Instant Gratification Vs Longterm Pain

Do you know how you’re more motivated? According to Tony Robbins, we, as humans, are motivated by two key driving forces.

I’m more of a ‘towards’ person myself, meaning I like working towards the pleasure of achieving something than an ‘away’ person, as someone who is motivated by the need to avoid pain. If you can figure this out, you’ll save yourself lots of time and energy with everything you do, not just fitness.

More people are motivated by the need to avoid paid as it’s built in within us – it’s our survival mechanism, our survival brain designed to keep us safe, and therefore keep us in our comfort zone. A lot of people will struggle to commit to a fitness program because of their need to avoid pain – perceived pain of the process or taking action/continuing to take action as it’s not comfortable, rather than the pleasure they’ll experience on achieving their outcome. I say perceived, as if you attach pain to exercise (for example), when you actually take action on the exercise, you’ll realise it’s not painful at all. You’ll feel awesome from it and you’ll never regret doing it. You’ll only regret not doing it!

Let’s take food temptation as another example and pain and pleasure. Initially we get pleasure from eating whatever it is we love to eat, say chocolate. It’s pleasurable. The pain comes fairly quickly afterwards though as we pile on the pounds super fast. Here’s when instant gratification (PLEASURE) vs longterm PAIN plays a major role. We live in an age of instant gratification.  We want everything to happen right now, or yesterday. We live in overwhelm which we perceive as stress and it’s very easy to resort to instant gratification to alleviate said overwhelm. The price we pay though is longterm pain – fat gain leading to illnesses & disease.

I’d like to invite you to think about Instant (pleasurable) gratification vs longterm pain. You may feel that initial high during the pleasurable experience but for how long is that sustained? Plus, it’s addictive. You want more, almost immediately. Sugar is like a drug, it’s like cocaine. Only more people die from sugar overload than they do cocaine per capita.

So….how to get around that? Can you do something else to separate yourself from your current overwhelm or desire for that temptation? Can you step outside and breathe? Do a guided meditation for 5 minutes? Can you take into work with you some raw vegetables like broccoli / carrots / peppers sliced and dip them into humous (organic of course)? That would be focusing on longterm pleasure – and you may just enjoy the snack too. You won’t experience the mental energy crash afterwards either. I’ll explain all about that another day.