The Motivational Triad

As a Life Coach, I help my clients see how their thoughts are creating the results in their lives.  Many times my clients ask me "Why am I thinking this way? Why is it so hard to change my habits?"

The answer is because our brains are wired for survival.

Our primitive brains, the ones that helped us survive when we were living in caves and hunting our food, had 3 priorities - to seek pleasure, avoid pain and conserve energy. This is called the Motivational Triad and this is how our primitive brain has kept us surviving as a species for so long.

The first part of the Motivational Triad is to seek pleasure.  

Pleasure was anything that keeps you alive. We would seek pleasure:

• Through staying in groups, because in primitive times we were safer in large groups

• Through food and feasting on food because it might be a long time until our next meal

• And through sex so that we procreated as a species

The second part of the Motivational Triad is to avoid pain.

Back in the cave, that meant staying safe, avoiding being eaten by a lion or being attacked by another tribe.

The third part of the Motivational Triad is to be efficient, expend the least amount of energy needed to perform a task so we had energy in case we need it later to survive.

That was then, this is now...

The Motivational Triad was great for us when we were trying to survive in primitive times, but today not so much. 

In these modern times, we need to overcome these primitive instincts, take control of them with decisions made in the Prefrontal Cortex part of our brain so we don't remain victims to our habits.

Today our Primitive Brain is always telling us to seek pleasure, and there are so many ways to seek pleasure today we overdo it.  It's not about survival anymore.  And we have a hard time controlling ourselves around all this pleasure. For example - We don't have to hunt our own food anymore it's everywhere and we overeat! 

Today avoiding pain is about avoiding anything that hurts us and that includes anything that causes us to be uncomfortable or feel discomfort, like emotions.

Today the problem is that your brain can't tell the difference between physical pain and emotional pain so just like you want to avoid the physical pain of breaking a bone or hitting your thumb with a hammer, your brain also wants to avoid any negative emotion, like fear, sadness, anger, anxiety, etc., which the brain also perceives as pain.

We avoid our emotions by overeating, overdrinking, overspending,  Facebooking for hours, Netflix, instead of feeling our feelings.  We no longer need to avoid emotional pain because discomfort is not going to kill us and in fact, we need to feel our feelings in order to evolve.

And Today we no longer need to save our energy like we did when we were cave dwellers - we're not likely to be chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex later on today - and today saving energy means procrastinating and that can cause a lot of stress.

One of the ways our brains conserve energy is by creating habits so it doesn't have to think about what to do and when to do it.  This can be good when you are driving your car, but not when you are working at changing your eating habits.  Habits help your brain to save energy, but it keeps you from making the changes you want to make - stop overeating, stop procrastinating.

If you want to evolve to the next level you have to be the one in charge of your Primitive brain.  Instead of defaulting to what your Primitive brain has always done, you need to take control by making decisions ahead of time with the Prefrontal Cortex part of your brain so you can break the default habits and make the changes you want in your life.

More on how to do this in my next post.

If you want to learn more about how your thoughts are creating the results in your life, click this link to schedule a No-charge No-obligation Consultation   LifeCoachingWithHeidi.com

Thanks for reading.
Until next time...