Cognitive Fitness: Pain Is Inevitable. How to Alleviate It and Use It to Your Advantage.

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The motivation to experience pleasure instead of pain unites us all, despite the immense diversity in our thoughts and behaviors. However, the perception of pain is easier than the fleeting feeling of happiness and paradoxically, an obsessive desire for pleasure or an inability to endure pain are conducive to pain, not pleasure.

The emotions of pain and pleasure are persuasive and mesmerizing but can also be convoluted and deceptive, and the absence of pain is not enough for happiness. Suffering because of disease, disability, or difficulty is natural, but suffering can subtly interfere with our serenity, and some helplessly abuse substances and other things for happiness.

The human brain is marvelous, but there is something suspicious about its practical utility for a flourishing life, and its imperfect intelligence can make us suffer, even when there is no internal or external reason for the pain.

Pain cannot be erased from life, but cognitive fitness can alleviate it and allow us to use it, as well as illusive intellect, to our advantage.

Cognitive fitness advances cognitive competence and resilience for success; suggests strategies to manage stress, anxiety, depression, failures, and complexity; provides a pragmatic answer to nihilism; and helps to keep the hedonic gauge on the continuum of pain and pleasure as close to pleasure as possible.