How I Learned to Resist Pleasure and Value Pain

I always remember those painfully long, stressful days at work.

Everything just seems to go wrong and take twice as a long as it should.

I’d be fighting for my life against wave after wave of the most complex, long consultations there are:

• Self neglecting Elderly patients

• Acutely unwell patients convinced that I was a one man Hospital

• Acutely Suicidal or Psychotic patients

• Anxious but well patients wanting every test under the Sun

• Patients with multiple unrelated issues

• Language Barriers

I’d think what the hell is happening?! Why have they all chosen today to see me?!

Just for good measure the computer crashes, or there’s some other NHS IT failure.

Your adrenaline surges and you’re in survival mode completely focused on getting to the end.

You are running over an hour late and desperate to try and make up time, but each patient that enters is YOUR responsibility.

There are no short cuts, there are no medium cuts.

These patients need TIME!

They need to express every bit of their frustration.

They need compassion.

But you’re already spent, you have nothing left to give.

You’ve become numb, operating like a machine to get through it.

Your cup is empty, there’s no joy or happiness left.

You forget you’re an actual person.

Then you get to your telephone consultations that you’d had to save till the end,

A patient answers in palpably good spirits and asks ‘How are you Doctor?’

“I’m…”

You pause in silence contemplating whether its appropriate to start crying on the phone to a patient.

Then you take a deep breath and fortify the Dam that holds back your own emotional pain.

“I’m okay… thanks for asking”

…

…

…

(I’m not okay bro, I’m really not).

You continue listening to their problem.

Finally you finish and breathe a sigh of relief knowing you no longer have to:

• Make any decisions about anyone else’s life

• Solve any one else’s problems

• Absorb anyone else’s emotions.

But you can’t switch your brain off yet.

All the admin still needs doing, you’ll have to hold out for another hour or so.

By this time though you have started to regain the capacity to think about your own physical state which has been decimated by stress.

How much water have you drank today?

Did you skip eating lunch or just shovel it down so fast that now the only thing tighter than your bowel cramps is your anal sphincter?

Oh dear, what a day!

Surviving in a World of Abundant Pleasure

I’m sure you’ve had your own specific nightmare experiences but the point is that you’ve had a bad day.

When an activity becomes tiring or unpleasant we usually want to stop doing it.

As humans we’re naturally wired to move towards pleasure and away from anything which causes pain and discomfort.

It’s worked well for us as a species for millions of years, enabling us to survive in an environment of scarce resources and threats to life.

However in the modern world we have abundant sources of pleasure, more than we could possibly need for survival.

This means there are virtually no obstacles to our pleasure seeking brains obtaining pleasure constantly.

But this has to be considered carefully because:

1)Constant pleasure can be bad for our health and self development

2)In order to function and survive there has to be a trade off or compromise.

A common experience that highlights this is the day job pain and evening pleasure cycle.

As I’ve described above our day jobs can cause us a great deal of pain and suffering, yet we choose to persist with them.

Because we are aware that they are relevant to our survival in terms of generating income to pay for food, water, housing.

The Pleasure Pain Polarity (PPP)

We are like magnets constantly attracted to Pleasure and Repelled by Pain.

This is the Pleasure Pain Polarity, PPP

When we are having a bad day at work the force of the PPP is overcome by the force of survival, i.e “you gotta get that dollar”

When the context changes to being at home the force of survival pushing you towards pain reduces significantly—

And the force of the PPP increases significantly sending you flying towards pleasure.

So after our horrendous day at work enduring pain. The body will naturally seek out pleasure as quickly as possible to restore the balance.

This is why when you finally get home after a day of prolonged suffering—

You become a sugar/salt/fat seeking missile targeted straight for the food cupboard to destroy whatever crisps, chocolate, cookies etc are there to be found.

Those dry flavourless crackers, rice cakes, nuts and seeds just aren’t going to cut it.

Not right now.

You need to feel something, you need to regenerate your humanity before being able deal with whatever responsibilities you have remaining for the day.

Then its onto the comfort of the sofa to sit and scroll social media with the TV on in the background for a second level of distraction from the harsh reality of Life.

We endure short term Pain to survive in the long term, but then seek immediate short term Pleasure which cripples our long term Mental and Physical well being.

Choose your poison:

• Food

• Porn

• Drugs

• Alcohol

• Gambling

• Social Media

• Video Games

Another important aspect of the Pleasure Pain Polarity is that our bodies are constantly monitoring where we are between Pleasure and Pain.

The body wants us to stay in the middle of Pleasure and Pain, this is Homeostasis, the bodies way of keeping everything the same.

So when we expose ourselves to excessive Pleasure the body naturally will drag us back towards the pain side to keep things equal.

However during the correction it will overshoot and make us feel like crap for a period before going back to the middle.

This is why you crash after a sugar rush, or feel low after an alcohol binge.

During this period some people will seek to keep the pleasure going by consuming more of the poison of choice and this is the slippery slope to addiction.

This letter isn’t about addiction though, we’ll save that for another time.

How to overcome the Pleasure Pain Polarity PPP at Home

(When your job is Pain incarnate)

Including commuting and staying late with no pay, our jobs use up so much time that we have very few hours left at the end of the day.

You then have to make sure the essentials are covered like eating, sleeping, caring for loved ones, then what does that leave you with?

Very limited time. You have a choice to make with this time.

Do you give in to the pull of the Pleasure Pain Polarity?

Do you take that quick, cheap dopamine hit and leave the consequences for your future self to worry about?

Or do you do something which improves your situation and work on yourself?

Do you forego the immediate pleasure and force yourself to stay pressed up on pain for even longer?

Will Power

I admit its a difficult choice to make.

Just by knowing that you have a choice you’re mentally miles ahead of the majority of people.

When I’m wiped out after a day of work all I want to do is eat junk, watch TV and go to bed so I can prepare myself to take that next hit of pain the following day.

But eventually I realised that the day job pain and evening pleasure cycle had to stop because it was taking me on a one way trip to a future full of regret.

Regret that:

• I hadn’t achieved my potential in Life

• I’d not tried hard enough  

• I’d made too many excuses

• I’d wasted too much time doing things that didn’t matter

Eventually I realised that the pain of that Regret was going to feel so much worse than the pain of any bad day.

I would be living a lifetime of bad days before retiring and eventually getting hit with a pain that would vastly outweigh all of those days put together.

This is the source of my Will Power.

Will Power is what makes you do unpleasant/painful things when you are already at your perceived pain threshold.

Will power is:

• Waking up early to work out when you’re tired.

• Cooking a healthy meal when you’re craving junk food.

• Reading that important non-fiction book when you just want scroll social media or watch TV.

Self improvement relies heavily on Will Power.

No one who WANTS to improve their Life is currently living in a situation where they have the PERFECT CONDITIONS to do their self improvement actions consistently.

I believe everyone can strengthen their will power, even if you think you don’t have any. Its just that you’ve not found your source yet.

Remember when I said “We are aware that our jobs are relevant to our survival in terms of generating income to pay for food, water, housing.”

What you have to do is raise your awareness of Pain serving a much greater purpose than simply providing the necessities to exist.

Pain is also the path by which you break the cycle and become the person you want to be, living the life you want to live.

And that provides the internal sustainable pleasure that will completely shield you from the impact of the pain you HAVE to go through.

As you can see from my amazing graphics you have 2 options:

1) Continue down the path towards longterm Pain.

2) Switch to the path towards longterm Pleasure.

Its your choice.

Thats all for now

Lewis

P.S

If you are struggling with feeling more negative about your work day than positive then I may have just the thing for you.

I’ve been working on a free gift for all you lovely readers which I hope to have ready in 3 weeks time.

Stay tuned for updates!

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