THIS is the key to change
I’m sitting in the chair with my mouth wide open. I’m staring at the ceiling as the drill starts up. I smell the horrible smell of bone being shaved off my tooth. I taste the bitterness of the adhesive sliding on to my tongue. The dentist stands over me. Just behind him is the computer screen where I can see my “treatment plan,” aka all of the work that’s ahead of me in the months to come. I breathe and think to myself “I can do this. I can do this.”
There’s a break in the procedure where I have time to sit with the unpleasantness I'm experiencing and also the sheer dread of the rest of the work I will have to get done. My treatment plan sits there mocking me. As the technician comes back she say, “Are you okay, you look like you’re about to cry!” I mumble back, “No I’m fine” as I think to myself, I’m not in physical pain...no, this is the face of regret. I’m regretting my sheer avoidance of the dentist for longer than I care to admit. Regretting only doing the minimum twice-a-day brushing on top of a steady intake of sugar for the last decade. Regretting all the money I’ll be forking over to fix all of this.
And in that moment I mentally commit to never being in this position again. I vow to brush, floss, mouthwash, and repeat so that I never have to feel this again. "Enough is enough," I say to myself.
Some might call this my rock bottom of oral care. A wake-up call. Come to Jesus moment. Whatever you call it, it was the moment where the pain of staying the same outweighed the pain of changing. I had suffered enough to decide that I needed to change. This, my friends, is the key to change: using the principles of pain (and pleasure).
The forces that motivate humans the most are pain and pleasure. If enough of either are applied we typically respond. If a few years ago someone had offered me great sums of money to stay on top of flossing my teeth, chances are I would have done it. In the same way, experiencing the complete unpleasantness that is dental work has now helped me comply to a thorough regimen.
The problem with using pain and pleasure to enact change is this that there is a delay.
In real life pleasure is normally something that comes much later, making it difficult for us to stay on top of the change we want to make. If you are unsatisfied with your job and struggle to get yourself to update your resume and cover letter, network, and start applying for new jobs, you likely won’t see the fruits of your labor until you’re actually settled in to a new job. Waiting for the pleasure makes it hard to motivate yourself to start the process, which is why people usually wait for the pain to set in before getting started. Many people wait until they are so miserable in their current job that they have that “enough is enough” moment which gets them to act.
Pain usually is more motivating for humans than pleasure, however, I think most of us would agree that it is not ideal to wait until we hit rock bottom before we act. So how can we use the pain and pleasure principle to help motivate us to change? Our imagination.
Right now, call to mind something that you would like to see changed in your life. Take a few moments to journal and fully imagine what life would look like as you consider the following (note: this is much more effective if you allow yourself to fully feel your feelings as you move through this):
What would life look like if you haven’t made this change in the next 6 months? What about in the next year? What about the next 5 years? 10? 20? Allow yourself to really imagine what might happen in the future. How would you feel? What would it cost you emotionally? What would it cost you financially? What would your relationships be like? What would be the impact on your health?
Really vividly bring these images up and feel what it’s like.
The idea here is to make it so unbearable that you have to change today. Enough is enough!
Now, take a few moments to journal and fully imagine life if you did make a change, again fully feeling everything that comes up:
If this change were to happen today, what would life look like in the next 6 months? What about in the next year? What about the next 5 years? 10? 20? Allow yourself to really imagine what might happen in future. How would you feel? What would it be like financially? What would your relationships be like? What would be the impact on your health?
Hopefully you enjoyed the latter exercise more. Because using our imagination is not quite as impactful as literal pain and pleasure, I recommend that you come back to the exercise consistently. It’s helpful to drive these feelings it into your nervous system, which can only happen if you fully allow yourself to feel the feelings.