I spend a lot of time thinking about persuasion. Over the last year and a half I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time thinking of self-persuasion and self-mastery and as a result have noticed some phenomenal results in my life.

The only way to make progress in the outside world is to make progress on your inside world.

By asking the right questions you will naturally lock on to the right answers. I’ve been using this as my guide and have begun to ask myself the right questions.

I’m talking about the big questions: What is the real make up of a human being? Where do we come from? What is our organic makeup?

It’s philosophical. . . I know and that’s not always comfortable for more technical or process oriented people because it can be vague and open ended. . . but give it a try. Where does the subconscious mind live? It lives in the body. What then would be the influence of the body on our subconscious mind? If the subconscious mind lives within the framework of a human being, must it carry with it then the frame work of that body?

The answer is most definitely.

Our bodies carry genetic programming. This genetic programming directly influences our subconscious/other than conscious minds, our thought process, our learning, our experiences, how we form values. . .

What is more fundamental than our values?

Our core drives. There are four that supersede every other drive we have as human beings. First and foremost, we have the drive to sustain ourselves. Without food, we die. It’s that simple.

If you stopped eating right now and didn’t ever eat again. . . your life would end. This energy consumption is about continuing on.

The converse of this is gluttony. This ceases to be about our genetic drive to simply exist and becomes a perversion of excess. . a desire for pleasure. (Obviously, overeating isn’t THAT simple. There are many reasons aside from the pleasure factor.)

Last year I began to ask some hard questions. What’s the difference between “needing” to eat and my drive for pleasure? I used to think about food all the time. I’d say things like, “I can’t wait for dinner tonight. It’s going to feel good eating the kinds of my wife cooks for me.”

When someone eats for pleasure (others call it “stuffing”), it can really damage you. These hard questions made me rethink and focus on mindful and intentional eating. I persuaded myself that it is far more important to eat to survive than it is to eat for fun. Making the right choices is hard sometimes. Adding in cravings, medical conditions, genetics. . . all of this factors in and the choice became incredibly clear.

There is some research that has been done recently on why do some people when faced with huge health issues change and other people don’t. The desire to eat turns into something so perverted, so infected, so unhealthy, that the concept of ‘continuing on’ is not even a priority anymore. (More on the other kind of perversion/desire in an upcoming article on the fourth base drive.)

My big question became: how can I learn to eat to survive and not for purposes of enjoyment. This focus has helped immeasurably. I have begun to find my enjoyment in other things.

Coming soon: the remaining base desires of fight, flight, and reproduction and tips on how to use these impulses, urges and drives to persuade like crazy.