Avoid Pain.
Seek Pleasure.
Conserve Energy.
We humans are hard wired for these 3 things.
Hundreds of years ago, this system worked. In fact, it’s the reason we survived and thrived as a species. If a lion was chasing you, it would be very beneficial to “avoid pain.”
Unless we were wired to “seek pleasure,” we may have stopped perpetuating the human race.
Our drive to “conserve energy” allowed us to use necessary energy to forage for food, and build our shelters.
This is exactly how our “lower brain” was made to function and it was useful for many many years.
What’s the problem you ask? Well, today many of the dangers we face are emotional in nature, and our brain does not know the difference between emotional and physical danger, and yet, it will set off the same signals… as though we were being chased by lions.
There are so many ways in our society to “seek pleasure” that it can sometimes be counter productive to learning about ourselves. Seeking pleasure feels a lot better than allowing a negative feeling. Enter overeating, overdrinking, overspending….. etc.
We also live in a culture where most of us do not need to hunt for food, or build our own shelters, so “conserving energy” then becomes the crutch when we do not want to do hard things, set big goals, or take massive action.
The good news? We have another part to our brains called the Prefrontal Cortex or the “higher brain” for simple folks like me. This is where our humanness resides. We use this part of our brain to make decisions ahead of time, create goals and envision dreams.
Knowing how the brain functions takes us out of judgement and into compassion. The brain is doing what the brain does. It makes sense. But left on auto-pilot, we will get auto-pilot results in our lives.
However, when we recognize we have a CHOICE in the matter…. that we have a higher brain, then we can override the hard-wired programming, with thoughts, feelings, actions and results we create on purpose.
Being HUMAN is amazing!