Needs
👉 Our personalities are formed by learning to repeat behaviors that lead to reward (pleasure) and to avoid behaviors that cause pain (punishment).
Meeting your needs is critical to survival.
To help you survive, your brain and body feel good when your needs are met 😃, and bad 😞 when they aren’t.
These good and bad feelings are what we know as pleasure and pain.
Every living creature is built to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
Your brain registers behaviors that lead to pleasure (or the removal of pain) as reward. Rewarded or pleasurable behaviors are reinforced (you do them more over time).
Your brain registers behaviors that lead to increased pain or loss of pleasure as punishment, and you learn to do these behaviors less over time.
This process of changing behavior through seeking reward and avoiding punishment is called learning.
This learning process is what shapes the strategies we develop to meet our needs in the world. In other words, our personalities are formed to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
🤔 Reflection of the Day: What behavior do you find yourself doing a lot, even though you don’t want to? What reward are you getting from that behavior?