Which Inspires You More: Love or Fear?

Note: This article is adapted from Lisa Leshko Evers' blog, where she talks about the power of love to heal pain.

But why have medical professionals asked their patients to rate their pain on a scale of 0–10, with 10 being the worst possible pain, for the past 25 years?

The truth is that whenever memories are brought back, our subconscious mind immediately transports us to the incident scene and makes it seem like it just happened. This is accompanied by a shift in energy and a burst of neurotransmitters that can either positively or negatively impact our internal homeostasis.

Through some personal experience and with patients, it has been demonstrated that the best way to change behavior is to point people in the direction of the desired result rather than having them expend energy resisting the things we are trying to avoid.

Lessons I learned from my diet experience

Like many teenagers, I struggled with being overweight for years, and no matter how I felt, I was focused on the weight on the scale and my calorie intake. The number that appeared on the scale every morning and night was all that mattered.

I was overcome with joy when I reached my goal and saw the desired number, but I soon became engulfed in sadness for days when I failed in reaching my goal. This is because thinking about calories and weight was enough to regulate my mood and energy levels. However, after struggling with my weight and depriving myself of food to reach my ideal weight, I discovered that this success was only fleeting and that I would soon fall back into a cycle of anxiety and worry about constantly gaining and losing weight.

Fortunately, when I regained consciousness and reframed the matter so that my ultimate goal was to seek better health, I began to discover the source of my suffering and struggle and resolved to make entirely healthy decisions. I even stopped thinking of food as an enemy and began counting every morsel as beneficial and nutritious. I started eating nutrient-dense foods instead of counting calories, and I'm seeing amazing results in weight, mood, and energy.

Pain and relief?

If we resist the pain, we try to reduce the level of pain to a certain level less than what we feel. This often only works for a short period, and this is often done by taking medications. Also, the pain will most likely return once the effects of the drug wear off, and we will not have addressed the main cause of the problem. What we're really doing is ignoring the messages our bodies are sending us, and worse, we're causing unwanted side effects that can lead to addiction, overdose, and death.

If we consider pain to be a form of protection for our bodies, we may notice and take the signals it sends seriously. The key is to do so from a positive, hopeful perspective that encourages, heals, and comforts us, transforming our worst pain into the best we've ever felt in our lives.

Instead of trying to memorialize a terrifying and painful car accident, dream up in your mind the image of yourself falling in love and walking holding the hand of your beloved, or the image of your newborn staring into its little eyes. Try to revive cute images from your memory and allow hope to permeate your brain cells. Concentrating on those things will cause the pain and fear to fade, to be replaced by an energy of love, joy, and comfort that will allow you to live in a state of calm.

Similar to the goal of improving health rather than attempting to control weight , true relief is the aim of escaping the pain trap rather than simply suppressing it, and it should be kept in mind that we are blessed with a mind and a soul that have the right of our love and care in a special way. When life is busy, we may miss hearing their whispers "calling" for some love. A full recovery requires a keen ability to notice, understand, and collect the messages and signals our body and mind are trying to send us.

How can we best use our minds to heal from pain?

"One of the key practical lessons of modern neuroscience is that the power to direct our attention has within it the power to shape our brain's response patterns, as well as about the strength needed to shape the structure of the brain itself," says Dr. Daniel Siegel, professor of psychiatry at the University of California (UC) School of Medicine. Furthermore, by concentrating on avoiding pain, we are impeding healing because our brain response patterns become negatively associated with pain. To stimulate patients' innate abilities for recovery, the healthcare system can concentrate on using positive statements when assessing patients' conditions.

"The work of the brain is not limited to the head, but the nervous tissue intertwines with the muscles, skin, heart, lungs, and even the intestines, and this data forms the basis for the movement maps that help form our gut feeling and our true feelings," continues Dr. Siegel in support of this integrated and holistic approach to health. "These are a vital source of intuition, and they influence logic and how we create meaning in life."

Aalto University research from 2018 demonstrated how the brain's MRI can reveal the presence of both love and fear. The work of other mental functions can then be seen as being facilitated or restricted at a given time by emotions. Therefore, we must focus the majority of our attention and energy on fighting off negative emotions like fear, which is frequently accompanied by suffering, rather than focusing on them.

Why does love feel more pleasant to us than fear?

Love makes us feel better than fear, and this has to do with incentives and rewards. Researchers Andreas Bartels and Samir Zeki claim that talking about love, regardless of the type, activates particular brain regions as well as regions that overlap with the brain's reward system, which is connected to regions rich in oxytocin and vasopressin receptors. It also cancels out the activity of a common group of regions linked to negative emotions and social judgments. Love has a strong impact because it doesn't just produce benefits for us; it also gets rid of fear-based negative emotions.

Neuroscience explains that we experience an adrenaline rush when we feel fear or stress to escape from our clutches, which simultaneously leads to negative side effects. As human beings, we instinctively realize that the experience of love requires a high amount of energy and emotional feelings, unlike the fear that ultimately drags us into the abyss. Fear and stress cause the adrenal cortex to release cortisol, just as it does when we experience chronic pain. This raises blood pressure and sugar levels, weakens our immune systems, and increases the risk of developing high blood pressure and diabetes in the future, which is not what we want if we want to recover from the pain and get better overall.

In Conclusion

By asking positive questions about ourselves and one another, we can remember and live with hopeful feelings to ultimately reshape our brains and enjoy a healthier body. We should get rid of fear-based strategies and live a life driven by loving thoughts and memories.