🌔 Pain helps us focus, increase my instant awareness for the surrounding, help our minds not to wander (a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. )

🌔 Pain serves features similar to mindfulness and meditation, just that intense meditation (the type that would actually reap benefits) takes lots of practice. Pain, on contrast, is like a short-cut meditation— immediately after pain, our brain continues secreting opioids (to dull pain), which makes us feeling pleasant.

🌔 the world disintegrates, language disintegrates, the self-disintegrates in face of torture. Transcending the ego. Referencing religious practices (ascetics, arriving at enlightenment through self-deprivation, stoic) . The senses are open (anterior insular cortex) and people can see the world with greater clarity (concerning the sensory) immediately after enduring pain (experiment with tasting tea and rating intensities of 4- flavoured drinks).

🌔 Inhibiting certain desire (eg. to urinate, as in the psycho. experiment) also inhibit other distractions / need for immediate pleasure (participants who are in high-bladder pressure group prefer greater gain in the future than immediate but smaller money gain).

🌔 Eudaimonia (meaningful life) vs Euphoria (happiness).
Orientation to happiness: 1. seeking out pleasure 2. engagement (seek out situations that challenges her/his skills and abilities) 3. meaning (helping others)
People who live life, seeking happiness through 2/3 are more content and happy and less depressed, also they have better academic and occupational success .As givers but not takers.
Those who are happier but with less meaning in life tend to be takers than givers, they are more carefree with no significant worries or anxieties in life, but they are also more self-absorbed. (indulgent?)

10/4/2022
Pain and pleasure are twins (acc. to Leonardo da Vinci and John Keats.)
It is only in the despair and most painful moments that the beauty and truth presents itself in such intensity and clarity that we would never otherwise know.
Our capacity for pleasure is largely dependent on our ability to endure pain.