What's Your Pleasure? Happiness?

There's overlap and difference between pleasure and happiness, and it's important to understand because all pleasure all the time has another name (addiction) and will destroy happiness. And, as we all know, even relatively small amounts of the "wrong" kinds of pleasure can also reduce happiness quite significantly.

Pleasure is short term and is what instinct continuously drives us toward. Instinct always drives us toward short term reward, and in "nature" works as a system of behavior perfectly, but in "civilization", unimpeded and uninformed, is a bit of a disaster.

The reason for that is that technology allows us to concentrate substances and experiences that stimulate the pleasure center of our brain. Ever wonder why bugs "off themselves" on the porch light? It's because there ain't no electric light bulb in nature, and their "pleasure receptors" (necessary for survival) are (ironically) greatly overstimulated by the "technologic concentration" of the bulb.

In the book "The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health & Happiness" authors Goldhamer and Lisle put forth the idea that a "motivational triad" for instinctual behavior is to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy. To get some idea how effectively they've managed to put this idea across, and what to do with it once understood, quickly sample some of the reviews of the book on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1570671974/ref=od_aui_detailpages00?ie=UTF8&psc=1#customerReviews

They are not trying to disparage pleasure however, only to understand better how to direct the impulse so that we do not ourselves become the equivalent of bugs on a porch light.

On my own bumpy progression to understanding better how to produce health in my own life, it only became obvious to me gradually that any so-called "healthy" diet that was not also pleasurable was also not sustainable. We need comfort and pleasure, without them we will slowly go crazy. But being driven toward "unhealthy" pleasures will drive us crazy more quickly.

So I came to understand how important it is to feed "the pleasure monster" a proper diet. And that the formula for a diet that is both healthy and sustainable is "sufficient nutrition + sufficient pleasure - toxic substances = long term health and happiness".

So how, you may ask, does one make a diet of "rabbit food" (fruits and vegetables) more pleasurable? Well the answer is actually pretty obvious, because fruit is perhaps the most pleasure inducing unaltered whole food there is, but there is a trick to doing a diet high in carbohydrates that has to be understood (not difficult), and I will address that in a future blog. (Hint: it has to do with keeping insulin resistance, the precursor to weight gain and so many other problems, at vanishingly low levels.)

And some who discover the "pleasure of fruit" do not balance it properly with vegetables, which can also be an unguided pleasure impulse that will not produce the goal of long term health and happiness. Like so many other things it's about balance...but we have to have the scales handy, and know how to use them.