A few years back, I had a boss who was so tough on his team. He kept pushing his team to deliver high-quality work every time without fail. He pushed the team to be thoughtful and on top of their game. He set the bar higher than anybody else that we have worked with in the past. He could yell so loud that other people could hear whatever he said when angry.
So at one point, when we were having lunch, I got frustrated and then asked him, “Why would you do this to your own team? Why are you so tough to deal with?”
He simply said that he believed the team would thank him later for the hard lessons he gave while working with him because it would make them better people personally and professionally. He gave people pain. The pain that someday could turn into something beautiful and can be cherished. That’s the seed he tried to plant in his team’s brain from the beginning.
But, what stroke me the most was not how he gave people more headaches. Instead, it’s one thing that he said after our brief lunch while walking back to the office, which I still remember today, that the pain is growth. It kept ringing in my head because I believed what he said was true. I wished I could disagree with him, but I couldn’t.
It definitely had some impact on me. It helped me become more resilient, improve my alertness, increase the quality of work, and become a more capable human being. From there, I concluded that humans have no growth without pain. Pain drives growth. Growth improves our ability to respond to stressful environments to level my playing field, which eventually drives a pleasure in knowing that I have become a better and more capable human being. Now you can see the cycle here.
Ice bath history
Let’s take another example of the pain-pleasure cycle on an ice bath. We all know ice bath has been gaining more popularity for the last few years due to their benefits to dopamine, stress level, and cardiovascular. I guess you are familiar with Wim Hof, also known as the “Ice Man.” He set a Guinness World Record for swimming under ice and says that a “cold shower a day keeps the doctor away” by decreasing stress and increasing energy levels.
But how is this even real? Where did it start? How can we explain this phenomenon scientifically?
Before exploring those topics, let’s take a step back to how our ancestors leveraged ice baths in their daily lives. It all started when Ancient Greeks used Thermal Medicine to utilize water at various temperatures to help ease muscle fatigue and other health ailments.
Later, during Roman times, it evolved as a regular use since bathing became essential for personal health. More people were participating in this new trend to enjoy the pleasures of this unique and tempered water. However, it wasn’t until the Renaissance that water evolved as a possible treatment to cure human diseases.
It was two physicians of the mid-1700s who introduced ice baths to broader society. Specifically, John Floyer and James Currie utilized cold water to treat both bodily and mental diseases. Later on 1820s, a German farmer named Vincenz Priessnitz promoted the use of ice-cold water to cure all manner of physical and psychological disorders.
Ice bath benefits
Moving forward to today, since the advent of modern plumbing and heating, hot baths and showers have become the norm, but ice-water immersion has lately become popular again. Many people use it now to gain these benefits:
- Reducing stress levels by adding a small amount of stress into the body leads you to the process called hardening.
- Increase alertness level. It makes your body up by decreasing the level of CO2 throughout the body, helping you concentrate.
- Increase immune system.
- Increase willpower due to the pain that’s introduced during the activity.
- Many athletes have been using it to boost muscle recovery.
- More energy as it triggers adrenaline and dopamine.
- Increase blood flow circulation.
All of these benefits require you to do one thing: enduring the pain which leads you to the pleasure.
The science of pain and pleasure
In her book Dopamine Nation (I highly recommend it for you to read), Anna Lembke took an example of her patient which regularly taking ice bath to get “high.” She tried to explain this experience scientifically. In a study, she found that there was 250 percent of dopamine improvement and 530 percent increase on plasma norepinephrine as a result of cold-water immersion.
Dopamine rose gradually and steadily over the course of the cold bath and remained elevated for an hour afterward. Norepinephrine rose significantly in the first thirty minutes, plateaued in the latter thirty minutes, and dropped by a third in the hour afterward, but it remained elevated well above baseline even into the second hour after the bath.
The discovery of benefits of ice-cold water immersion is an example of how pressing on the pain side of the balance can lead to its opposite — pleasure. Unlike pressing on the pleasure side, the dopamine that comes from pain is indirect and potentially more enduring.
Pain leads to pleasure by triggering the body’s own regulating homeostatic mechanism. Homeostatic is a state of balance among all the body systems needed for the body to survive and function correctly. It explains that the initial pain stimulus is followed by pleasure on the side of the balance. The pleasure we feel is our body’s natural and reflexive physiological response to pain.
The whole idea between pain and pleasure is not new. Ancient philosophers had similar observation. Socrates mused on the relationship between pain and pleasure more than two thousand years ago:
How strange would appear to be this thing that men call pleasure! And how curiously it is related to what is thought to be its opposite, pain! The two will never be found together in a man, and yet if you seek the one and obtain it, you are almost bound always to get the other as well, just as though they were both attached to one and the same head. Wherever the one is found, the other follows up behind. So, in my case, since I had pain in my leg as a result of the fetters, pleasure seems to have come to follow it up.
In his journal on Meditation, Marcus Aurelius had the same idea that pain and pleasure are two inseparable experiences:
Death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these happen to good and bad alike, and they are neither noble nor shameful — and hence neither good nor bad.
We’ve all experienced the same version of pain leading to pleasure in sort of our daily lives. Like Socrates and Marcus Aurelius, you have noticed a better mood after period of ill, or felt a runner’s high after reaching certain distance. Pain is the price we pay to get to the pleasure.
The science of hormesis
Now you know that pain can lead to pleasure. Let’s explore how adding pain to daily life can positively impact our lives. Yes, there’s science for this called hormesis. It is specifically a study on the beneficial effect of administering small to moderate doses of painful stimuli that lead to pleasure, such as cold, heat, food restriction, and exercise.
Edward J. Calabrese, an American toxicologist and a leader in the field of hormesis, describes this phenomenon:
Adaptive responses of biological systems to moderate environmental or self-imposed challenges through which the system improves its functionality and/or tolerance to more severe challenges.
Some example cases worth mentioning in the case of hormesis:
- Worms exposed to temperatures above their preferred 20 degrees Celcius lived 25 percent longer and were 25 percent more likely to survive subsequent high temperatures than non-exposed worms.
- Intermittent fasting and a low-calorie diet can improve overall health and longevity.
- Exercise increases many neurotransmitters in positive mood regulation: dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, epinephrine, endocannabinoids, and endorphins.
- Regular intellectual activities can be beneficial for brain health.
- When the 1945 nuclear attack happened in Japan, approximately 200.000 died instantaneously. Still, those with low-dose radiation exposure may live marginally longer and have decreased cancer rates compared to un-irradiated.
Based on the cases above, it’s important to note that we will feel pleasure after pain. In a world full of convenience like today, introducing a small bit of pain into daily life will benefit well-being.
I know it’s hard, but for me, especially, doing hard things in the morning, like crushing in the gym, boxing, and running, has been crucial to making me feel good, increase my energy level, and improve overall mood throughout the day. As Nietzsche famously said:
What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.
Addicted to pain
Can pain lead to long-term negative impacts on our lives?
A study using a running wheel on rodents showed that it’s hard for them to stop once they start using a running wheel. The running wheel is governed by the same endo-opioid, dopamine, and endocannabinoid pathways that drive compulsive drug use. So running the wheel is not necessarily a model for a healthy lifestyle, but also it works like a drug where rodents get addicted to a running wheel.
We can find another example of addiction to pain in extreme sports such as skydiving, kitesurfing, hang gliding, snowboarding, mountain biking, and bungee jumping — slam down hard and fast on the pain side of the pleasure-pain balance. Intense pain/fear plus a shot of adrenaline creates a potent drug that is hard to get away from as you do it more frequently.
A study of skydivers compared to a control group (rowers) found that repeat skydivers were more likely to experience anhedonia, a lack of joy, for the rest of their lives. Skydiving can be addictive and lead to persistent dysphoria if engaged repeatedly. Dysphoria is a feeling of profound unease and dissatisfaction. It doesn’t mean skydiving is not good, but pushing fast and hard on the pain side is more likely resulting to those issues.
Overtraining syndrome is also a good example but is a poorly understood condition among endurance athletes who train so much that they reach a point where exercise no longer produces the endorphins that were once plentiful. The pleasure is not there anymore.
Balancing the pain
All this proves that those who lean too hard and too long on the pain side of the balance can also end up in a persistent dopamine deficit state because those people manage to increase their pain tolerance. They will need more and more pain to get the same benefits of pleasure they receive from the previous activities.
If we consume too much pain or in too potent a form, we run the risk of compulsive, destructive overconsumption.
But if we consume the right amount, there will be a good joy that we can feel after small to moderate doses of pain in our daily life. It feels good. It feels healthy. It’s good for our well-being.
P.S. This post was originally published on Fitgeist.
