Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at the Academy of Toronto and a professor emeritus at Yale. The author of vi books, his writing has appeared in Nature,Science,The Guardian,The New Yorker, andThe Atlantic.

Below, Paul shares five key insights from his new book, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.

1. "He who has awhy to live tin can acquit almost whateverhow."

A lot of people will tell you that humans are hedonists. We just want to take a skillful time—we seek out pleasure, we avoid hurting, and that's the end of it. Sometimes we choose to suffer, but under this view, the only reason we do that is to go what we want. Nosotros go to piece of work to make money to accept fun. We go to the shop to buy food to eat. Simply in the end, all we really desire is pleasure.

Merely I don't think that'due south right, and I hope my book will convince yous to take seriously an alternative, which we could callmotivational pluralism. It'due south a terrible-sounding name, but the idea is that we want many things. Nosotros should reject one-word answers to the question, "What motivates people?" It's nicely summed up past the economist Tyler Cowen, who writes, "What's good nearly an individual human life can't be boiled down to whatever single value. It'south not all about beauty or all most justice or all near happiness. Pluralist theories are more plausible. Postulating a variety of relevant values, including human well-being, justice, fairness, beauty, the artistic peaks of man achievement, the quality of mercy and the many unlike, and indeed, sometimes contrasting kinds of happiness. Life is complicated."

Now, ane alternative to pleasance is meaning. This drive for pregnant is equally as important as the bulldoze to have a good time, to enjoy ourselves, to exist happy. I present a lot of scientific data for this position in my book, but information technology'south an onetime thought, which is why I draw upon the writings of Viktor Frankl, particularly his bookMan'south Search for Pregnant.

In the 1930s, Frankl, who was a psychiatrist in Republic of austria, ended upward in Nazi concentration camps—first at Auschwitz, and then Dachau. Even in the camps, he continued his work. His topic of enquiry was depression and suicide, and he studied his fellow prisoners, wondering virtually what distinguished those who maintained a positive attitude from those who couldn't bear it and lost all motivation, often killing themselves. He concluded that the reply is meaning. Those who had the best run a risk of survival were those whose lives had broader purpose, who had some goal or project or relationship, some reason to live. Frankl was fond of quoting Nietzsche, "He who has awhy to live can acquit near whateverhow"—a nice analogy of the complication and richness of human motivation.

two. Suffering can enhance pleasure.

I started this book because I was interested in a puzzle. Commonly, we avoid pain, anxiety, stress, and discomfort—simply sometimes nosotros seek it out. Think of your ain favorite negative experience. Maybe you go to movies that brand you cry or scream or gag. You lot might listen to sorry songs. You might poke at sores, swallow spicy foods, immerse yourself in hot baths or saunas. Perchance you climb mountains, run marathons, decide to get punched in the confront in gyms and dojos. Why would you seek out these unpleasant experiences? I reason is what Paul Rosin callsbenign masochism. Sometimes hurting can help you escape from yourself. A sharp jolt of pain can distract y'all from your twenty-four hours-to-day worries. Sometimes we seek out pain to signal to others how tough nosotros are. Sometimes pain is a source of catamenia and mastery. C. S. Lewis points out that if you're not eating because you lot have no food, at that place'southward not much proficient to be said near that, just if you're not eating because you're fasting, that could be a sit-in of command and mastery.

Probably the simplest caption for beneficial masochism is that pain and pleasance are intertwined. Neuroscientists will tell you that the brain is a departure machine; experience is understood in terms of contrast. In studies involving gambling, losing $x is pretty bad, merely if y'all thought y'all'd lose $50, it's neat at all. It'south actually quite positive.

We play with this dissimilarity in social club to give ourselves pleasance. We seek out pain to maximize the dissimilarity with the experience that comes next. The bite of a hot bath could exist worth information technology because of the blissful contentment that comes when the temperature cools. The burn down of hot curry tin can be pleasurable if it's followed past the shocking relief of a cold beer. This is the dissimilarity theory of why nosotros cull to experience pain. It'south like the old joke my dad used to tell me about the guy who was banging his head against the wall. When asked why he said, "It feels so good when I stop."

3. Suffering tin give us meaning.

Young men sometimes choose to go to war, and while they don't wish to exist maimed or killed, they hope to experience challenge, fear, and struggle. Some of the states choose to have children. We normally have some sense of how difficult it will be, but we rarely regret our choices. More more often than not, the projects that are most central to our lives involve suffering and sacrifice. If they were easy, what would be the betoken?

Five facts link suffering and significant. Offset, individuals who say their lives are meaningful tend to report more than anxiety, worry, and struggle than people who say their lives are happy. Second, the countries whose citizens report the most meaning—that is, they say they alive the almost meaningful lives—tend to exist poor countries where life is relatively difficult, and this is different from the happiest countries, which tend to be prosperous and condom. Third, the jobs that people say are the most meaningful, such every bit being a medical professional person or member of the clergy, often involve dealing with other people'due south pain. 4th, when asked to depict the nearly meaningful experiences of our lives, we tend to think nearly extremes; this includes very pleasant events, but also very painful events. Finally—and I call back near importantly—we often choose pursuits nosotros know will test us, everything from preparation for a marathon to raising children, because we know, at a gut level, that these pursuits matter. As the novelist Julian Barnes put it, "It hurts as much equally information technology'southward worth."

4. Endeavour sweetens life.

Psychologists like to talk about theeffort paradox. Nosotros normally seek to reduce effort, and effort to brand things easy for ourselves. Merely sometimes effort is the hole-and-corner sauce that makes things better. One of the classic findings in psychology is that the more endeavour you put into something, the more y'all value it. This is the logic of Benjamin Franklin's classic advice on how to turn a rival into a friend: Enquire him or her to exercise yous a favor. Having worked to help yous, they'll like you more. Or take Mark Twain'south story of when Tom Sawyer had to whitewash his fence. When Tom'south friends come by, he pretends to be delighted at the task, and soon his friends terminate up paying him for the privilege of working on the fence. Every bit Twain puts information technology, "Tom Sawyer had discovered a great law of act, namely that in order to brand a man or a boy covet a thing, it is merely necessary to make that thing hard to attain."

At present those are anecdotes and stories, but at that place'due south laboratory support for this. Michael Norton and his colleagues at Harvard Business concern School did a serial of experiments where they institute that people adopt objects that they helped create. They became especially attached to information technology, and the more work, the better. They phone call this theIKEA outcome, afterwards the large-box store where people get together their own article of furniture and seem to value it more.

Some other manifestation of the pleasures of attempt is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi callsperiod. You lot might think that the perfect life is sitting on the sofa, watching Netflix, and relaxing. But Csikszentmihalyi discovered that people actually get enormous amounts of pleasure, satisfaction, and richness when they're immersed in an activity. You know you're in flow when time goes by, nonetheless you don't notice information technology. You forget to consume, and miss appointments. For this to happen, though, the activity has to hit a sure sweet spot. If it'south too piece of cake, you'll get bored. If information technology'due south too difficult, you'll become anxious. But the ability of flow, which is experienced by corking athletes, by musicians, past writers, and at times by all of u.s.a., is a squeamish illustration of the centrality of attempt in human satisfaction.

5. Don't try to be happy.

There are two reasons for this. The offset is that it's self-defeating; you can screw upwardly being happy by trying also hard. At that place are studies that expect at the extent to which people are motivated to pursue happiness. They might ask people questions like, "To what extent do you hold with the statement, 'Feeling happy is extremely important to me,' or 'How happy I am at a given moment says a lot about how worthwhile my life is'?" It turns out that people who hold with those items are more probable to be depressed and lonely. There are a few reasons for this. By setting unrealistically high expectations for themselves, people who pursue happiness set themselves upwardly for failure—or maybe the self-conscious pursuit of happiness makes y'all think a lot about how happy you are, and that gets in the way of being happy. It's like how thinking about how proficient you are at kissing probably gets in the way of existence a good kisser.

The second part of the problem is that when nosotros are asked what makes us happy, we're usually wrong. It turns out that pursuing extrinsic goals—that is, goals related to praise and reward, like looking good and making money—makes you less happy, less fulfilled, and is linked to depression, anxiety, and mental illness. Somewhat paradoxically, if you want to exist satisfied with your life, if y'all want to feel pleasance and joy and meaning, you may need to effort less hard at attaining these things.