How to Hack Your Pain for Pleasure And Get in the Best Shape of Your Life

Everything you and I do, we do it either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure.

Let me give you some examples –

• You eat ice-creams, muffins, cheesecake, chocolate chip cookies and other sugar loaded crap because it gives you sensory pleasure when you eat these food-type substances.
• You avoid exercising regularly because it just isn’t fun to break a sweat and get your muscles to be sore the other day (i.e. you try to avoid pain and just sit on the couch and get fat).
• People who give a greater importance to gaining pleasures like to spend money on clothes and eating out whereas people who like to avoid pain have developed the habit of saving/investing their money (to avoid the pain of being broke) and they cook their own meals (to save $ and also avoid being fat).

If you’re seeking to create lasting changes in your health and fitness levels , then read on. Because by understanding and utilizing the forces of pain and pleasure, you’ll do yourself a huge favor and save years of disappointment of falling for and failing on the next fad diet or another fancy fitness app.

Here’s a question for you if one of your goals is to get in the best shape of your life. Please be honest when you answer it.

Why don’t you do some of the things you know you should do to live a healthier lifestyle?

You know what I mean here. Eat moderately healthy, exercise more*. Isn’t that self-explanatory? Then how do you end up constantly having to battle with your weight every year?

If you’re scratching your head on my last question, the simple answer is – because you never focus on building healthy habits but rather get swayed by the marketing tactics of the health and fitness industry (21 Days Boot Camp Challenge, 6 weeks 6 pack challenge, etc).

There’s an advanced answer to it that I’m going to give you in a bit.

But let me share with you how I discovered that during my first unsuccessful business.

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The Thing That Comes Before The Habit

From Oct 2014 – Apr 2015, I was trying to make it big in the real estate house-flipping market. I had a business partner with a $1M housing portfolio. Or at least that’s what I saw on paper.

But Rock Solid Property Investments crashed hard on me because my partner ended up being a psychopath who was a wanted felon and ran away conning me with $30,000. Who knew that psychopaths were so courageous and expert in manipulating people?

During my financial recovery period, I was working on building new habits because I had already seen the power of habits transform my health and fitness levels.

Some systems that I immediately started to implement were –

• Became extremely frugal when it comes to the basic expenses like food and clothing**
• Created a Google sheet to track my personal finance manually***
• Worked hard to generate multiple sources of income

But then I was still struggling to create significant changes in my financial health. Over the course of 12 months, with a mix of luck and commitment, I was able to turn my finances around.

The biggest lesson I learned that is applicable to every other area in life and very much in health and fitness is this –

When you’re trying to change your behavior – whether it’s building a new habit of going to the gym regularly or breaking a bad habit of eating sugary stuff, people tend to focus on tactics and strategies.

But the fact of the matter is, that’s an effect. You being fat, sick, or unhealthy is an effect and you cannot transform it before dealing with the cause(s) behind it.

Read the last line again because this might be the core reason why you’re still struggling with your health and fitness.

You being fat, sick, or unhealthy is an effect and you cannot transform it before dealing with the cause(s) behind it.

What do I mean by that?

See.. you already know what you need to do to lose weight and get fit. But you’re not getting any positive results because you’re too caught up on the effect before having a clear idea of the causality.

Self-awareness at it’s finest is accepting your shortcomings and accentuating your strengths. – Gary Vaynerchuk

A majority of America is struggling with their health and fitness because they are not self-aware. They are too focused on trying to make changes in their health and fitness without even being aware of what is causing these negative behaviors and habits they have developed.

If you aren’t clear yet what I’m trying to say here, check out the following questions –

• How am I doing fat?

You have to eat certain kind of foods to get fat. You have to have a certain type of lifestyle to get unhealthy and sick.

• What actions are causing me to put on all the weight back again even after going on a diet or trying a 21 days fitness challenge?

You’ve probably experienced weight loss in the past. And if you gained it back again, you’d have to do certain things for that – emotional eating, binge eating, etc.

Now that you know that you have to look into the causes in order to change your behavior, let’s get back to hacking pain in your life to get in the best shape.

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How to Use Pain to Getting In The Best Shape of Your Life

The main reason you end up procrastinating with your health and fitness goals is this –

At some level, you believe that taking action at this moment would be more painful than just putting it off.

Yet, have you ever had the experience of putting something off for so long that suddenly you felt pressured to just do it? It was time to just get over with that pending task you had been procrastinating for so long?

What happened in those situations when you were able to take a task you were delaying for so long but finally committed to getting it done no matter what?

Let me give you the answer –

You changed what you linked pain and pleasure to. Suddenly, not taking action became more painful than putting it off. This is a common occurrence that many Americans experience around April 14 (deadline to file their taxes).

Before we get into the strategies to leverage pain to our benefit, I want to share with you this behavioral concept that has helped me a lot.

Loss Aversion – The renowned Noble Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman along with Amos Tversky first coined this term . In their research, they found that we humans would rather prefer avoiding losses that focus on acquiring gains.

Most of us would work much harder to hang on to what we have than we would, to take the risks necessary to get what we really want. That’s because the fear of losing something is much greater than the desire for gaining a positive outcome.

You’d rather prefer not to lose 5 bucks than to find 5 bucks. In fact, Kahneman also found that losses i.e. pain is twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains i.e. pleasure .

If you are struggling with your weight and honestly answered the above questions to build self-awareness around your current health situation, now you know the causes of your unhealthy behaviors and outcomes.

And now you also know about loss aversion.

So how can you use this to help you get in the best shape of your life?

Pain is Your New Friend

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 – Tony Robbins

When pain becomes your friend, your emotional intensity is at its highest.

You say to yourself – “That’s it. I’ve had it enough. I’m not going to accept the way my health and fitness levels are today anymore.”

As I look back to my own life, I was able to turn my finances around for the good because I was done being broke and scrapping off of what ever was left. I was able to transform my health because I would not accept me being sick and bed-ridden anymore.

In his book, The 4-Hour Body , Tim Ferriss calls refers to this as the Harajuku moment. That moment when you realize that the pain of staying the same (fat, sick, and unhealthy) is greater than the pain of changing (eating healthy, exercising more, sleeping better), you will experience the intrinsic motivation to finally commit to create lasting changes in your health and fitness levels like never before.

If you are self-aware of the causes of your current health and fitness conditions, you know that it was your desire to avoid some sort of pain (loneliness, boredom, stress) and to gain pleasure (dopamine rush) that led you to indulge in fattening food and replace exercising with watching Netflix.

But here’s the thing a lot of you may not know of – we don’t move away from real pain. We move away from what we believe will lead to pain.

Maybe the first few workout sessions made your muscles sore and you linked that pain***** as neither being fun nor desirable.

But then what caused you to not go for some more sessions until you started to get the feel for the movements and also got your muscles stronger? Was it the pain itself or your belief that continuing in those activities will lead to more pain?

This is powerful stuff, right?

Now if you’re still struggling with your health and fitness, I want you to imagine what would happen if you link massive pain to your current habits.

In fact, I want you to spend a few minutes to link massive pain to your current health and fitness situation and the habits you’ve formed.

• If you have a habit of overeating, then how is that causing you massive pain in your life?
• If you eat to overcome your negative emotions, then how is that causing you massive pain in your life at the moment?
• If you struggle to exercise regularly, then how is that behavior causing you massive pain in your life?

You can get in the best shape of your life at any age when you decide for yourself what you link pain to and what you link pleasure to.

If we link massive pain to your unhealthy behaviors or emotional patterns, you will avoid indulging in it at all costs.

Now that you understand the power of pain and pleasure in shaping your health and fitness, let’s jump into some habits to help you get the maximum ROI from this.

• What is Keeping Your Fat, Sick, and Unhealthy?

List your current habits and belief systems that are keeping your fat, sick, and unhealthy and associate massive pain to it.

• What are the routines you are running away from at the moment that you know will make you burn fat, get fit, and healthy?

First, list all the things you know you should be doing but you don’t do it.and then link tremendous feelings of pleasure to the “pain” of those activities – whether it’s the pain of sweating during your training session or the pain of staying away from sugary food or the pain of

Next, link tremendous feelings of pleasure to the “pain” of those activities – whether it’s the pain of sweating during your training session or the pain of staying away from sugary food or the pain of how long it’s taking for you to see any significant results.

The pleasure comes in the form of the amazing energetic feeling you get after your workouts, the pleasure of not getting hunger pangs by avoiding sugary stuff****.

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Hack Your Brain For Pain and Pleasure Once and For All

In our brain, we have established associations in our nervous systems with related to each routine. The amount of pain and pleasure your brain derives from each routine helps it to select what will end up as a habit and what it will keep resisting to not form a habit.These determine what we do on a consistent basis and ends up as becoming a habit.

This is what determines what we do on a consistent basis and ends up as becoming a habit.

Emotional eating becomes a habit because your brian loves the reward you’re giving it and it completes the habit loop every time you crave for the reward which becomes your cue; you do the routine (eating sugary food) and then your brain get that dopamine rush which helps it to associate a pleasurable experience with the act. And then it becomes a habit.

Similarly, if you’ve been forcing yourself to workout; you don’t like the training sessions, then your brain associates those experiences as negative rewards and it does not crave for it at all. You may be able to use brute force to do those routines for a few days or weeks but in the end, the brain wins and won’t let you form the exercise habit.

You can assess this statement right now by pinching your belly fat. If you don’t like what you see, that’s because your brain been winning so far.

Here’s the thing… I have no doubts when it comes to your intelligent and your expectations. Yes, I believe that you want to lose weight, burn that belly fat, and get in the best shape of your life.

Since that is your goal, I want you to know that it’s not our intellect that really drives us. In most cases, our emotions – the sensations that we link to our thoughts are what truly drive us.

What drives our behavior is an instinctive reaction to pain and pleasure, not intellectual calculation.

If that sensation is rewarding the brain wants to do it. If it’s unrewarding, the brain will try its best to resist it.

So start implementing the following systems so that you can hack your brain to leverage pain and pleasure for the health and fitness results you want to see.

The Key Habit to Hack Your Brain for Pain and Pleasure

• Don’t try to override the brain’s reward system but rather leverage it by tricking your brain.
  Give pleasure to the positive routines that you’ve been putting off by associating massive pain to your negative routines i.e. the habits that keep you fat.

Ultimately, in order for a change to last, you must link pain to your old behavior and pleasure to your new behavior, and keep repeating it until it’s consistent.

People who are fit and healthy believe that nothing tastes as good as thin feels! And they love food that nourishes them.

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.

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Conclusion

When it comes to your health and fitness, learn to link massive feelings of “pain” to the routines you’ve been indulging in and are now self-aware what are those habits causing you to stay fat and unhealthy. You will have solved the problem for the moment – but if you haven’t eliminated the cause of the problem, it will resurface.

Now link tremendous feelings of pleasure to the “pain” of the routines you’ve been putting off.

Convert the discomfort of discipline into the satisfaction of personal growth.

We can create higher meaning 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 to determine the direction and quality of our lives.

Our behavior, both conscious and unconscious, has been rigged by pain and pleasure from so many resources: childhood peers, moms, and dads, teachers, coaches, movies, authors, tv heroes; the list goes on.

The truth is, 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 behavior.

If you want to take control of your health, you must learn to advertise in your own minds. And you can do this in a moment. How?

Simply by linking pain to the behaviors you want to stop at such a high level of emotional intensity that you won’t even consider these behaviors any longer.

1. Refined carbohydrates food like pizza, muffins, banana bread, etc
2. Processed foods that come in a box with 10+ ingredients whose name you can’t pronounce

Anytime I pass along these in the supermarket, I’ve associated terms like ‘Piece of shit’, ‘Makes me fat’, ‘This is poison’ and easily skip them without even having to make a decision about saying ‘No’.

Think of the pleasure sensations you link to those at the moment. Now attach pain to those pleasure sensations. Just use the feelings you currently associate with the activities you are avoiding like exercising regularly and cooking your meals. This should be easy as long as you don’t like the sight of your naked body in the bathroom.

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*Well it’s a bit more than just eating healthy and exercising regularly. But still, even with this insanely simple basic which people are well aware of, the obesity stats in America just amazes me.

**I would go to churches and the freestore foodbank for my food needs and then pretty much went without shopping for clothes for over 12 months.

***I started using Mint after I had already come out of my financial mess. But the habit of manually tracking my finances on a Google sheet had a psychological effect that kept me aware of my financial health, thereby motivating me to work harder.

****My pleasure to stay away from sugar is to avoid the ADD symptoms I get when I’m high on the sugary stuff.

*****Muscle soreness is different than the pain caused by muscle spasms and inflammation. It’s important to note that the old school ‘No Pain, No Gain’ defies the science of human behavior and won’t let you build the habit sine the brian is getting a painful reward with each habit loop. Also, often these pain can lead to a serious physiological injury as it did for me leading to years of chronic low back pain because I couldn’t identity the difference between spasm pain from soreness.