One of the great blocks to success or recovery is the inability to take action. Once again, the scale of the action does not matter. Taking action is simply the ability to move. Notice how pain motivates. So does pleasure – the carrot and the stick. We can tolerate a certain discomfort, but when it is pain, we take action to do something about it. We change our state.
World-famous life coach Anthony Robbins describes survival as the single-most dominant human dynamic. The brain is constantly seeking to avoid pain and gain pleasure, by which we survive. We do those things which bring pleasure, we avoid those things which cause pain – we survive. Both stimuli create action, depending on their intensity. Humans have the unique ability to reassign what causes us pain or pleasure. Robbins is right.1
Pain
Pain for most people hurts, which is why Nike's 'Just Do It!', for most people, didn't. 'No pain, no gain' discovered instead a world full of fat people paying £50 a month for a gym membership they never showed up for. We avoid things or people that cause us pain. We aggregate pleasure. Linked with pain is the need to do something about it.
Pleasure
...too can provoke action if we let it. Multi-billion-dollar industries have grown up around the need to stop pain or ease it with pleasure. Advertising doyens play pain and pleasure games like the pros they are. Five hours a night of TV entrainment, infomercials, ads and soaps plug us into the pain matrix. Pleasure, the billboards snarl, You're Not Getting Any. Cooking gurus make food we can't get at. Exotic travel shows contrast dream locations with our own crummy neighbourhoods. Adverts show people in pain gaining pleasure from the advertiser's product. We want those things we are told will bring us pleasure: cars, sofas, quad bikes, fashion clothes, Crazy Frog ring-tones and, if there's cash left over, a card for the spouse.
Placebo/Nocebo
Faith Changes Your Biochemistry
Pain and pleasure affect us at such a fundamental level, our thoughts change our biochemistry. Witness someone caught in a traffic jam who has to be somewhere in a hurry. Someone in love. The fight or flight response when danger threatens. There are four interesting effects that spin off from this:
Threat = mental pain = depressed immunity
No-threat = mental pleasure = raised immunity
Placebo = raised immunity
Nocebo = depressed immunity
Someone given a fake pill or placebo2, who holds to be true that the pill will heal them, stands a good chance of recovering by boosting their immunity. If they know the pill is a fake, however, any benefit is lost and the effect does not work. There's faith for you.
For centuries, doctors used placebo to assist in their work. Drugs are tested today in double-blind, placebo-controlled studies to see whether the drug can outperform the placebo effect.3 Witness two doctor's declarations almost 100 years apart:
"I was brought up, as I suppose every physician is, to use placebo, bread pills, water injections and other devices –. I used to give them by the bushels"
Professor Richard Cabot, Harvard Medical School, 1903
"Whatever the rights and wrongs, placebo prescribing is widely practised and, if we admit it to ourselves, so is the habit of prescribing for largely social reasons." [emphasis moi]
Dr K Palmer, British general practitioner, 1998
Nocebos have the opposite effect to placebos and depress immunity. Nocebos don't have to be 'bad' pills at all. They can be anything we process in a negative fashion. Consider the following:
A son told repeatedly, 'You're no bloody good' -Nocebo
'Good news, Mrs H, the cancer is gone' -Placebo
A patient told, 'You have three months to live.' -Nocebo
Bad news -Nocebo
Good news -Placebo
Love -Placebo
Hate - Nocebo
Changing State
When we avoid pain and move towards pleasure, we 'change our state'. Media teaches us how to handle the spasms of life variously with beer, football, cigarettes, sex, drugs, violence and lots of chocolate. For the young, bad news nocebos, financial woes, stressed relationships and late nights at the office are countered with perceived placebic effects such as shopping, food, clubbing, sex, alcohol and controlled substances which change mental focus to ban pain and gain pleasure. We like how pleasure feels. It's feral. 'Just Do It!', so we bloody did, mate.
The older relieve stress with more sedate placebic actions: reading a book, going to the pub, watching a good film, having friends around. There is nothing wrong with changing state, so long as the effects do not harm us or others. Sometimes though, we banish symptoms instead of the cause: the headache treated with painkillers; money problems with shopping; a gnarly husband with Valium. In the meantime, the underlying problem continues unabated.
Learn More About Yourself
What causes you pain?
What causes you pleasure?
What placebic events are operating in your life?
Which nocebos?
How do you change your state to relax?
Are any of these state-changes harming you?
Are you solving your problems or just masking the symptoms?
What You Can Do
If I am unhappy with my life, I can do something about it
I can take action
I will only take action if I am uncomfortable enough
When I am uncomfortable or motivated enough, I gain leverage
Gaining leverage is when I am compelled to act immediately and irresistibly
To take action I must decide where I want to go
Setting goals gives me a course of action
Now I can plan the steps to carry out my mission
Each step must impress me enough to move on to the next
My goals must be irresistible, impress the heck out of me
I must take action if I want a result
To achieve my goals, I must really want them
I can improve my well-being by increasing placebic effects in my life and decreasing nocebos
I can steer my own destiny
I can really do this
1 Robbins, Anthony Awaken the Giant Within, www.anthonyrobbins.com
2 placebo ; a harmless, pharmacologically inactive medicine given to a patient which effects ‘a cure’.
3 Studies conducted where neither the patient nor doctor knows whether the tested substance is the real drug or placebo