The pleasure of pain

Paul Bloom: I've always been interested in why we sometimes like to suffer. It's no big deal to explain why people like food and sex and good company and all sorts of fun stuff, but it's a real puzzle why we often choose to put ourselves in situations that involve pain and effort and suffering, why we like spicy foods and some of us go to movies that make us scream, some of us train for marathons and triathlons, and I became very interested in why.

Sana Qadar: This is Paul Bloom, he is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, and this question—why we sometimes seek pain and get pleasure from it—is the subject of his book The Sweet Spot. But it's not just pain for pleasure's sake he's interested in, it's also pain and struggle that can lead to meaning.

Paul Bloom: Consider somebody who has a maximum life of pleasure, they are hooked up to a drip of some delicious drug that just gives them this enormous high all the time and they spend their whole lives lying on a table maxed out on that drug. Maybe they are happy, by definition they are getting a lot of pleasure, but I think we could look at that and say that's an awful life.

Sana Qadar: So can some degree of pain and suffering help us live a good life?

You're listening to All in the Mind, I'm Sana Qadar. Today's episode is one from our archives and it's all about the interplay between pleasure, pain, suffering and meaning.

Can you start by explaining, do we all actually derive pleasure from some degree of suffering or pain? Are we all drawn to it?

Paul Bloom: I've never met somebody who wasn't in some way or another. Now, your mileage may vary. Some people don't like horror movies at all but they like sadomasochistic sex, some people don't like spicy foods but they like high intensity exercise. We differ. And we are talking now about suffering for a pursuit of pleasure, but it's also suffering as part of deeper life projects like raising children or going to war, climbing mountains, and people differ in that too but I think everybody has the basic impulse to do it.

Sana Qadar: Yes, can you explain a bit more what you mean when you say pain or suffering?

Paul Bloom: So when I started the book, I was interested in cases where we inflict pain on ourselves in sort of a controlled way, as part of a good time, as part of a source for pleasure. But as I began to write it and think about it and read more and talk to people, I realised there is a broader notion here which is often we choose to suffer as part of a life well lived. So, some people have children and anybody who has children knows how difficult that can be and how much of a struggle, but it would be so worthwhile if it wasn't so difficult. And the same for all sorts of other life pursuits. I think part and parcel what makes for a meaningful life is putting yourself in a situation that involves some difficulty and stress and the possibility of failure. So I mean suffering both in the specific sense of eating spicy hot foods, but also in a more general sense, making life choices that involve difficulty.

Sana Qadar: Right, okay, and it seems…on the one hand that seems a bit counterintuitive but on the other hand it almost seems obvious. What kind of reaction have you had to the thesis you are pushing in the book?

Paul Bloom: It's a nice way of putting it because in some sense I am merely reciting back old wisdom from philosophy, from religion. If you tell somebody who is a Buddhist or a devout Catholic that a good life involves suffering, they look at you as if, 'Really? You're telling me this? We've known this for a while.' And so I think in some way this is common sense, it's what people understand, a sort of 'no pain no gain' philosophy, and we understand that we seek out pain sometimes. But I think it the same time, psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists tend to forget about this, and too many people kind of get caught up in the idea that we are hedonists, that pleasure is our only goal. And so I like the way you are putting it. To some extent my argument in the book…the details get interesting, but the general argument that we seek out pain and suffering is old news, and I'm kind of I guess trying to bring it back.

Sana Qadar: All right, let's talk in more detail about the kind of pain and suffering you're talking about, starting with benign masochism. Firstly, what is it?

Paul Bloom: It's a lovely term thought up by a psychologist, Paul Rozin, and he was talking about cases where we give ourselves controlled doses of pain in order to enhance our pleasure. So he was thinking of cases like when we eat spicy foods or put ourselves in positions where we are frightened but in a safe way, or saddened but in a safe way.

Sana Qadar: Like watching a film?

Paul Bloom: Exactly. And everything like you have a sore tooth, you poke it with your tongue, somebody comes up to you and says, 'Do you want to see something disgusting?' And most people will say, 'Yeah, okay,' even though disgusting is a bad feeling. And so I explore different theories as to why we do this. There are all sorts of answers. One answer is contrast. You know, the brain is a difference machine, and we experience things, including pleasure, not in terms of absolutes but often in terms of differences. So, one way to enhance pleasure is to precede it with a little bit of pain.

My dad used to tell me this joke about the guy who was banging his head against a wall and when he was asked why he was doing that, he said, 'It feels so good when I stop.' And that sounds like a terrible dad-joke but it really does capture the fact that sometimes you fill your mouth with hot food because it feels so nice when you drink the beer, you generally put yourself in a bath that's blazing, and then when it cools off, it's just blissful.

Sana Qadar: Can we talk a bit more about examples of this idea of contrast and why that enhances pleasure? Can you give a few more examples of that?

Paul Bloom: Food tastes a lot better when you are really hungry, just slowing down and walking feels a lot better if you were running full speed right before and you are totally out of breath. One example of this, and I talk about it in the book, is visiting a Finnish sauna. People do this willingly, and if you were a Martian looking at humans, you'd wonder why are they in incredibly hot rooms that cause them great discomfort? And part of the answer is when you get out of it, in this case when you jump into a beautiful lake, it feels blissful. And for the most part there is no better shortcut to getting bliss than to put it in a context of preceding it with pain, some degree of pain.

I think contrast is part of the story, I think there are other things that go into benign masochism, there's a feeling of mastery and control. Sometimes it feels really good to put yourself in a bad situation knowing that you can take it, knowing that it's under your control, knowing that you're doing well in it.

Another thing going on here is sometimes painful experience could lead you to lose yourself, and that's kind of a weird way of putting it, but sometimes what's in our heads is noisy and distracting and annoying, the constant voice-over in our heads, we are conscious of our past, our future, we're worried, we're ashamed, we are thinking about how we're coming off, and certain states, including painful states, can obliterate that. If you talk to a trained athlete about high intensity exercise, they will tell you that when they are doing it they are often thinking of nothing else, and there is a pleasure to that too.

Sana Qadar: Professor Bloom says this helps explain why people engage in all kinds of somewhat painful activities, including consensual sadomasochistic sex, or BDSM.

Paul Bloom: BDSM is a funny status because you do polls as to how frequent it is, and so much depends on how you ask. So if you describe some heavy duty activity involving a lot of pain and humiliation, not many people say they are into it. On the other hand, if you ask whether people fantasise about it and are interested in it, the numbers go through the roof.

The most popular book of the last 10 years is 50 Shades of Grey, which is all about it. People are fascinated by this. And so the question is what itches the scratch, why do we enjoy it? So one theory of BDSM, which is, again, very mysterious and I think really interesting to explore, is that by the physical pain, the emotional pain distracts you from your own consciousness, it takes you out of yourself. We are very much focused on presenting ourselves in a certain way, being seen in a certain way, and it often feels really good to have that go away.

People in the business of studying this always like to quote a dominatrix to says, 'When you take out the whip, people's eyes fall upon it and they can't look away, and it steals away all of their consciousness.'

I think, by the way, this is a good time to make a really important distinction that runs through my book, which is everything we are talking about here is chosen suffering, and chosen suffering has all of these benefits and these possibilities. Unchosen suffering, the involuntary experience of pain or humiliation or anguish is as bad as everybody thinks it's bad and there's a world of difference. So the secret sauce to all of this is control, it has to be up to you what you're experiencing.

Sana Qadar: Can you tell me about your own experience with benign masochism and losing yourself when it comes to Brazilian jujitsu?

Paul Bloom: I tell the story of the first time I ever did Brazilian jujitsu, and I was substantially older and substantially out of shape. And on my the very first day I started rolling with somebody, sparring with somebody. And so for however minutes, we are bouncing around on the floor and he's trying to pull my head off my shoulders, and I realised afterwards that during that, I thought of nothing else. I wasn't thinking about my book, I wasn't even thinking about my kids or my family or did I look good in my uniform, I was totally immersed in the moment. These high intensity experiences, some which involve pain, some which don't, all that involve some degree of difficulty, take you out of yourself.

One person who has studied this more than anybody else is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who sadly passed away a little while ago, and he was the discoverer of the notion of flow, and a flow experience is an experience where it's not too easy and it's not too hard. If it's too difficult, it's frustrating. So what happens is it's sort of a Goldilocks state, it's difficult enough to kind of capture you, so you know you are in a flow experience if time goes by, you forget to eat, you forget to pick up the kids at school. Csikszentmihalyi talks about flow experiences of musicians, of rock climbers, of writers, of poets, of artists. He argues, I think convincingly, that a good life involves a lot of flow.

Sana Qadar: And why does it feel so good? Is it partly because of that erasure of self thing where you are not thinking about your anxieties, you are just focused?

Paul Bloom: It's a good question, why we like flow states, and I'm not sure anybody knows for sure. It could be that we've evolved to fall into them because there's something really beneficial to find yourself in this for long periods of time. Or it could be because of the feeling of mastery that goes with it. If you are watching TV, you don't feel proud of yourself, you don't feel good about what you've done later. But if you are, I don't know, composing a symphony or practising backflips or whatever, there's this feeling of 'look at me, I have control over my situation'.

Sana Qadar: When it comes to painful pleasure, how we interpret the experience, whether it is in fact enjoyable and how much so, seems to depend on the order in which we experience the pain versus pleasure.

Paul Bloom: I think it comes from the fact of contrast again. So the way we want it, just if you want a quick answer, is pain first. To have a memorable experience, you get the bad part over with, you get pain first, and then that sets the stage for pleasure. If you made the mistake of having pleasure first and then pain, you will remember the experience later more negatively, and the pleasure will not be as intense.

Sana Qadar: As an example, say you're at a party and you're having a good time and it's going really well, but it ends with a really embarrassing experience. You're likely to remember the party as having been a lot worse than you would if the embarrassing thing had happened at the beginning of the night.

Paul Bloom: So there's various studies done by Daniel Kahneman who won the Nobel Prize for this work, finding that this balance is critical, it's not only critical for the experiences we are talking about, it's critical, say, for the stories we enjoy. So anytime you see a movie or a TV show or read a novel, very typically it will have the structure; things are bad, maybe they get worse, they get worse, they get worse, and then they get better. That's the making for so many great stories that just drag us in. If you were to flip it, things start off good, they get better, they get better, then they are awful. That would be a story…you could be in some sort of artsy cinema or whatever, I'm sure there's wonderful stories like that, but they are not exactly what you'll take your kids to.

Sana Qadar: I guess my overall question when it comes to the section on pain and benign masochism, it's really interesting to me because I thought overall humans will do more to avoid pain than seek pleasure, but what you're saying here seems to counteract all of that.

Paul Bloom: In some sense there's kind of a paradox here because what we are talking about now, benign masochism and the like, really is the seeking of pleasure, it's people looking to have a good time. But the paradox is one way to get there is through pain, one way to get there is through pain and struggle and difficulty, and that's kind of a trick through which to maximise your pleasure.

Sana Qadar: All right, let's talk about another kind of unpleasantness. Can you talk me through the evidence around effort, and generally humans don't like to put effort into things they don't have to, is that right?

Paul Bloom: So, it's exactly right. One of the basic observations for humans and other animals is that…I think there's something called the principle of least effort, and the idea is that if you were going to walk and get to the fridge and get a glass of water, you'd walk straight to the fridge, you wouldn't go outside, walk around your house twice and then go back to the fridge, it's crazy. You typically satisfy your goals with the least effort possible. What's cool is we do that all the time, except when we don't, except when we purposefully choose effortful activities. And people go for a walk, people lift weights, and you might say there's some health benefit to that, but I do crossword puzzles, I spend a considerable amount of time staring at a screen, struggling with crossword puzzles. I don't do well enough to impress anybody, it doesn't make me a better person or whatever. But it's just the kind of effort that's kind of fun. And the very existence of everything from Wordle to chess suggests that we often like difficulty. And this is different from pain in some simple sense but it is a puzzle, we like what we would normally avoid, and so that's another example of what we are talking about.

Sana Qadar: Yes, I was just going to say you're absolutely right about that because when Wordle is too easy I don't enjoy it.

Paul Bloom: That's exactly right. You take crossword puzzles, the ones I do, you go from Monday to Saturday and they get increasingly difficult. I'm good enough to do the Monday ones pretty easily, so I don't do them, I do the ones that are harder. I don't do puzzles that are way too hard for me, there has to be sort of a sweet spot in-between maximally easy and maximally hard, but everything from Wordle to puzzles to physical exercise, we seek out effort and difficulty.

Sana Qadar: That's interesting. So can you explain that a bit more in terms of do we value the things that we put effort into more?

Paul Bloom: So there's a few explanations for why effort has this appeal. One is that, for whatever reason, the products of effort gain more value. So there's a lovely study done by Michael Norton and his colleagues where they had people build stuff, origami pieces or Lego structures, and then said, look, you can take home what you build or we'll give you a better version that has already been made. And people want to take home with their own stuff. People develop this strange liking for things that they create themselves, they call this the IKEA effect, based on the idea that we tend to like IKEA furniture that we put together ourselves, and a lot of research suggests that the more effort you put into something, the more value you give to it. So that's an example of focusing on the outcome.

We also find effort satisfying because there is a sense of mastery, of aspiring towards goals. A lot of games work that way. I think it's important to realise it's not necessarily the goal itself, it's not like all the satisfaction from Wordle comes from getting the word at the end. I try more crossword puzzles than I finish. But struggling towards them and making incremental progress, working on them, thinking your way through is kind of fun.

Sana Qadar: That kind of relates back to the concept of flow that you were talking about, in that the final product isn't necessarily the point, it's the process as well.

Paul Bloom: That's exactly right, and that happens from the small-scale to crossword puzzles, to the large-scale, like climbing Mount Everest. So people who climb Mount Everest, they want to get to the top of Mount Everest, but that's not the whole point of it. So people climb mountains and they get to the top and then they say, okay, I'm at the top, and then they turn around and go back. It's not like there's this enormous moment of bliss and satisfaction. What we see here is it's the process, it's trying to attain the goal that is satisfying. And this is a really interesting aspect of people. Everything we are talking about now I think is uniquely human, I think it's universal, it shows up in every human society and only humans. Only humans take pleasure in pain, only humans take satisfaction in effort, only humans seek out flow.

Sana Qadar: This is really helpful for me to understand why people would bother climbing a mountain or running a marathon, because I've never understood the appeal there but this is helping it all makes sense.

Paul Bloom: And it goes back to what you were saying before when you asked, you know, does everybody have these appetites? And the answer is yes, but they manifest themselves in different ways. And I'll tell you one thing we don't know, we don't know why some people like spicy foods and others don't, some people like horror movies and others don't, we can't predict these different facets of people. Knowing their age, knowing their gender gives some hint, but for the most part it's kind of mysterious why people have these different appetites.

Sana Qadar: So it's not even related to personality characteristics that we know of?

Paul Bloom: Not that we know of. You could test people on their extraversion and their agreeableness and their conscientiousness, and you just don't find huge effects. I could talk to you for an hour, and as long as I don't ask the question, I can't guess whether or not you like spicy foods, I can't guess whether or not…well, you told me you don't like running marathons, so I got that one, but I couldn't guess it otherwise.

Sana Qadar: It depends how spicy, I'll tell you that.

Paul Bloom: Fair enough.

Sana Qadar: An area where a lot of us put a huge amount of effort in over our lives is our jobs, our careers. What do we know about meaningful and satisfying jobs and what we can gain from that and why we put effort in there?

Paul Bloom: So here we are shifting gears in an interesting way. We are talking up to now about use of pain and suffering and difficulty to have fun, to have a good time. But I think there's a sense in which it's also part and parcel of a good life. So you look at something like jobs and you ask people; what are the most meaningful jobs? There was a study of a million people and they asked people; what do you do, and how meaningful do you find it?

And it turns out the most meaningful jobs are jobs like being a teacher, being a member of the clergy, being in the military, being some degree of a medical person. And for the most part you look at the list of jobs and they are not well paying, they are certainly not easy, some of them aren't high status, they often involve stress and difficulty and long hours, but they are meaningful, they are valuable, while other jobs that sometimes involve a lot of status and making a lot of money, they may have other perks but they don't give meaning in the same way.

Sana Qadar: Let's talk more about meaning because you grapple in the book with why people embark on difficult journeys or life changing decisions, things like going to war, things like having a baby. Having a baby in particular is interesting to me, partly because I had one about a year and a half ago and I've spent a lot of time thinking about…especially early on when it's really hard, right after birth, you know, why do people have babies, why do people do this? In many ways I'm the happiest I've ever been but I'm the most exhausted. So what did you learn about the choices that we make and our motivations for it, with babies and otherwise as well?

Paul Bloom: You've summed up perfectly the psychological literature on what it is to have a baby and now a one-year-old. It's complicated. So original studies took people with babies, young children, no children at all, and then assessed their happiness, sometimes by just asking them, sometimes by giving them a beeper that went off at random times in a day, sometimes by asking at the end of the day; tell me about the happy parts of your life and the unhappy parts of your life.

And what this original research found was the people say the time they have with their children, particularly with their young children, is not a happy time. Their happy times were with friends, resting, going to church, having sex, but spending time with a toddler…people tell you different things, but they don't tend to get much happiness from it. And these original studies found that on the whole parents are somewhat less happy than non-parents. So this was the original wave of studies.

But then things got more complicated and it turned out to be a lot messier. Fathers tend to be happier than mothers, older parents tend to be happier than younger parents. The original studies were done in the United States in a situation where there was not much good healthcare and the healthcare there was expensive. If you look at countries which have government subsidised healthcare, parents are much happier, often happier than nonparents.

But the number one discovery which I find interesting, given what my book is about and given what I'm talking about, for most parents it's not really about happiness. If I asked you, if you had a child, do you think your life is on the whole more pleasurable jolts of happiness than if you didn't have a kid, and you ask parents this and they say, 'Well, that's not exactly the right question. I didn't have a kid in the same way I might take cocaine or go on a rollercoaster ride, I have a kid and it's meaningful, it gives meaning to my life, it gives significance and purpose to my life, it gives intimacy and complexity and struggle and difficulty.' Most parents, it may not make them happy in a simple sense, but it's not happiness that they are after. Having kids is an illustration to me of one of the main things I argue for in the book, which is motivational pluralism, and that's a fancy term meaning we want many things. We do want to be happy, we want a kick of pleasure, sure, but we also want to be good, we want morality, and we also want meaning and purpose, and I think the evidence suggests having kids satisfies the meaning and purpose part of the equation.

Sana Qadar: Yeah right, and I guess because there's a perspective, the hedonistic perspective where if we are just seeking pleasure, then having a baby is a bad decision.

Paul Bloom: Probably…certainly it's not a lock as a good decision, so maybe people would do better off with cocaine and beach vacations than having a baby. But if I told that to a parent they'd say that's the stupidest advice ever because, again, life is more complicated than that, we want different things.

Sana Qadar: And you also wrote that on surveys parents consistently say their lives have more meaning than nonparents, which I thought was lovely or awful depending on what side of the parenting divide you sit on.

Paul Bloom: I have a lot of close friends who have chosen not to be parents, and their lives are every bit as rich and meaningful and purposeful, they just focus on other things. I think in the end, a rich and good life (and this is what evidence suggests) requires you get meaning and purpose from somewhere. So, for many of us it's our jobs. For me I have two sons but they are now adults out in the world, and maybe more of my energies are to other sorts of projects.

Sana Qadar: Towards the end of the book you sort of come back to the original tension you see between hedonism and meaning, pleasure and meaning. Is there a true dichotomy? Can we have lives that have both?

Paul Bloom: Yes, so there are studies that ask people, you know, how happy is your life? And they also asked people how meaningful your life is, and maybe the good news here is…or bad news for some people I guess…answers are correlated. So it's not that there is an essential tension between a pleasurable life and a meaningful life, on the contrary, people who have a lot of pleasure tend to have a lot of meaning, and people who have a little bit tend to have a little bit.

On the other hand, there are choices you make, there are cases where pleasure is at the cost of meaning, and meaning is at the cost of pleasure. And I'm not that arrogant to say, okay, here is how you should divvy them up to have a good life. Everybody has to make the choice themselves. But one of the things I try to raise in my book is the fact that we are faced with this problem, there are many things we want, some of them conflict, and we have to kind of choose the balance for ourselves.

Sana Qadar: That's interesting because I was going to ask you, are there overall ground rules that can help us when we are trying to have more of this mix in our lives?

Paul Bloom: I have a couple of bits of advice, I'll just stick to two. One is that there is a lot of evidence that trying to be happy is a mistake. There's a real connection between people who say being happy is very important to them and they try very hard, and people who are basically miserable and unhappy with their lives. It's complicated why there is a relationship, but it does seem like the happiest people in the world are people who don't actually try hard to be happy, they do other things, and happiness comes along for the ride.

Sana Qadar: This will be a familiar idea if you listen to our recent episode on toxic positivity.

Paul Bloom: And the second bit of advice I would say, finding flow in your life, learning to take the time and to some extent to sacrifice, to put away your cell phone and turn away from the TV and focus on something difficult, be it athletic or musical or intellectual or whatever, gives real reward to people's lives. And many people say they have no flow in their lives and I think such lives are diminished by that.

Sana Qadar: Is finding flow about finding what you enjoy doing, a hobby, that kind of thing?

Paul Bloom: It could be, there are a lot of things that are good and valuable that don't involve flow, and a lot of things that are flow activities that aren't really in some way that rewarding. But ultimately flow is an activity that involves immersion in difficulty. I think for many of us it's best found in sports, it's best found in artistic pursuits and it's best found in intellectual pursuits.

Sana Qadar: Has writing this book changed the way you approach your own life? How much are you living in the sweet spot?

Paul Bloom: A little bit. As I wrote the book, I decided to join a gym, and not just any gym but a gym which has tremendous emphasis on weight training, and so there's like a gruelling hour where we just lift weights. I hate lifting weights, but I decided, well, time to suffer. And you do this sort of thing because you hope to get health benefits and look better, but you also do this sort of thing, I've come to realise this, because there's a satisfaction and pleasure in it. And so what I've tried to do as a result of working on my book and try to do more and more is seek out difficulty, seek out struggle, seek out trouble to some extent, and if you find the right sort, I think it's kind of a good thing.

Sana Qadar: That's Professor Paul Bloom from the University of Toronto. He is also the author of the book The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.

And that's it for All in the Mind this week. Our producer is James Bullen, sound engineer this week was Roy Huberman. I'm Sana Qadar, thank you for listening, I'll catch you next time.