“Reason guides but a small part of man, and the rest obeys feeling, true or false, and passion, good or bad.” -Joseph Roux
“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters: pain and pleasure. They govern us in all we do, all we say, and all we think. Every effort we make to throw off our subjection will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.” -Jeremy Bentham
The In-n-Out drive through, favoring the couch instead of that planned 5k run, a triple Tito’s martini with Castelvetrano olives…
When it comes to human behavior, we generally do things because we “feel like it”, and because we “want to”. What we feel like doing and want to do, are a product of what outcome we associate with an action. Our primitive minds task the limbic system with identifying whether the outcome of a given behavior is likely to produce pleasure or pain for us. “Pain = bad! Pleasure = good!”
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These associations of pleasure vs. pain are made through conditioning over time, and we humans have a proclivity toward preferring that instant kind of gratification. In this article, I want to provide a conceptual framework for you to make the system work for you, not against you. In behavioral psychology, we call this the behavior-consequence contingency chain. We will also discuss reverse engineering conditioning to flip the script on what produces a pain/pleasure response for you.
I want to leverage Tony Robbin’s five step Ultimate Success Formula to frame this up and weave behavioral psychology principles, and aspects of my program throughout it. For our example today, we are going to use a typical use case I see in my practice; someone who wants to be more fit and is dealing with modern busyness, family, food culture, stress, and not a lot of time:
1. Know Your Outcome
Obtain absolute clarity on your Best Self. How do they show up? What do they do? What do they not do? Unless you are crystal clear on exactly what or who you want to be, then any and all behaviors become acceptable. Without clarity on our end goal (outcome), just as in business, all paths (behaviors) become the correct next step.
We then condition pleasure to any and all behaviors that contribute to our Best Self. Pain becomes conditioned with behaviors that serve the Anti Self. Draw a picture of your Best Self, identify behaviors that this persona does and does not do, state traits they have. Get intimately entrenched in this character as if you are the director of a movie and must do an excellent job in character development.
Anais Nin said, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Once you are so clear on your Best Self that you can taste it, the tight bud of maladaptive health behaviors becomes more painful than the abstention or action that the blossom of positive health behaviors.
Related Post: GUILT AND SHAME HAVE NO PLACE IN AN OPTIMAL HEALTH PLAN!
2. Know Your Reasons Why
Get in touch with a powerful reason to pursue the goals that you set forth in order to withstand the grit and tenacity that difficult goals inevitably require in the journey to actualize them. Some common themes I hear in my practice related to health and fitness are: being a good role model to my kids and family, to be aligned with how I feel the highest expression of myself actually is, to beat this chronic condition (diabetes, heart disease, atherosclerosis, high blood pressure, COPD) so I can live longer and enjoy this life.
The bottom line here is that we want to make your goal and its associated behaviors “must dos” instead of “should dos.” We want your positive health actions to carry through from occurring in the initial ‘motivation phase’ to being sustained when the going gets tough. If you can get in touch with and define why your goal and its associated behaviors must happen, you are more likely to stay the course and not give up when it gets uncomfortable.
In doing this, we further our conditioning with pleasure and pain. In the example of a client I had with COPD: cigarettes began to represent the pain of death and not allowing her to stick around and see her children grow up. No longer did they represent the pleasure of a break in the day, punctuating a satisfying meal. Defining her “why” as a matter of life and death, and accepting that cigarettes contributed to the latter enabled her to associate the functional equivalents of calling a friend, taking a walk, and enjoying a square of dark chocolate with pleasure as opposed to the cigarette.
3. Take Massive Action
As Beyonce once said “I see it, I want it… Dream it, I work hard, I grind ’til I own it.” She would know, right?
I like to use the term ‘radical ownership’ with my clients. There are no two ways about it: reaching your goals requires consistent, massive action. First, define what actions need to take place in order for you to accomplish what you are setting forth to achieve. Next, find one or two you can do in the next five minutes to contribute toward the forward trajectory of the goal. Then, set a schedule of goals with some accountability (from a coach or a friend).
These actions are what we are going to condition pleasure to. Consider a gentleman who was forced to eat everything on his plate growing up due to his family having limited finances. Leaving food on his plate is associated with pain. When he gets older and more successful, and is able to afford any food he wants, not to mention big dinner plates too, you guessed it, this dude got into a 38 lb weight gain because he was conditioned to finish his plate to avoid pain. The strategy that helped him was to play his favorite song and get some good endorphins going when he pushed his plate away at 80% finished. Over time, pleasure began to be conditioned with leaving food on his plate.
The theme in this category is “be the change”. Remember how we worked on character development of your best self earlier? Get into that character. Play the part. “What would this character do if they were presented with… a big gift box of cookies/asked to hit the bar/etc.” You are the protagonist of your own story here. So, engage in the massive action required in even the smallest decisions throughout the day in alignment with your best self. Remember: you are rewarded in public for what you do in private.
4. Notice Your Results
Have you selected the most optimal behaviors to focus on conditioning to get you where you want to go? We only know the answer to this question if we look at dependent variables. In the case of health and fitness coaching, these tend to be: labs, blood pressure readings, blood glucose scores, weight, body fat, lean muscle mass, distance, speed, etc.
We are required to be both in the grasses of our day to day goals, and at a birds eye view to evaluate if the fruits of our labor are leading to the results we seek.
5. Change Your Approach
If an honest look at your dependent variables leaves you less than thrilled, consider some alternative function replacement swaps. If a nightly bottle of wine has been replaced with a nightly bag of chips, you may not be reaching the body fat goals you’d hoped for. Recruit some coaching from a friend or professional to consider alternatives like a yoga class or comedy show assuming the function of the wine drinking is stress relief. Sometimes, joining a group or working with someone to be accountable can help us adhere to our targets more consistently. Stay hardened in your goals, and flexible in your approach. Failure is a requirement and helpful feedback tool in pursuit of any worthy goal.
In summary, obtaining absolute clarity on your highest self, defining why that goal must occur for you, pinpointing action steps to start and stop that contribute to this goal, conditioning those action steps appropriately to serve our limbic system, evaluating the actions against our dependent variables, and pivoting if necessary.
This is how we recondition historical behaviors to new meaning. Our perception of health behaviors as providing pleasure of becoming our best self, or pain of staying the less desirable version is the foundation to decision making. Once properly assigned a condition, adaptive health behaviors become the default choice. No intellectual reasoning required. Thanks lizard brain!
Ashley Damaj is a Cornell trained Nutritionist, USC trained masters-level therapist, and post-masters Board Certified Behavior Analyst. An avid athlete, yogi, organic farmer, and chef; Ashley lives with her husband and daughter in Newport Beach, California.
She is the founder of Mothership Wellness, Inc., an integrative private practice. The backbone of her business is working directly with clients on ten pillars of wellness that are assessed and improved through actionable, short term, goal oriented individualized programs.
As a former pack a day smoker, drug/alcohol abuser, and overweight individual, Ashley’s mission is to bring behavior modification science and empirical solutions to individuals and families who want to make the move to a more healthy lifestyle be in alignment with the fullest expression of themselves.
She has worked in both corporate and clinical settings over the course of her career. Ashley has held Director level positions at a Fortune 5 companies, to clinical positions in a variety of therapeutic settings
(juvenile hall, domestic violence centers, in-home therapy, facility settings, etc.). Ashley has with diverse clientele of all ages using CBT, ACT and Behavior Analytic modalities for over a decade.
