Leveraging the Suffering Set-Point

In psychology, "Set Point Theory" is the idea that humans have a given set-point of hedonic pleasure/suffering that we are always drawn to throughout out lives.

This results in the concept of a "Hedonic Treadmill", where no matter how much pleasure we may add to our lives, we will always feel about the same level of happiness. It's hopeless!

Or is it?

Manipulating the Hedonistat

I imagine it like this: my mind, body, and soul will work together1 to ensure that I'm always at the same basic "level" of happiness.

Put another way, they work together to keep me at the same basic level of suffering.

Feelings, of course, are information, which we ignore at our peril! But, some "emotions" can be quite easily found by choosing a given framing, or even (in the case of anxiety or low self-worth) manufactured by the mind completely out of fantasy without any referent at all.

When we do not have enough suffering in our lives, our brains will summon some suffering for us, to keep us at the baseline.

This is the Hedonistat.

Don't Let Go

Some two and a half millennia ago, some guy made the ground-breaking observation that life is out of joint. The hedonistat ensures we will suffer, no matter what. The only way out is to release all attachments to desire, seek the void and moments of enlightenment, to free ourselves from the cycle of suffering and desire.

But what if I like wanting things and stuff?

I've realized recently that it is possible to deliberately adjust the hedonistat by adding suffering, in a way that is healthy and beneficial. And, by framing it as a simple trade, "Would you rather suffer with X or suffer with Y?", I'm able to trick my inner pathological demand avoidance demons without having to summon inhuman levels of executive function and will.

My Experience With This

Last year, a few life events (including but not limited to my dad dying) left me in a pretty dark place, and my natural neuroticism really kind of got the best of me for a while. It's humbling to admit, to be honest.

At the start of 2024, I made a New Year's Resolution (lol) to "churn grief into sweat". Around March (that is, not January), I finally actually did something in that direction, by signing up for exercise classes at the gym closest to my house, which happens to be a Muay Thai gym2.

I really hate that class. It's profoundly not fun.

The people there are great, the trainer is encouraging, and the exercise has actually been helping with some long-covid symptoms. I'm not in the best shape of my life (that is almost certainly behind me at this point), but I'm already in much better shape than I was last year. But it sucks and it hurts, every time.

Hating the class is the point. It's a sacrificial thing to deliberately not enjoy, so that my idiot brain will check the box and get out of the way of the rest of my life.

Every time I consider not going, I remember that if I don't go suffer at the class, by jumping and lifting and running and bloody-fucking-kill-my-lungs burpeeing for an hour, I'm going to probably find myself at bedtime replaying the saddest and most anxiety-inducing horrors my brain can cook up. I don't have to care about gains or goals or anything; just go have a small amount of bad time, and everything else will be fine.

The results have been awesome. Besides just the normal physical benefits of regular exercise, I've been happier, calmer, more balanced, more aware of what's working for me and what isn't, more able to let go of what doesn't matter, and appreciate what does.

Those monks flagellating themselves… I get it now.

Footnotes

1 Of course, these three are one in the same, simply viewed from different angles of analysis, the Holy Trinity of oneself. back

2 A similar location-based selection criteria is how I ended up studying Taekwondo in my late 20s, eventually getting a black belt after training about 20 hours a week for almost 2 years. And in hindsight, I think it was a similar sort of "self-medicating with less harmful suffering" kind of behavior. I'm not actually training to fight this time. I'm in my 40s, I'm just there to peacefully exercise. It is fun to kick the bags sometimes and let my legs pretend they can still break stuff, though. back

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