Episode #35- Allowing Pleasure

Have you ever noticed that as humans we have a hard time allowing ourselves to feel pleasure, happiness or other positive emotions?

Our brains have a negativity bias, and on a primitive level feeling pleasure is perceived as dangerous to our survival.  We should not let our guard down, and we should always remember that negative things are about to happen.  Thanks, brain...

I talk about what Gay Hendricks calls the Upper Limit Problem, the difference between pleasure and buffering, and how to notice and cultivate more pleasure in our lives.  Even if you are struggling with pain, I will teach ways to begin increasing the pleasure and positive emotions you can feel each day.

 

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Transcript- Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, episode 35, Allowing Pleasure. In this podcast, we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.
Become Unstoppable Body and Mind.
Hello, my friends. I'm excited today because I'm trying something a little new. I, in addition to recording this podcast, I am videoing it too.
So I'm hoping to put it on my YouTube channel, which is Body and Mind Life Coach, as well as Instagram TV, Body and Mind Life Coach. You can find me there on Instagram. So today's episode is about allowing pleasure, which seems like something we would all want to do.
But if you think about it, humans really do have a hard time allowing ourselves positive emotions, allowing joy, happiness, creativity and pleasure. I first thought about this and heard about this when I was reading the book by Brene Brown. I think it was Daring Greatly.
And she sets a scene of people in a car, a family talking, and it zooms out and it shows them driving along a windy road, and then it zooms in and they're talking and stop. Imagine what is going to happen. Most people say something bad is gonna happen because this is how our brain works.
Remember the negativity bias that I talk about a lot. So this is a way that our brain helps us survive by always looking out for negative things, but it makes it really hard unless we are purposely trying to enjoy and cultivate more happiness to actually allow positive things in our life. Think about sometimes when you go on vacation and how you just have this urge to do things and maybe even check your phone a lot.
Think about, they call it Guilty Vacation Syndrome. In the UK, there was research showing that 66% of people did not want to leave their work to go on vacation because they felt guilty about leaving. Sometimes it's called the letdown effect, where you have a letdown of your perceived stress, then you're more likely to have illness or disease.
More people report having panic attacks on weekends. There was a study in Taiwan in 2015 that found that holidays and weekends have more ER admissions for peptic ulcers than weekdays do. It's like we're always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Gay Hendricks talks about this phenomenon in The Big Weep, and he calls it the upper limit problem. We have a limited tolerance for feeling good and having life go well. It's like we have this internal thermostat of how much capacity for happiness that we have.
And when it reaches that upper limit, then we actually do things to sabotage ourselves so that we bring ourselves down to that more comfortable level. We all have limiting beliefs about ourselves, that we're not good at certain things, that we're shy, that we can't make a lot of money. So when we hit this upper limit, our brain manufactures thoughts that bring us back down to proving itself right, basically.
Our brains will look for evidence of the bad things about us, and the brain would rather be right and miserable or in a painful condition than to challenge those beliefs about ourselves that just don't feel true. He says we may even start fights with people or have accidents so that we are not in that uncomfortable happiness and bring ourselves back down to the emotions that we are more used to feeling. Does that sound crazy?
If you look at the model, so if you think of episode five, the model that I taught, it actually makes sense because our thoughts are what create our feelings. Our feelings create our actions and then our results. So if we have negative core beliefs about ourselves, our brain is going to point out things when we start to have feelings that are too happy.
Remember how you're too bossy and people don't like that or don't get too excited about your new promotion because you'll probably just mess it up like you've done before or just because you lost that weight doesn't mean that you're going to keep it off. You always tend to gain it all back and then some, thank you brain. Our brain is so good at reminding us these things that limit us.
With pain, this can happen too. And I've seen it so many times where people start to feel better and then overdo it and get hurt again or start to have another body part that starts hurting. When we hit the upper limit, we are uncomfortable with tolerating happiness or pleasure.
So we do things to bring us back down. Joe Dispenza talks about it on a cellular level where we're actually addicted to certain emotions. So take the emotion of stress.
If you have cortisol at a certain level, your cells become used to all of those receptor sites having cortisol in them. In fact, the next cells that are made actually have more receptor sites to accommodate for that cortisol. And then if you start depleting that cortisol level, if you start feeling a little less stressed, your brain will literally look around for things in the environment to stress out about to produce that cortisol for your cells.
So when we talk about just allowing pleasure, it's not that simple. We have to increase our capacity for tolerating happiness and positive emotions. Now you may think I'm good at tolerating pleasure.
I come home and I have a few drinks, or I buy things online, and I have so much pleasure. But I want to take a minute and talk about the difference between pleasure and what I'll call buffering. So buffering would be something that you do to avoid your emotions, that you do to make yourself feel good, but has a net negative effect.
So if you're coming home every night and drinking a substantial amount, it might have a negative effect on your family, relationships, or on your body the next morning. If you're compulsively gambling or shopping online, it may have a net negative effect on your bank account. So it's definitely a case by case basis.
Some things may in moderation not give you that net negative effect and be pleasurable truly. But for example, if you're on social media to the point that you're not taking care of your responsibilities, you feel kind of depressed because of all the things you're looking at, that might have a net negative effect. So I really want you to think about the difference between pleasure and buffering and what buffering might look like for you, but usually it's a way to get away from your emotions, not to actually feel true happiness or pleasure.
So how do we increase our capacity for pleasure? How do we tolerate more positive feelings in our lives? We have to increase our tolerance of feeling joy and feeling good.
The first way, as always with this work, changing any kind of thoughts or beliefs starts with awareness of what you're already thinking. Where are those areas where you have limits for yourself, those self-limiting beliefs? Where are your upper limit problems?
And then realize that feeling pleasure, feeling good, feeling joy is actually safe. Really understand at a primitive level that your brain is trying to protect you by offering the negativity and don't let yourself feel too good because it's gonna end, and really increasing that capacity on purpose starts with realizing that it's safe to feel pleasure and joy. We have so much guilt and shame in our culture, it will take some conscious effort to allow yourself to feel positive things without that guilt and shame.
But it is healthy for us. We show up as better people in the world if we allow pleasure for ourselves. Most of the time, our brain is so focused on planning for the future, thinking about the past, guilt, shame, stress, anxiety, that we don't even realize some simple pleasures that are around us.
But have you ever spent time with a child? They show us a way of seeing the world that is so different than the way that we get desensitized to. I saw a four-year-old last week that her mom got her a bowl of grapes, and she just was anticipating those grapes.
And then when she got them in her bowl, she was like, mm, grapes. And she was doing a happy dance, and she was walking over to the table, taking them over, just so full of joy. And then, you know how children eat, she took like four bites to enjoy that one grape.
And the whole time, mm, mm, yummy, this is so good. And it was just like a pleasure to watch her enjoy something so simple that much. It reminds me of what about Bob when he's eating, and he's like, mm, mm, mm, yum, yum, yum, you know.
That scene is so funny. I'm not doing it justice. But that's the kind of attitude we could have if we were really enjoying all of the simple pleasures that are around us.
So what are things around you that bring you joy? I have made a joy list, and it's something that I just keep in my planner so that I can add to it at any time. And I've written down simple things that bring me joy.
And my planner is actually one of them. I love my planner. And other things that I have on my list are sitting on my porch, drinking a cup of coffee in the morning, even the smell of coffee when I'm at the grocery store, wearing a summer dress on a warm summer evening.
I love long walks on the beach. I'm just kidding. I love listening to children when they're playing and hearing them laugh.
I love seeing a dog with its head out the window. I love taking my dog on a walk in the mountains and watching him just run around with joy. That brings me pleasure.
I love when people wink. It brings me joy to give a compliment to someone. I have joy with taking a bath, listening to music, listening to podcasts when I'm doing housework.
I love kombucha. I love funny movies. I love the feeling of clean sheets on my bed.
I love going to yoga. I love teaching yoga. It energizes me.
So those are some things that I have on my joy list, and I suggest that you start a joy list too. And especially look for those things that you find joy in, that you've almost forgotten about, that you don't notice on the daily, but are there for you every day that you can take pleasure in, these small moments of the day. The more we notice and experience these pleasurable things, the more we will allow ourselves to feel positive.
So thinking back to the model again, pleasure is an emotion, a feeling. And emotions, feelings come from our thoughts. So we can also increase our pleasure by changing the thoughts that we have about things.
One of the thoughts might be, I can allow myself to feel pleasure, or it's not dangerous to feel pleasure. It doesn't mean that I'm bad or selfish if I'm taking time and doing things for myself. Taking care of myself is the best thing that I can do for the people around me.
Another big part to recognizing those pleasures that are all around you is to be mindful to be present in the moment. So whatever you're doing, if you're taking a shower, then you could really notice how the warm water feels on your body. And if you're washing yourself, really touch your body and feel it and feel the pleasure with that.
Maybe putting on lotion, taking the time to actually put it on like you would lotion up a baby rather than just slapping it on. If you're eating, are you savoring the food that you're eating or are you shoveling it in or are you eating in your car? Taking time to notice the touches and tastes and smells and sights around you.
I remember one time I had a student with me that was a photographer, and she would always comment on how the sky looked or how the mountains looked. And those were always there for me, but I had so much more awareness of them when she started pointing them out, and I began looking for how cool the sky looked, too. Notice the amazingness, I don't know if that's a word, how amazing it is when a child is telling you a story.
And maybe it isn't about something that you find necessarily interesting, but maybe have curiosity and fascination for why it's interesting to them. Being present with people and really listening to them will not only increase your pleasure, but allow them to feel more seen and heard. Having that attitude of fascination and being curious is a great way to increase the pleasure in your life.
Gay Hendricks has you think how much love and abundance am I willing to allow and how am I getting in my own way? Now, if you are struggling with a lot of pain at the moment, which you may be if you're listening to this podcast, this might seem very challenging for you. How can I find pleasure, possibly, when I'm in such a state of agony or such a state of discomfort?
And it starts with very small steps. But remember, the more you're focusing on the pain and obsessing about the pain and thinking about it continually, you're actually creating more neurons that are associated with creating pain in your body. More of your brain capacity starts being focused on pain, and your hypersensitivity to pain increases.
So it's especially important for you to start increasing your capacity for pleasure. I think of with the law of attraction, where you don't want to focus on the things that you don't want. So you're not focusing on, you know, when is this pain going to go away?
I hate this pain. But you want to focus as much as possible on what you do want. Maybe for you, you're not quite at the point where pleasure seems like a reality, but you can start by at least getting yourself out of the fight or flight response when you have pain.
I talk about this in my episode, Somatic Tracking, a meditation for pain. So you could actually lay down and do this meditation and really notice that you can feel sensations in your body. You can focus on them and describe them without going into fight or flight and without trying to retract from the pain and pull away from it.
Actually going into the sensations, discovering more about them. And this way, you're going to start decreasing that, you're going to start rewiring your brain to create less pain. I think about in yoga, when I've been in a very uncomfortable position and thinking about keeping that steady breath, focusing on my breathing, that can really help with the physical discomfort or the challenge that I'm feeling with my muscles burning or stretching.
So we always have our breath with us. It's a tool that we have from the moment we're born until the day we die. And it's something that we can use to actually get out of that fight or flight, get into the parasympathetic nervous system where we calm our bodies and we aren't in a state of creating more and more pain as we focus on it.
So being aware of your breath, slowing your breath is such a helpful tool in the times that either you're feeling pain or your brain is just feeling out of control. You know, you have a lot of thoughts, you have some anxiety, things that you're thinking of with guilt or shame from the past, whatever it is, taking a deep breath. That's always so important.
What brings you joy or pleasure may be different than what brings other people or myself joy or pleasure. So this is a chance to really think about for you what is positive for you? What do you want more of in your life?
I suggest really trying to tune in to your inner voice. If you find me on Instagram, I did a reel, which is a little short video clip with music, where I show you how to listen to your intuition by swaying back and forth. So what you would do is close your eyes, ask yourself a yes or no question, and depending on which way you sway, that's your answer.
Yes, usually forward. No, it's backward. And this is one good way of starting to tune in to your inner voice.
If you feel like you don't have a good connection with your inner voice, do know that the more you practice, then it does become stronger and stronger. I love how Glennon Doyle in her book Untamed talks about really connecting to her inner voice. She calls it the knowing.
She said that when she started meditating, she started with ten minutes a day, and she could feel that she would sink down into herself more and more, where she wasn't on the surface with all of those thoughts that were thinking about crazy things and jumping from one subject to the next. When she sank down lower and lower, she would have this answer. She would have the knowing.
And it would not necessarily come as a voice to her. It was like a nudge. And then she said when she would act on that nudge, it was like warm liquid gold flowing through her veins when she would do what the nudge had told her to do.
And this is how she would do the next right thing one thing at a time. She said it felt almost like a game where you're not focusing on the end. The knowing wanted her to keep coming back and keep asking what is the next right thing, giving her that nudge, and then she would do it.
So she said, just practice this formula, sinking down, feeling the nudge or the knowing, acting on it, doing what it says, feeling the warm liquid gold, and then repeat forever. I really like this because it is easy to get overwhelmed with what is the big picture, what are all of the things out there that are necessary to do. But we can always slow it down, find in ourselves what the next right thing is to do.
And again, it's very individualized, so it's not going to always look the same from day to day or from person to person. But that's what's beautiful about it, and that is what will help us evolve to the next versions of ourselves by following that voice, that nudge, that knowing, and allowing ourselves the capacity to enjoy, to have pleasure, to have happiness, to show love without guilt. So please think about this over this next week.
Maybe start the joy list, think of what things bring you pleasure, practice knowing the next right thing to do, and see if you can increase your capacity to have positive things in your life. Because once you're turning away from the negative, focusing more and more on the positive, that's what will grow. So thank you for joining me today.
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