15. The Motivational Triad

When you've been betrayed, emotional overwhelm becomes the norm. You feel stuck, swinging between heartbreak and anger, hoping something will shift. But beneath that emotional cycle lies a powerful force quietly shaping every decision you make: the motivational triad. Understanding it could be your first step toward truly taking back control.

In this episode of After the Affair, I explain how the three primal drivers of human behaviour (seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and conserving energy) may be keeping you stuck in old emotional loops. Once you see the triad at work, you can begin making intentional, conscious choices that lead to healing, not self-sabotage.

Key Takeaways:

• Discover how your brain’s default settings may be sabotaging your recovery.

• Learn why anger often feels easier than sadness and how to interrupt the cycle.

• Understand how emotional detachment and self-abandonment can feel deceptively "safe."

• See how delaying gratification and embracing discomfort can rewire your healing path.

• Recognise that your deepest transformation begins with allowing your emotions, not avoiding them.

💬 Reflection questions:

Can you spot the motivational triad at play in your own healing journey? What’s one way you can lean into discomfort instead of defaulting to distraction?

Connect with Luke:

• Website: www.lifecoachluke.com

• Instagram: @mylifecoachluke

• Email: luke@lifecoachluke.com

Join the After the Affair community at www.facebook.com/groups/aftertheaffaircommunity

Episode Transcript:

The After The Affair podcast with me Luke Shillings is here to help you process, decide and move forward on purpose following infidelity. Together we'll explore what's required to rebuild trust not only in yourself but also with others. Whether you stay or leave I can help and no matter what your story there will be something here for you.

Let's go! Hello and welcome back and Happy New Year and welcome to episode number 15 of the After The Affair podcast with myself Luke Shillings. During the holiday period I really got to thinking about what drives us as human beings and both from an evolutionary perspective and also how that can show up in our day-to-day lives now and in particularly in our relationships. There's this idea, the idea that people seek pleasure and avoid pain.

It's a basic principle of human motivation. It suggests that people are motivated to engage in activities that are enjoyable and rewarding and to avoid or escape activities that are unpleasant. This principle is often referred to as hedonic motivation.

Hedonic motivation is quite simply the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. These are primary drivers of human behaviour. It suggests that people are naturally inclined to seek out activities and experiences that are enjoyable and rewarding and to avoid or escape activities and experiences that are unpleasant.

Hedonic motivation can influence a wide range of behaviours including the types of activities that people engage in, the choices they make and the goals that they pursue. For example a person might choose to go on holiday to a beach destination because they find the experience of being by the ocean to be pleasurable or they might choose to eat a favourite food because it brings them pleasure. On the other hand a person might avoid going to the dentist because they find the experience unpleasant or they might avoid engaging in a task that they find boring or tedious.

These two elements, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, are part of a concept known in coaching as the motivational triad. Triad of course means three, so what's the third component? In addition to seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, people may also be motivated to conserve energy and avoid expending unnecessary effort. This principle is known as the principle of least effort and it suggests that people will choose the option that requires the least amount of effort or energy expenditure, all of the things being equal of course.

Both hedonic motivation and the principle of least effort can influence people's behaviour and decision-making. For example a person might choose to watch a movie on Netflix at home, other streaming services are available of course, instead of going to the cinema because it's more enjoyable and being in the comfort of their own home and on their sofa requires less energy. On the other hand a person might choose to go to the gym and exercise and even though that does require more effort, because the benefits of exercise such as improved physical strength and fitness outweigh the costs of the effort required, it's still a balanced triad.

And of course this made perfect sense. Thousands of years ago when we were cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers and really seeking pleasure meant finding food, it meant having sex and reproducing, it meant keeping warm and comfortable, they really were very driving factors. Likewise avoiding pain of course, you wanted to keep safe, you wanted to keep warm, keep away from the cold, you wanted to keep within your small group or tribe and avoid the dangers outside, particularly at night.

You would want to avoid predators and other things that can kill you including poisonous plants and animals. Of course using the least amount of energy is also a really significant driving factor because you literally didn't know where your next meal was going to come from. So not expending unnecessary energy for anything other than fulfilling either of the two other components of the motivational triad, one being seeking pleasure, for example finding food, that's one of the reasons that we're still so driven by sugar, it's such an addictive thing for a human being.

But of course back then berries on a tree would have been an essential high calorific treat, you know, to the point where you might not see one again for who knows how long. So to indulge and to ultimately gorge on it and gorge on as much as you possibly could would make perfect evolutionary survival sense. Now though we have access to food and sweets and high sugar things at our fingertips, in fact a few taps on the screen of your mobile device and you can order food to literally be delivered to your doorstep.

There are endless supermarkets that have shelves filled with enough treats to last a lifetime and there is abundance of it. And for most people, certainly in the Western world, this is just something that we don't have to worry about, it's something we don't have to really give a massive amount of thought to. When was the last time you felt real hunger? What does real starvation actually feel like? Most people, and I include myself in this, don't really know what that feels like.

It's one thing to go on a fast and to intentionally not eat for a period of time, whether that be 12 hours, 24 hours or longer, but we always have this knowledge that we're doing it through choice rather than doing it from a place where we literally do not know where the next meal is coming from. So of course it made perfect sense, but on reflection, now it makes far less sense and the same applies to danger. So we want to avoid pain, of course it's natural to want to avoid pain, but how is our brain perceiving pain? Taking us back to the primitive cave-dwelling version of ourselves, we were wanting to avoid pain because it was potentially the difference between life and death.

Now our brain misinterprets all kinds of things as potential danger, things that are really, that really aren't significant threats at all, they're just uncomfortable experiences, they're just negative emotions. But our bodies respond in the same way, as if our lives were in danger, and actually it's just a negative emotion. And it does this because of the third part of the motivational triad, and that is this using the least amount of energy possible.

So let's think about this. It wants to use the least amount of energy, so it's most likely going to do the thing that it's most familiar with. That's why when you learn a new skill, to begin with, it's quite challenging, it requires a lot of effort.

But as you repeat that enough times, your brain is able to take that from the conscious part of your brain, from your prefrontal cortex, the bit that's making all those decisions, the part of your brain that requires all that energy, and transfer it to a deeper part of your brain where your habits are formed, where the learned skills that you have can just be recalled at a moment's notice. Now of course we go through life rarely questioning or challenging these deep-set thoughts, skills, beliefs that have formed over, you know, our lifetimes. So when our brain just delivers it in a particular moment, we have an emotional response to a given situation.

It provides us with an instruction which is us to be saying, you know, danger, danger, danger, keep away from this. So it does everything it can to avoid it. So we distract ourselves and we usually do that by seeking something that offers a short-term instant gratification.

So that might be going to the snack cupboard and getting some chocolate or crisps. Or it might be going to your mobile phone because it's there right next to you and it's dead easy to pick it up. That's exactly what all the big tech companies do.

That's what the social media platforms are designed to do. They're designed to make it very, very easy for you to consume as much content as possible, to distract you for as much time as possible, and to use the least amount of energy. And so they're playing into that motivational triad that we all have and we all experience.

So how does this play out within a relationship, specifically after infidelity? There is no shortage of pain, sadness, heartbreak, sense of betrayal. A very common response is to react, often displayed through anger, resentment and blame, just to name a few. These are what I would consider very outward emotions.

They are like a flammable liquid. They only require a small spark to ignite. Although anger, resentment and blame are still negative emotions, the key point is that they can feel better than the pain and the sadness.

So as we can see, all three parts of the motivational triad are happening. Avoid pain, so sadness, heartbreak, feeling depressed. Seek pleasure.

Ever so slightly better emotions like anger, resentment and blame because we can then hold the other person responsible for how we are feeling. Holding someone else responsible is more comfortable than feeling responsible yourself, regardless of any facts. The path of least resistance, the least amount of energy has been consumed by going to these easy-to-find outward emotions.

This all sounds fine and logical, and I for one love logic. The way this scenario plays out happens almost without conscious awareness. And why would it? It takes so little effort in the short term.

Your brain does not see the utility in expending more effort trying to seek an alternative solution. So let's look at this through another example. Imagine somebody cutting you off in traffic on your way to work whilst driving.

This may feel unfair, maybe even a little frightening, but before you know it you are already waving your arm, beeping your car horn and swearing. Why? Well because it feels better in the moment, but now you are angry and annoyed. And how is that going to affect other decisions that you make and other interactions that you have when you arrive at work? Now I'd like us to think back to the example with the gym.

In that scenario the discomfort of training is outweighed by the future gains. We as humans have the ability to delay gratification, but to do so can mean enduring some intentional discomfort. To get there, the increase in energy required is balanced by the increase in overall pleasure achieved.

You might be thinking but what about the increased pain I'm going to have to endure whilst waiting for this delayed gratification? Well first we could look at how that is working out for you now. If you allow this pattern of behaviour to play out without intervention then you may indefinitely cycle between sadness and anger. This sounds self-destructive and arguably it is, but it is the easiest and default path which is why many of us get stuck there.

It doesn't matter if you are avoiding the gym because it's easier to sit on the sofa at home, fill your face with junk food and watch a TV show, or you are struggling to get over infidelity because it's easier to remain stuck in this sadness stroke anger cycle. Both problems can be overcome by embracing discomfort and delaying that gratification, but it will require more effort. So the key takeaway from today's episode is that the motivational triad is playing out in our lives regardless of whether we are intervening with it or not.

It'll always just go along, running along in the background, seeking pleasure, avoiding pain and using the least amount of effort possible. However if we want to make an intentional change in whatever challenges that we're facing right now, then we need to do that intentionally. We need to embrace the discomfort and know that the worst thing that can happen is a feeling.

Think back to the episode, don't mention the F word, where I discuss feelings in more detail and how there are four things that we can do with our emotions. We can avoid them, we can resist them, we can react to them. These are the default ones, these are the easy ones.

Or if we're going to be intentional we can allow those emotions and we can learn to live with that discomfort and then make intentional decisions going forward about how we want to show up, about how we want to respond to a given situation and ultimately how we can take responsibility for our own thinking, our own feelings and our own actions. And therefore the results that we get in our lives are far more in our control than we perhaps ever realised. Okay that's everything I have for you today.

Let's make 2023 the changing point, the turning point in your relationship, the turning point in your life where you can take on board what it is that you've learned, what it is that you've experienced, own it and move forward on purpose. Okay, I'll talk to you next week. Take care.