Trading on Target: How to Cultivate a Winner's State of Mind

THE LURE OF PAIN

The human brain is a three-pound chemical laboratory that creates chemical responses to various stimuli. In response to something pleasurable, we produce a set of chemicals in our brain that make us feel an intense and wonderful sensation. As a result, we want to feel that way again, and so we try to reproduce that pleasurable experience. In response to pain, we also produce a set of chemicals that produce another intense set of sensations that we normally would want to avoid ever feeling again.

So, if we are attracted to pleasure and repelled by pain, why would anyone then be drawn to pain? Not only can pain represent a familiar place that reminds one of childhood and memories long gone, pain has its own physiological/psychological appeal. As we experience pain, that same chemical reaction in our brain that floods us with intense feelings also makes us feel very much alive at the same time. While in the throes of this intense emotional and physical state, we also tend to blot out anything else that is happening at the same time.

Anyone who has lost a loved one through death knows that feeling of intense pain that drapes everything around you in a kind of misty gauze. You feel like you are on some kind of strange drug that simultaneously heightens and dulls your senses. You find yourself looking at the world from the outside, no longer part of what is happening, wondering at the foolishness of those around you who do not understand.

In this emotional and biochemical ...