The Motivational Triad

& how it gets in your way

Why is it so difficult to develop healthy habits? 

Do you ever wonder why it’s sometimes so tough to stick to the goals that you set? To continue taking action towards getting the results that you really want in your life?

Let’s think back to the pretend goal we set last week when we were taking about goals: 

One year from today, I will have lost 10 pounds and will be fit and healthy enough to run a 5K race at a 11:00 min/mile pace. 

One of the action steps you created was:

I will stop snacking at bedtime. I will not eat anything after dinner.

Great goal, great action step – you are on your way towards great things.

Night 1: You finish dinner, do some light housework, get the kids to bed, and read the new book you bought before falling asleep feeling good about yourself.

Night 2: Similar, and again you feel good.

Night 3: You had a tough day at work, then came home and the kids were whiny and fighting with one another. They complained about the dinner you made and fought about everything that they could possibly find to fight about. Once they are in bed, you are tired, frustrated, and overwhelmed.

And the cookies in the cupboard start calling your name! In that moment, eating the cookies really seems like it’s going to make you feel better. You had such a rough day. You know you said you would not eat after dinner, but you find yourself pulling out those cookies and justifying that this is what you really need tonight.

Let’s talk about some very basic brain science that can help us to understand what is going on in our brains when we end up eating the cookies that we had planned not to eat. (Or when we struggle to maintain any of our healthy habits or stick to the goals we set.) 

There are 2 parts of the brain that can be helpful to understand: the prefrontal cortex and the primitive part of the brain. (Please note – this is a very over-simplified description of the brain, but we don’t need to go into the brain-science-weeds to understand the point.)

Prefrontal Cortex: The prefrontal cortex is the part of our brain focused on planning. It is future focused and is good at making decisions ahead of time. This is the part of your brain that was engaged when you were creating those great goals. 

Primitive Brain: There are structures in our brain that I’m going to call the primitive brain, for simplicity’s sake. This part was very handy to your long-ago ancestors, and does still serve us in many ways. Much of what the primitive brain does is done in an effort to keep you alive. It can be a bit misguided, though, because our current living situations are very unlike the living situations of our cave-people ancestors.

The primitive brain is not generally planful or future focused. Instead, it seeks pleasure, avoids pain, and always wants to conserve energy.

And unfortunately, this is the part of the brain that is engaged when you are tired and grumpy after a long day.

The Motivational Triad

The actions we tend to take when we are tired, grumpy, or frustrated often stem from 3 deeply rooted survival instincts, often referred to as The Motivational Triad. Each one of us is innately driven by the Motivational Triad regardless of whether we realize it or whether we actually want to be motivated by it. 

The principles of the Motivational Triad are to:

• Seek pleasure
• Avoid pain
• Conserve energy

It’s important to understand that our brains have evolved over centuries to keep us alive – both individually and as a species. While the 3 parts of the Motivational Triad can sometimes get in the way of us achieving the goals that we set for ourselves, all 3 parts have increased our chance of survival and evolution over time. 

Let’s look at each of the 3 components separately to understand how each affects us and then think about how we can overcome them.

Seek Pleasure

Our brains want us to seek out things that provide pleasure, happiness, and comfort. Most often this shows up in the seeking of certain foods, physical pleasure, sex, physical and emotional comfort, and social relationships. This made sense to our primitive ancestors, because they needed to be motivated by these things in order to survive and to continue as a species. They needed nourishment, they needed to reproduce, they needed community, and they needed to be safe.  

So when you ate those cookies at bedtime even though it was out of alignment with the goal you had made for yourself, your primitive brain was seeking pleasure. There were several complicated factors involved, but one powerful factor involved dopamine, and the way it helps us to feel pleasure as part of the brain’s reward system. 

Dopamine is a powerful neurotransmitter that is made in your brain and it plays a leading role in our desires to seek pleasure.  When you ate the cookies, you had a surge of dopamine in your brain that made you feel good for a moment. And your brain is going to remember that feeling of pleasure – however brief it was – next time you are tired or overwhelmed. 

What are the main ways that your brain tends to seek pleasure when you’re feeling tired?

Avoid pain

Pain and fear could have meant death for our cave-person ancestors and so we’ve been designed to avoid pain and avoid situations that we perceive as scary. 

Again, this was great for our ancestors who literally needed to be on the lookout at all times for physical dangers in their environment, but not quite as necessary for most of us with all of our modern-day conveniences.

You might have a goal of going on a run, which you know is good for you – but your primitive brain remembers the (natural) discomfort you experienced last time you went on a run. Running takes effort and can be physically uncomfortable, especially when you are a new runner. Your higher-level-thinking brain knows this and understands that the discomfort is part of the process and part of what helps you grow. But your primitive brain’s goal is to keep you alive and it wants nothing to do with this run that it associates with pain and discomfort. You should know that the primitive brain will work hard to keep you from going on that run!

The avoid pain part of the triad can also manifest emotionally.

 These days we tend to struggle with it most often in situations when there is potential to feel tough emotions like shame, resentment, sadness, or worry.

Experiencing these emotions is no picnic, but when we experience them, our primitive brain often makes them worse than they need to be. The brain will  go on high alert – “This hurts, I might die! I need to do everything in my power to avoid this painful feeling.”

The primitive desire to avoid pain is where a lot of our fear, anger, and anxieties reside. It explains part of why we avoid difficult emotions at all costs. 

How does your primitive brain most frequently direct you to avoid pain?

Conserve Energy

The third part of the Motivational Triad is the primitive brain’s desire to always conserve our energy. 

Our ancestors did not have grocery stores where they could readily restock their groceries. Finding food wasn’t easy, so conserving energy was crucial. Because of this, the intrinsic motivation evolutionarily wired into our brains is to conserve energy and minimize effort whenever possible. Our brains want us to save both physical and mental energy for things that are necessary to survival and not be frivolous with our energy expenditure. 

Again, great news for our ancestors, but in the present day this can cause trouble for those of us working to achieve our goals. Taking action towards your goals requires you to expend energy. In fact, every single time you take action, you have to expend energy. And this can cause some rather strong dissonance in the primitive part of your brain. That dissonance will be felt as resistance.   

Has your primitive brain’s desire to conserve energy ever gotten in the way of your goals?

Overcoming the instincts of the primitive brain

Awareness is the first step in taking action towards your goals in spite of the resistance the motivational triad is creating within you. Just knowing about the primitive brain and the motivational triad can weaken their command over your decisions.

You’ll get to the end of that long frustrating day and as you’re feeling the strong urge for the cookies, you pause and think to yourself: “Oh, hmmm, that’s my primitive brain. It’s trying to seek pleasure in order to avoid this painful emotion I’m experiencing.” And with that pause you create a tiny bit of space and possibility for an outcome other than you lying on the couch with cookie crumbs all over your face.

While we are all intrinsically motivated to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy, don’t forget that you also have that higher level part of your brain (the prefrontal cortex) waiting in the wings. This part of your brain knows that those strong survival urges are not the full story and it has the ability to reason, research and use logic before making decisions about what actions you are going to take.

That pause above allowed the prefrontal to wiggle its way into the situation and remind you that it wants a vote too!  And of course you already know that it’s vote will be to avoid the cookies, because it wants for you to reach your goals. It wants you to have all of the results you desire in your life. It knows that while eating the cookies might feel great in the moment, it won’t move you towards what you really want in life. 

So when the primitive brain tells you to eat the cookies, you have to bring in the prefrontal and allow it to intervene. The prefrontal knows your goals, it knows why you want to achieve your goals, who you want to become, and it knows how to get you there. Once the prefrontal arrives on the scene, it can thank your primitive brain for trying to keep you alive, and then tell it to kindly take the backseat. 

Each time that you create that space and allow your prefrontal to make the difficult and better choice, the process becomes easier. This is because you are effectively rewiring or changing how your brain responds to and adapts to stimuli in your environment. By creating new neural pathways you are able to make lifestyle changes that stick.

So, next time you have trouble sticking to your goals, remember the motivational triad and remember the way that the primitive brain affects many of the decisions that you make. You might even consider all of this ahead of time as you are setting goals and planning the action steps you are going to take to achieve them. Remember that you will meet resistance, and that it doesn’t mean that you’re lazy or that you’re failing. It’s just your primitive brain trying to keep you safe and alive.

When this happens, you can thank your primitive brain for all that it has done for you. Then, let it know that you won’t be needing its services for this situation, because you’ll be contracting the services of the prefrontal cortex instead.