand comes perhaps from a very simple cause, one that is more material than spiritual.1 The human soul (and likewise all living beings) always essentially desires, and focuses solely (though in many different forms), on pleasure, or happiness, which, if you think about it carefully, is the same thing. This desire and this tendency has no limits, because it is inborn or born along with existence itself, and so cannot reach its end in this or that pleasure, which cannot be infinite but will end only when life ends. And it has no limits (1) either in duration (2) or in extent. Hence there can be no pleasure to equal (1) either its duration, because no pleasure is eternal, (2) or its extent, because no pleasure is beyond measure, but the nature of things requires that everything exist within limits and that everything have boundaries, and be circumscribed. The desire for pleasure has no limits of duration, because, as I have said, it ends only with existence, and so human beings would not exist if they did not feel this desire. It has no limits of extent because it belongs to the substance of ourselves, not as the desire for one or more pleasures but as the desire for pleasure. Now, such a nature carries infinity materially within it, for every single pleasure is circumscribed, but not pleasure itself, whose extent is indeterminate, and the soul, which loves pleasure substantially, embraces the whole imaginable extent of this feeling, without being able even to conceive of its extent, because it is not possible to form a clear idea of something desired without limit. Let us proceed to the consequences. If you desire a horse, you have the impression that you desire it as a horse, and as such and such a pleasure, but in fact you desire it as an unlimited and abstract pleasure. When you take possession of the horse, [166] you encounter a pleasure that is necessarily circumscribed, and you feel an emptiness in your soul, because the desire that you actually had is not satisfied. Even if it were possible for it to be satisfied in extent, it could not be so in duration, because the nature of things requires again that nothing be eternal. And assuming that the material cause that once gave you such and such a pleasure were to remain with you forever (for example, you desired wealth, you obtained it, and forever), it would remain materially, but no longer as the cause of such a pleasure, because another property of things is that everything wears out, all impressions vanish little by little, and as habit takes away pain, so it extinguishes pleasure. Add that even if a pleasure that you felt once lasted your whole life long, your spirit would still not be satisfied, because its desire is also infinite in extent, so that, even if that particular pleasure equaled the duration of this desire, yet, because it would be unable to equal its extent, the desire would always remain, either for ever new pleasures, as happens in fact, or for one pleasure that might fill your entire soul. Therefore, you may readily conceive that pleasure is always utterly vain, something which surprises us very much, as if this came from some particular nature of its own, while pain, boredom, etc., do not possess this quality. The fact is that when the soul desires a pleasurable thing, when it desires the satisfaction of an infinite desire, it really desires pleasure, and not a particular pleasure; now, when it finds, in fact, a particular pleasure, not an abstract one, embracing the full extent of pleasure, the result is that, since its desire is far from being satisfied, this pleasure is scarcely pleasure, because it is a matter not of a small but of a vast [167] inferiority to our desire, not to mention our hopes. And therefore all pleasures must be mingled with displeasure, as experience shows, because in the process of obtaining them the soul is desperately searching for something it cannot find, that is, an infinity of pleasure, or the satisfaction of an unlimited desire.

Let us move on to man’s inclination toward the infinite. Independent of the desire for pleasure, there exists in man an imaginative faculty that can conceive of things that do not exist, and in a way in which real things do not exist. Considering man’s innate tendency toward pleasure, it is natural that the imaginative faculty makes the imagining of pleasure one of its principal occupations. And given the said property of this imaginative power, it can fashion pleasures that do not exist, and it can fashion them infinite (1) in number, (2) in duration, (3) and in extent. The infinite pleasure that cannot be found in reality can thus be found in the imagination, from which derive hope, illusions, etc. For this reason, it is no surprise (1) that hope is always greater than the outcome, (2) that human happiness cannot consist in anything other than imagination and illusion. Therefore, we must consider the great mercy and great teaching of nature, which, while it could not, on the one hand, deprive man and all other living beings of the love of pleasure—which is an immediate consequence of, and almost the same thing as, self-love and the self-preservation necessary to the continued existence of things—and, on the other, could not provide them with real infinite pleasures, chose to make up for them (1) with illusions, in which she was most generous to them, and which we need to consider as something arbitrary in nature, which could perfectly well have done without them, (2) with immense variety, [168] so that when man was tired or disappointed by one pleasure he could turn to another, or even if he was disillusioned with all pleasures he could be distracted and confused by the great variety of things, and also he could not so easily tire of a particular pleasure, because he did not have so much time to linger on it and let it wear itself out, and there again not have too much space to reflect on the inability of all the pleasures to satisfy him. Therefore, you may deduce the usual consequences of the superiority of the ancients over the moderns on the question of happiness. (1) Imagination, as I have said, is the principal source of human happiness. The more imagination rules in man, the happier he will be. We can see it in children. But it cannot rule without ignorance, at least a certain ignorance, like that of the ancients. Knowledge of the true, that is, of the limits and definitions of things, circumscribes the imagination.1 And observe that since the imaginative faculty is often stronger in educated people than among the ignorant, it is so more potentially than in actuality, and therefore, because it is much more active among the ignorant, it makes them happier than those on whom nature would seem to have bestowed a richer source of pleasures. And note, second, that nature did not wish humans to regard imagination as such, that is, it wished them not to think of it as a deceptive faculty but rather to confound it with the cognitive faculty, and therefore to think of the dreams of the imagination as real things and so be stimulated by the imaginary as much as by the true (indeed more, since the imaginary has more natural powers, and nature is always superior to reason).2 But now educated people, even when their illusions are plentiful, regard them as such, and follow them more out of will than out of persuasion, in contrast to the ancients, [169] the ignorant, children, and the order of nature. (2) Since all pleasures, like all suffering, etc., are as great as we think they are, it follows that, the vaster and richer our illusions, the vaster and richer will be our pleasures, and although even the ancients did not experience particular pleasures as infinite, they did experience them as very great indeed, and capable of giving them at least contentment if not fulfillment. Nature did not wish us to know, and primitive man does not know, that no pleasure can satisfy us. Therefore, both by experiencing each pleasure as much greater than we do, and imparting to it through the imagination an almost unlimited extent, and by passing from one desire to another, with the hope of greater pleasures and full satisfaction, the ancients achieved the purpose that nature had set, which is to live, if not entirely satisfied by that particular life, at least content with life in general. In addition, the variety I mentioned provided endless distraction and enabled them to switch rapidly from one thing to another without the time to know anything completely or for pleasure to be worn down by habit. (3) Hope is as infinite as the desire for pleasure, and has, in addition, the power, if not to satisfy us, at least to replenish us with consolation and keep us in the fullness of life. The hope peculiar to human beings, that of the ancients, children, the ignorant, scarcely exists for the wise of today. See the thought beginning “Diogenes Laertius describes” on p. 162.

Moreover, since the desire for pleasure is materially infinite in extent (not only in man but in every living being), man’s pain in experiencing a pleasure is to see immediately the limits of its extent, which someone who is not very deep will see only vaguely. Therefore, it is obvious: (1) Why everything [170] good seems beautiful and special from a distance, and the unknown seems more beautiful than the known, this being an effect of the imagination determined by our natural inclination toward pleasure, an effect of the illusions willed by nature. (2) Why the soul, in poetry and everywhere, prefers airy beauty and infinite ideas. Given the previous argument, the soul must naturally prefer above all others that pleasure which it cannot embrace. The ancients have this airy beauty, these ideas, in abundance, as do their poets, especially Homer, the earliest of all, children have them in abundance, and are truly Homeric in this respect (see the thought “As to the imagination” on p. 57 and the other on p. 100), as are the ignorant, etc., in short, nature. Learning and knowledge play havoc with such ideas, and it is very difficult for us to experience them. Melancholy, modern sentimentalism, etc., are so sweet precisely because they immerse the soul in an abyss of indeterminate thoughts that seem bottomless and vast. And this is also the reason that in love, etc., as I said on p. 142. Because at such times the heart loses itself in some vague, undefined space. The type of such beauty and such ideas does not exist in reality but only in the imagination, and only illusions can represent them to us, nor does reason have any power to do so. But our nature created them in great abundance and meant them to be part of our lives. (3) Why our soul hates everything that restricts its sensations. The soul searching everywhere for pleasure and not finding it cannot be satisfied. Where it does find it, it loathes any limitation, for the reasons given above. So seeing the beauty of nature, it likes to let its eye wander as far as possible. Which Montesquieu (Essai sur le goût, “De la curiosité,” pp. 374–75)1 attributes to curiosity. Wrongly. Curiosity is nothing but a determination [171] of the soul to desire that pleasure, as I will explain. So it could be the immediate cause of this effect (which is to say that if the soul did not find pleasure in a view of the countryside, etc., it would not desire the extension of this view), but it is not the main one, and this effect is special or peculiar not only to matters of curiosity but to everything that is pleasurable, so it could be said that curiosity is an immediate cause of the pleasure experienced in looking at the countryside, but not of the desire for that pleasure to be unlimited. Except insofar as each desire for each pleasure may be unlimited and permanent in the soul, like the general desire for pleasure. Besides, sometimes the soul might desire, and actually does desire, a view that is restricted or confined in some way, as in Romantic situations. The reason is the same, a desire for the infinite, because then, instead of sight, the imagination is at work and the fantastic takes over from the real. The soul imagines what it cannot see, whatever is hidden by that tree, that hedge, that tower, and wanders in an imaginary space and pictures things in a way that would be impossible if its view could extend in all directions, because the real would exclude the imaginary. Hence the pleasure I always experienced as a child, and still do, in looking at the sky, etc., through a window or doorway or casa passatoia as they call it.1 Conversely, the vastness and the multiplicity of sensations delight the soul enormously. People deduce from this that the soul is born for the large scale, etc. This is not the reason. It is rather that a multiplicity of sensations overwhelms the soul [172] and prevents it from recognizing where one ends and another begins, allowing it to roam freely from one pleasure to another without dwelling on any of them, and this in a way makes the pleasure seem infinite. Similarly, vastness, even without multiplicity, occupies more space in the soul, and is almost inexhaustible. Wonder, too, leaves the soul astonished, occupies it entirely, and makes it incapable in that moment of desire. Besides, novelty (intrinsic to wonder) is always precious to the soul, whose greatest ill is weariness with particular pleasures.

From this theory of pleasure, you may deduce that the greatness of things that are not pleasing in themselves can be a pleasure simply as greatness. Do not attribute this to some imaginary greatness of our nature. According to this theory, we learn (as is indeed the case) that the desire for pleasure becomes a torment, a kind of habitual anguish of the soul. So it follows that (1) a drowsiness of the soul is pleasurable.1 The Turks procure it with opium, and the soul gratefully accepts this temporary relief for its troubles, because it is like an escape from the torments of desire that can never fully be satisfied, an interval like sleep, when the soul, even if it does not entirely cease from thinking, is not aware of doing so. (2) The happiest life is one of constant occupation, even when its occupations and sensations are neither exciting nor varied.2 A busy mind is distracted from that innate desire which would not leave it in peace, or directs it toward the little aims that fill the day (finishing a piece of work, providing for everyday needs, etc. etc. etc.), for these come to seem like pleasures (pleasure being anything that the soul desires), and, having achieved one aim, it moves on to the next, so that it is distracted from major desires and has no time to trouble itself about the futility and emptiness of things; and the hope invested in those [173] modest aims, and the modest plans for future work or hopes for some generally successful outcome in the distant future, provide enough satisfaction,1 and amusement in leisure time, which never lasts long enough to become boring; besides, rest after hard work is a pleasure in itself. This is what human life was meant to be, and it was so for primitive peoples, and is still true for tribal and peasant communities, etc., and it is mainly for this reason, and no other, that animals live happily. Notice how even today, for those living in society, a life of hard work and domesticity seems a vision of happiness, also because of the absence of suffering or real cares and afflictions. (3) The extraordinary, the marvelous, is pleasurable, even if its essential qualities do not usually belong to any class of pleasurable things. The soul always feels pleasure when it is full (as long as it is not filled with pain), and any total, vivid distraction is an absolute pleasure where the soul is concerned, just as rest from toil is a pleasure, because such distraction is a release from desire. And, just as the stupor produced by opium is pleasant (because real cares can be forgotten), so is that produced by wonder, novelty, or singularity. Even when our astonishment is not sufficient to overwhelm us completely, it can still have a powerful effect and this in itself is pleasant. Notice that nature had intended that wonder (1) should be something very normal for mankind, (2) should very often be absolute, so that it fills the entire soul. It happens this way in children, and used to happen in primitive man and now among the ignorant, but it cannot occur without ignorance, and ignorance today can never be the same as it is for people who do not live in society, because living in society [174] means being taught by the experience of the past and the present, to a greater or lesser degree, but experience always teaches us something, and novelty becomes increasingly rare. (4)1 Even images of suffering and other terrible things, etc., can be pleasurable in plays, poetry of every kind, and performances, etc. As long as we ourselves are not afraid or suffering, the power of distraction is always pleasurable. These images do not need to be of anything extraordinary: in that case they would come under the previous category. But the image of suffering, etc., alone is enough to occupy the mind and provide distraction. (5) Magnitude, of any kind whatsoever (except of our own suffering), is pleasurable.

Naturally, large things attract more attention than small ones, unless the small is extraordinary, in which case it takes up more of our attention than the ordinarily large. The point I am making is that the effect of size is a material one deriving materially from our inclination toward pleasure, not from our inclination toward greatness of size. The same could perhaps be said about the sublime, being something different from the beautiful, which we find pleasurable in itself. In short, boredom is nothing but a lack of the pleasure that is fundamental to our existence and of anything that could distract us from desiring it. If it were not for this overpowering drive for pleasure in whatever form, boredom, that most familiar, recurrent, and dreaded affliction, would not exist. And, in fact, what reason should a man have to feel so bad when there is nothing wrong with him? Take, for example, a man in isolation with nothing to occupy him physically or mentally, with no worries, problems, or actual pain, or bored by [175] the uniformity of something neither onerous nor unpleasant in itself, and tell me why this man should suffer. And yet we can see that he does suffer, that he is desperate and would prefer any kind of anguish to this state. (Indeed, the reply in the affirmative given by the doctors consulted by the Duke of Brancas when asked if boredom could be fatal is famous. Lady Morgan, France, bk. 8, notes.)1 It is simply because in such times the inborn desire that accompanies us throughout life is unsatisfied, undeceived, neither assuaged nor put to rest. Nature has done everything possible to prevent this malady, man’s horror and repugnance toward which could be compared to the fear of the vacuum in nature posited by ancient physicists to explain certain natural phenomena. Nature has provided for it by giving man certain basic needs, the satisfaction of which (hunger, thirst, cold, heat, etc.) brings pleasure as well as keeping him occupied; by its sheer variety, by the imagination, which can occupy itself with almost nothing, and also by fear (in regard to which, although it, too, is a natural, spontaneous effect of self-love, we must nevertheless take account of the whole system of nature and the astonishing balance and relationship between the different effects by which it achieves this purpose or that), by dangers that make us love life more and banish boredom, by natural disturbances of the elements, by suffering and by actual ills, because it is sweeter to recover from ills than to live without them, and by many other natural disasters regarded as evils, almost failings of nature, and explained away as extraordinary accidents, which may be true of each individual case, but not of all of them together; they, too, are part of the great system of the universe.2 In short, the natural order with respect to man is always aimed at warding off the terrible evil of boredom, which according to all the philosophers is very common in modern man but almost unknown in primitive peoples (and also in animals). And notice how children, even in a state of almost perfect inaction, never or very rarely feel [176] the true torment of boredom, because even the slightest thing is sufficient to occupy them completely, and the force of their imagination gives body and life and action to every fantasy that presents itself to their minds, etc., and in short, they find within themselves an inexhaustible, constantly changing source of amusements. And this without any knowledge, any experience, without having traveled, without having seen heard, etc., in a very confined and uniform little world. And while it might appear that the more this world and this field of interests expand and diversify, the greater and more varied should be the supply of inner activity, such as children have, and boredom all the rarer, nevertheless we see that quite the opposite happens. Let this be a lesson to those who will not admit that nature is almost uniquely the source of our happiness, and its corruption a certain cause of unhappiness. In addition, the fact that the force and fertility of the imagination (1) just as they very easily stimulate action, so very often they encourage inaction, (2) are quite different from the power of the mind, which on the contrary leads to unhappiness, is apparent from the example of southern peoples, particularly in Italy, compared with northern. This is because (1) just as the Italians were once very active on account of an enthusiasm born of a lively and vivid, rather than profound, imagination, so now one of the reasons that they do not notice or at least do not despair of a life that is unchanging and perfectly inactive is that this same imagination is still as rich and varied, and provides a great abundance of ideas, and so, almost without realizing it, they can immerse themselves in a kind of rêve [dream], as children do when they are alone, etc., something repeatedly stressed by Staël, while northerners, lacking these internal sources of consolation, are obliged to seek them outside and thus become extremely active; (2) intellectual depth, [177] and the ability to penetrate the innermost recesses of the truth, the abstract, etc., while not unknown among the Italians because of their subtlety, quickness, and insight (which makes it easier for them to conceptualize and grasp the truth, whereas others struggle and can often make mistakes despite their profundity), is nevertheless not their strength, and on the contrary constitutes the entire activity and therefore unhappiness of educated northerners (note, as a consequence, the high suicide rate in England),1 because there is nothing to distract them from this search for the truth. And however much it might appear that imagination in northern people is just as vivid, original, etc., nevertheless this is philosophy and learning rather than imagination, and their poetry is more metaphysics than poetry, owing more to thought than to illusions. And the sentimental in them is more desperation than consolation. Precisely for this reason, ancient poetry has never appealed to them; precisely for this reason, they have entirely different tastes and particularly like allegorical entities, abstractions, etc. (see p. 154); precisely for this reason, it will always be true that our country really is the homeland of poetry, and theirs of reason (see pp. 143–44).

Once nature had given mankind an unlimited inclination toward pleasure, it was free to arrange that this or that thing would be considered pleasure. So the reasons that something is pleasurable are quite independent of the theory expounded above, depending only on the whim of nature to determine what a pleasure should consist of, and consequently what should be the properties of the objects of this inclination in man. Leaving aside the pleasures I listed earlier (pp. 172ff.), which are pleasures not because it suited nature to make them such independently of man’s inclination toward pleasure but only or mainly because man’s desire [178] for pleasure is limitless. Since, as I have said, by pleasure I understand, and so it should be understood, everything that man desires, as for the rest, virtue, corporal pleasures, the pleasures of curiosity (see, if you will, Montesquieu as cited on p. 170 above), etc. etc., are pleasures because nature has willed it, and they might not have been, despite all man’s inclination toward pleasure, just as the abstract idea of propriety is not a reason that this thing or that seems proper or beautiful. Some pleasures are common, others are peculiar to this nation or that, others to this or that class of people, like the pleasures associated with greed, ambition, etc., some are individual depending on a person’s habits, opinions, physical constitution, the climate, etc., just as the idea of beauty is relative, depending on customs, habits, opinions, etc. (see Montesquieu, loc. cit., “De la sensibilité,” p. 392). Nature has given man many different qualities, some of which develop as a matter of necessity, while others may develop or remain latent depending on circumstances. Of this second group, nature wished or did not inhibit the development of some qualities, but there are others it did not wish, which, if allowed to develop, make man unhappy. And the reason it placed them in man without wishing them to be developed must lie in the depths of nature’s system, and could probably be discovered if we were not now concerned with more general matters. According to these different qualities, man finds different things pleasurable, and civilized man enjoys different pleasures than does primitive man, and will experience pleasures that primitive man never knew and will not experience many of those which primitive man used to enjoy. And therefore, the fact that something is pleasurable to us now, the pleasure of which depends on our excessive sophistication, does not mean that this is something willed by nature. And although now, [179] for example, an excessive fascination with the truth gives us great pleasure when we succeed in discovering it, we should not assume that nature intended us to be so curious, or that this pleasure is natural, or that primitive man shared this desire and was incapable of controlling it, nor should we conclude, therefore, that man’s unhappiness was necessary or that it comes from his absolute nature, when it is a product of our own relative and corrupt nature. For many of the circumstances that have produced this or that quality in us were not intended by nature, and derive from man, not nature. Furthermore, given this theory of particular pleasures, it might also be the case that the idea of infinity, wonder, or any of the things I included as being pleasurable simply because of our inclination toward pleasure might be pleasurable independently of this, the reason being the will of nature, as in the case of other pleasures. However, it does seem to me that I have given an adequate explanation of the reason for their being pleasurable, and that these considerations cover all aspects of the ideas in question.

Man’s inclination toward pleasure is infinite in a material sense, and does not allow us to conclude anything more about the grandeur or infinity of the human soul than about that of animals, who must naturally feel the same desire, of a similar intensity, this being an immediate and necessary consequence of self-love, as I shall explain below. So we can deduce nothing on this account from man’s inclination toward the infinite or from the sense of the nothingness of things (which is not a natural sentiment in human beings, and which, therefore, is not found in animals or in primitive [180] societies but arises from accidental circumstances, not willed by nature). And since the desire for pleasure is a consequence of our existence itself, infinite solely in this sense and therefore, just like thinking, our inseparable companion throughout life, it is no more a proof of the spirituality of the human soul than the ability to think. Rather, it is noticeable how this desire, which seems at first glance to be the most spiritual part of our soul (see pp. 106–107), is an immediate and necessary consequence (in our present circumstances) of the most material thing there is in living beings, namely self-love and self-preservation, something that we share with animals and that, as far as we are aware, is common to all living creatures. Certainly there is no life without love of self and love of life. As for our imagination’s ability to conceive of a certain infinity, a pleasure the soul cannot embrace, which is precisely what makes it pleasurable—I mean an ability that is independent of our inclination toward pleasure, and was nature’s decision to give us or not give us—let everyone decide for himself what it might show in favor of our greatness. Personally, I believe (1) that nature has given it to us solely for our temporal happiness, which could not survive without such illusions.

Leopardi
Zibaldone

The power of conditioning

Sometimes people want to create a change because a behavior or emotional pattern creates pain for them. But they may also derive benefit from the very thing they’re trying to change. If a person becomes injured, for example, and then suddenly everyone waits on them hand and foot, giving them a great deal of attention, they may find that their injuries don’t heal quite as quickly. While they want to be over the pain, unconsciously they want more of the pleaure of knowing that people care.

You can do everything right, but if secondary gain is too strong, you will find yourself going back to the old ways. Someone with secondary gain has mixed emotions about changing. They say they want to change, but often they subconsciously believe that maintaining the old behavior or emotional pattern gives them something they couldn’t get any other way. Thus they’re not willing to give up feeling depressed, even though it’s painful. Why? Because being depressed gets them attention, for example. They don’t want to feel depressed, but they desperately want attention. In the end, the need for attention wins out, and they stay depressed. The need for attention is only one form of secondary gain. In order to resolve this, we have to give the person enough leverage that they must change, but also we must show them a new way to get their needs met.
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Often, if we just break our old patterns enough, our brains will automatically search for a replacement pattern to give us the feelings we desire. This is why people who finally break the pattern of smoking sometimes gain weight: their brains look for a new way to create the same kinds of pleasurable feelings, and now they eat mass quantities of food to get them. The key, then, is for us to consciously choose the new behaviors or feelings with which we’re going to replace the old ones.
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Condition the New Pattern Until It’s Consistent.

Conditioning is the way to make sure that a change you create is consistent and lasts long-term. The simplest way to condition something is simply to rehearse it again and again until a neurological way is created. If you find an empowering alternative, imagine doing it until you see that it can get you out of pain and into pleasure quickly. Your brain will begin to associate this as a new way of producing this result on a consistent basis. If you don’t do this, you’ll go back to the old pattern.

If you rehearse the new, empowering alternative again and again with tremendous emotional intensity, you’ll carve out a pathway, and with even more repetition and emotion, it will become a highway to this new way of achieving results, and it will become a part of your habitual behavior. Remember, your brain can’t tell the difference between something you vividly imagine and something you actually experience. Conditioning ensures that you automatically travel along the new route, that if you spot one of the “off ramps” you used to take all the time, now you just speed past them—in fact, they’ll actually become difficult to take.

The power of conditioning can’t be overestimated. I read recently that Boston Celtics great Larry Bird was doing a soft-drink commercial in which he was supposed to miss a jump shot. He made nine baskets in a row before he could get himself to miss! That’s how strongly he’s conditioned himself over the years. When that ball hits his hands, he automatically goes through a pattern that is aimed at putting the ball through the hoop. I’m sure that if you examined the portion of Larry Bird’s brain that is linked to that motion, you would discover a substantial neural pathway. Realize that you and I can condition any behavior within ourselves if we do it with enough repetition and emotional intensity.

The next step is to set up a schedule to reinforce your new behavior. How can you reward yourself for succeeding? Don’t wait until you’ve gone a year without smoking. When you’ve gone a day, give yourself a reward! Don’t wait until you’ve lost eighty pounds. Don’t even wait until you’ve lost a pound. The minute you can push the plate away with food still on it, give yourself a pat on the back. Set up a series of short-term goals, or milestones, and as you reach each one, immediately reward yourself. If you’ve been depressed or worried, now each time you take action instead of worrying, or each time you smile when somebody asks how you’re doing and you say, “Great,” give yourself a reward for already beginning to make the changes necessary to ensure your long-term success.

In this way, your nervous system learns to link great pleasure to change. People who want to lose weight don’t always see immediate results—usually losing a couple of pounds doesn’t miraculously transform you into an Elle McPherson or a Mel Gibson.

Anthony Robbins
Awaken the Giant Within

The change should take place immediately, not someday in the future.

So why would someone not change when they feel and know that they should? They associate more pain to making the change than to not changing. To change someone, including ourselves, we must simply reverse this so that not changing is incredibly painful (painful beyond our threshold of tolerance), and the idea of changing is attractive and pleasurable!

To get true leverage, ask yourself pain-inducing questions: “What will this cost me if I don’t change?” Most of us are too busy estimating the price of change. But what’s the price of not changing? “Ultimately what will I miss out on in my life if I don’t make the shift? What is it already costing me mentally, emotionally, physically, financially, spiritually?” Make the pain of not changing feel so real to you, so intense, so immediate that you can’t put off taking that action any longer.

If that doesn’t create enough leverage, then focus on how it affects your loved ones, your children, and other people you care about. Many of us will do more for others than we’ll do for ourselves. So picture in graphic detail how much your failure to change will negatively impact the people who are most important to you.

The second step is to use pleasure-associating questions to help you link those positive sensations to the idea of changing. “If I do change, how will that make me feel about myself? What kind of momentum could I create if I change this in my life? What other things could I accomplish if I really made this change today? How will my family and friends feel? How much happier will I be now?”

The key is to get lots of reasons, or better yet, strong enough reasons, why the change should take place immediately, not someday in the future. If you are not driven to make the change now, then you don’t really have leverage.

Anthony Robbins
Awaken the Giant within

The drive to preserve the integrity of our own identity

The greatest leverage you can create for yourself is the pain that comes from inside, not outside. Knowing that you have failed to live up to your own standards for your life is the ultimate pain. If we fail to act in accordance with our own view of ourselves, if our behaviors are inconsistent with our standards—with the identity we hold for ourselves—then the chasm between our actions and who we are drives us to make a change.

The leverage created by pointing out an inconsistency between someone’s standards and their behavior can be incredibly effective in causing them to change. It’s not just pressure placed on them by the outside world, but pressure built up by themselves from within. One of the strongest forces in the human personality is the drive to preserve the integrity of our own identity.

The reason so many of us seem to be walking contradictions is simply that we never recognize inconsistencies for what they are. If you want to help somebody, you won’t access this kind of leverage by making them wrong or pointing out that they’re inconsistent, but rather by asking them questions that cause them to realize for themselves their inconsistencies. This is a much more powerful lever than attacking someone. If you try to exert only external pressure, they’ll push against it, but internal pressure is next to impossible to resist.

Anthony Robbins
Awaken the Giant Within

To create a sense of urgency that’s so intense that we’re compelled to follow through.

“Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure … they govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.”
—JEREMY BENTHAM

Why do people persist in an unsatisfying relationship, unwilling either to work toward solutions or end it and move on? It’s because they know changing will lead to the unknown, and most people believe that the unknown will be much more painful than what they’re already experiencing. It’s like the old proverbs say: “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know,” “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” These core beliefs keep us from taking the actions that could change our lives.

If we want to have an intimate relationship, then we have to overcome our fears of rejection and vulnerability. If we’re planning to go into business, we must be willing to overcome our fear of losing security to make that happen. In fact, most of the things that are valuable in our lives require us to go against the basic conditioning of our nervous systems. We must manage our fears by overriding this preconditioned set of responses and, in many cases, we must transform that fear into power. Many times, the fear that we are allowing to control us never becomes reality anyway.
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If you and I want to change our behavior, there is only one effective way to do it: we must link unbearable and immediate sensations of pain to our old behavior, and incredible and immediate sensations of pleasure to a new one. Think about it this way: all of us, through the experience of life, have learned certain patterns of thinking and behaving to get ourselves out of pain and into pleasure. We all experience emotions like boredom or frustration or anger or feeling overwhelmed, and develop strategies for ending these feelings. Some people use shopping; some use food; some use sex; some use drugs; some use alcohol; some use yelling at their kids. They know, consciously or unconsciously, that this neural pathway will relieve their pain and take them to some level of pleasure in the moment.
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The first step to creating any change is deciding what you do want so that you have something to move toward. The more specific you can be about what you want, the more clarity you will have, and the more power you will command to achieve what you want more rapidly.

We also must learn what’s preventing us from having what we want. Invariably, what’s preventing us from making the change is that we link more pain to making a change than to staying where we are. We either have a belief like, “If I change, I will have pain,” or we fear the unknown that change might bring.
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Get Leverage: Associate Massive Pain to Not Changing Now and Massive Pleasure to the Experience of Changing Now!

Most people know that they really want to change, yet they just can’t get themselves to do it! But change is usually not a question of capability; it’s almost always a question of motivation. If someone put a gun to our heads and said, “You’d better get out of that depressed state and start feeling happy now,” I bet any one of us could find a way to change our emotional state for the moment under these circumstances.
But the problem, as I’ve said, is that change is often a should and not a must. Or it’s a must, but it’s a must for “someday.” The only way we’re going to make a change now is if we create a sense of urgency that’s so intense that we’re compelled to follow through. If we want to create change, then, we have to realize that it’s not a question of whether we can do it, but rather whether we will do it. Whether we will or not comes down to our level of motivation, which in turn comes down to those twin powers that shape our lives, pain and pleasure.

Every change you’ve accomplished in your life is the result of changing your neuro-associations about what means pain and what means pleasure. So often, though, we have a hard time getting ourselves to change because we have mixed emotions about changing. On the one hand, we want to change. We don’t want to get cancer from smoking. We don’t want to lose our personal relationships because our temper is out of control. We don’t want our kids to feel unloved because we’re harsh with them. We don’t want to feel depressed for the rest of our lives because of something that happened in our past. We don’t want to feel like victims anymore.

On the other hand, we fear change. We wonder, “What if I stop smoking cigarettes, but I die of cancer anyway and I’ve given up the pleasure that cigarettes used to give me?” Or “What if I let go of this negative feeling about the rape, and it happens to me again?” We have mixed emotions where we link both pain and pleasure to changing, which causes our brain to be uncertain as to what to do, and keeps us from utilizing our full resources to make the kinds of changes that can happen literally in a moment if every ounce of our being were committed to them.

How do we turn this around? One of the things that turns virtually anyone around is reaching a pain threshold. This means experiencing pain at such an intense level that you know you must change now—a point at which your brain says, “I’ve had it; I can’t spend another day, not another moment, living or feeling this way.”
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Change requires more than just establishing the knowledge that you should change. It’s knowing at the deepest emotional and most basic sensory level that you must change. If you’ve tried many times to make a change and you’ve failed to do so, this simply means that the level of pain for failing to change is not intense enough. You have not reached threshold, the ultimate leverage.

“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

What you link pain to and what you link pleasure to shapes your destiny

While it may be a stretch for most of us to liken the sublime humility of Mother Teresa to the materialism of Donald Trump, it’s critical to remember that these two individuals shaped their destinies based upon what they linked pain and pleasure to. Certainly their backgrounds and environments played a role in their choices, but ultimately they made conscious decisions about what to reward or punish themselves for.

WHAT YOU LINK PAIN TO AND WHAT YOU LINK PLEASURE TO SHAPES YOUR DESTINY

One decision that has made a tremendous difference in the quality of my life is that at an early age I began to link incredible pleasure to learning. I realized that discovering ideas and strategies that could help me to shape human behavior and emotion could give me virtually everything I wanted in my life. It could get me out of pain and into pleasure. Learning to unlock the secrets behind our actions could help me to become more healthy, to feel better physically, to connect more deeply with the people I cared about. Learning provided me with something to give, the opportunity to truly contribute something of value to all those around me. It offered me a sense of joy and fulfillment. At the same time, I discovered an even more powerful form of pleasure, and that was achieved by sharing what I’d learned in a passionate way. When I began to see that what I could share helps people increase the quality of their lives, I discovered the ultimate level of pleasure! And my life’s purpose began to evolve.

What are some of the experiences of pain and pleasure that have shaped your life? Whether you’ve linked pain or pleasure to drugs, for example, certainly has affected your destiny. So have the emotions you’ve learned to associate to cigarettes or alcohol, relationships, or even the concepts of giving or trusting.

If you’re a doctor, isn’t it true that the decision to pursue a medical career so many years ago was motivated by your belief that becoming a physician would make you feel good? Every doctor I’ve talked to links massive pleasure to helping people: stopping pain, healing illness, and saving lives. Often the pride of being a respected member of society was an additional motivator. Musicians have dedicated themselves to their art because few things can give them that same level of pleasure. And CEOs of top organizations have learned to link pleasure to making powerful decisions that have a huge potential to build something unique and to contribute to people’s lives in a lasting way.

Think of the limiting pain and pleasure associations of John Belushi, Freddie Prinze, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. Their associations to drugs as an escape, a quick fix, or a way out of pain and into temporary pleasure created their downfalls. They paid the ultimate price for not directing their own minds and emotions. Think of the example they set for millions of fans. I never did learn to consume drugs or alcohol. Is it because I was so brilliant? No, it’s because I was very fortunate. One reason I never drank alcohol is that, as a child, there were a couple of people in my family who acted so obnoxiously when drunk that I associated extreme pain to drinking any alcohol. One especially graphic image I have is the memory of my best friend’s mom. She was extremely obese, weighing close to 300 pounds, and she drank constantly. Whenever she did, she wanted to hug me and drool all over me. To this day, the smell of alcohol on anyone’s breath nauseates me.

Beer, though, was another story. When I was about eleven or twelve, I didn’t consider it an alcoholic drink. After all, my dad drank beer, and he didn’t get that “obnoxious” or disgusting. In fact, he seemed to be a little more fun when he’d had a few beers. Plus, I linked pleasure to drinking because I wanted to be just like Dad. Would drinking beer really make me like Dad? No, but we frequently create false associations in our nervous systems (neuro-associations) as to what will create pain or pleasure in our lives.

One day I asked my mom for a “brew.” She began arguing that it wasn’t good for me. But trying to convince me when my mind was made up, when my observations of my father so clearly contradicted her, was not going to work. We don’t believe what we hear; rather, we are certain that our perceptions are accurate—and I was certain that day that drinking beer was the next step in my personal growth. Finally, my mom realized I’d probably just go drink somewhere else if she didn’t give me an experience I wouldn’t forget. At some level, she must have known she had to change what I associated to beer. So she said, “Okay, you want to drink beer and be like Dad? Then you’ve really got to drink beer just like your dad.” I said, “Well, what does that mean?” She said, “You’ve got to drink a whole six-pack.” I said, “No problem.”

She said, “You’ve got to drink it right here.” When I took my first sip, it tasted disgusting, nothing like what I’d anticipated. Of course, I wouldn’t admit it at the time because, after all, my pride was on the line. So I took a few more sips. After finishing one beer I said, “Now I’m really full, Mom.” She said, “No, here’s another one,” and popped it open. After the third or fourth can, I started feeling sick to my stomach. I’m sure you can guess what happened next: I threw up all over myself and the kitchen table. It was disgusting, and so was cleaning up the mess! I immediately linked the smell of beer to the vomit and horrible feelings. I no longer had an intellectual association to what drinking beer meant. I now had an emotional association in my nervous system, a gut-level neuroassociation—one that would clearly guide my future decisions. As a result, I’ve never had even a sip of beer since!

Can our pain and pleasure linkages produce a processional effect in our lives? You bet. This negative neuro-association for beer affected many of my decisions in life. It influenced whom I hung out with at school. It determined how I learned to get pleasure. I didn’t use alcohol: I used learning; I used laughter; I used sports. I also learned that it felt incredible to help other people, so I became the guy in school everybody came to with their problems, and solving their problems made both them and me feel good. Some things haven’t changed through the years!

I also never used drugs because of a similar experience: when I was in the third or fourth grade, the police department came to my school and showed us some films about the consequences of getting involved in the drug scene. I watched as people shot up, passed out, spaced out, and leaped out of windows. As a young boy, I associated drugs to ugliness and death, so I never tried them myself. My good fortune was that the police had helped me form painful neuro-associations to even the idea of using drugs. Therefore, I have never even considered the possibility.

What can we learn from this? Simply this: if we link massive pain to any behavior or emotional pattern, we will avoid indulging in it at all costs. We can use this understanding to harness the force of pain and pleasure to change virtually anything in our lives, from a pattern of procrastinating to drug use. How do we do this? Let’s say, for example, you want to keep your children off drugs. The time to reach them is before they experiment and before someone else teaches them the false association that drugs equal pleasure.

My wife, Becky, and I decided that the most powerful way to make sure our kids would never use drugs was to cause them to link massive pain to drugs. We knew that unless we taught them what drugs were really about, someone else might convince them that drugs were a useful way of escaping pain.

To accomplish this task, I called upon an old friend, Captain John Rondon of the Salvation Army. For years, I’ve supported John in the South Bronx and Brooklyn in helping street people make changes in their lives by raising their standards, changing their limiting beliefs, and developing life skills. Becky and I are very proud of the people who’ve used what we’ve taught to get off the streets and increase the quality of their lives. I’ve always used my visits there as a way of giving something back and as a reminder of how fortunate I am. It keeps me feeling appreciative of the life I have the privilege to lead. It also gives me perspective and keeps my life balanced.
I explained my goals to Captain John, and he arranged to take my children on a tour they would never forget, one that would give them a clear experience of what drugs do to the human spirit. It began with a firsthand visit to a rat-infested, rotting tenement building. The minute we walked in, my children were assaulted by the stench of urine-soaked floors, the sight of addicts shooting up heedless of who was watching, child prostitutes soliciting passers-by, and the sound of neglected, crying children. Mental, emotional, and physical devastation is what my kids learned to link to drugs. That was four-and-a-half years ago. While they have all been exposed to drugs many times since, they have never touched them. These powerful neuro-associations have significantly shaped their destinies.

Anthony Robbins
Awaken the giant within

Everything we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure

Throughout my life, I have passionately sought the answer to these questions. One thing is clear to me: human beings are not random creatures; everything we do, we do for a reason. We may not be aware of the reason consciously, but there is undoubtedly a single driving force behind all human behavior. This force impacts every facet of our lives, from our relationships and finances to our bodies and brains. What is this force that is controlling you even now and will continue to do so for the rest of your life? PAIN and PLEASURE! Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure.So often I hear people talk about changes they want to make in their lives. But they can’t get themselves to follow through. They feel frustrated, overwhelmed, even angry with themselves because they know they need to take action, but they can’t get themselves to do it. There is one elementary reason: they keep trying to change their behavior, which is the effect, instead of dealing with the cause behind it.

Understanding and utilizing the forces of pain and pleasure will allow you once and for all to create the lasting changes and improvements you desire for yourself and those you care about. Failure to understand this force dooms you to a future of living in reaction, like an animal or a machine. Perhaps this sounds like a complete oversimplification, but think about it. Why don’t you do some of the things you know you should do?
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The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you’re in control of your life. If you don’t, life controls you.

Often an interesting question comes up in discussions about these twin powers that drive us: Why is it that people can experience pain yet fail to change? They haven’t experienced enough pain yet; they haven’t hit what I call emotional threshold. If you’ve ever been in a destructive relationship and finally made the decision to use your personal power, take action and change your life, it was probably because you hit a level of pain you weren’t willing to settle for anymore. We’ve all experienced those times in our lives when we’ve said, “I’ve had it—never again—this must change now.” This is the magical moment when pain becomes our friend. It drives us to take new action and produce new results. We become even more powerfully compelled to act if, in that same moment, we begin to anticipate how changing will create a great deal of pleasure for our lives as well.

This process is certainly not limited to relationships. Maybe you’ve experienced threshold with your physical condition: you finally got fed up because you couldn’t squeeze into an airline seat, you couldn’t fit into your clothes, and walking up a set of stairs winded you. Finally you said, “I’ve had it!” and made a decision. What motivated that decision? It was the desire to remove pain from your life and establish pleasure once again: the pleasure of pride, the pleasure of comfort, the pleasure of self-esteem, the pleasure of living life the way you’ve designed it.

Of course, there are many levels of pain and pleasure. For example, feeling a sense of humiliation is a rather intense form of emotional pain. Feeling a sense of inconvenience is also pain. So is boredom. Obviously some of these have less intensity, but they still factor in the equation of decision-making. Likewise, pleasure weighs into this process. Much of our drive in life comes from our anticipating that our actions will lead to a more compelling future, that today’s work will be well worth the effort, that the rewards of pleasure are near. Yet there are many levels of pleasure as well. For example, the pleasure of ecstasy, while most would agree is intense, may sometimes be outweighed by the pleasure of comfort. It all depends on an individual’s perspective.

For example, let’s say you’re on your lunch break, and you’re walking past a park where a Beethoven symphony is playing. Will you stop and listen? It depends, first of all, on the meaning you associate to classical music. Some people would drop anything to be able to listen to the valiant strains of the Eroica Symphony; for them, Beethoven equals pure pleasure. For others, however, listening to any kind of classical music is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Enduring the music would equal a measure of pain, and so they hurry past the park and back to work. But even some people who love classical music would not decide to stop and listen. Maybe the perceived pain of being late for work outweighs the pleasure they would get from hearing the familiar melodies. Or maybe they have a belief that stopping and enjoying music in the middle of the afternoon is wasteful of precious time, and the pain of doing something frivolous and inappropriate is greater than the pleasure the music could bring. Each day our lives are filled with these kinds of psychic negotiations. We are constantly weighing our own proposed actions and the impact they will have upon us.

Anthony Robbins
Awaken the giant within