Have you ever seen a person choose more pain now over less pain later? It seems contradictory to common sense, doesn’t it? A new brain study explains this common phenomenon. It’s interesting to ponder how this applies to business and leadership.

In general, every day you witness behavior in others that you think is crazy. The TV show, Blind Date, enables you to tag along and watch the interaction between strangers. Many dates end badly, with daters compulsively sabotaging the relationship as the evening progresses. The same cycle happens at work between employee and boss, and customer service representative and client. Anyone who works in a collections department, regularly witnesses crazy human behavior. Customers dig a deep, financial hole, and then throw themselves into bankruptcy by going on a spending spree.

When you put your psychologist hat on, you can see that crazy behavior actually makes perfect sense if you understand one thing: these people are avoiding pain.

Yes, almost all “crazy” behavior is some form of pain avoidance.

You want to challenge that statement don’t you? How can sabotaging a date, aggravating a relationship with a boss, or throwing oneself into bankruptcy be motivated by pain avoidance?

A new area of study is called neuroeconomics. It uses brain imaging to understand how people make choices. Good old-fashion economics theory assumes human beings are rational: they avoid pain and seek pleasure and weigh the risks and probabilities appropriately. In the traditional model, a person would delay pain as long as possible, hoping for the circumstances to change and for an escape route to appear.

Neuroeconomics observes actual brain activity to understand decisions. It doesn’t assume rational thinking. Neuroeconomics is an emerging science that promises to help us understand our thoughts and behaviors better, and to make sense out of what appears to be nonsense.

The Experiement

Regarding self-sabotage, a study in this month’s Science shows that almost 1/3 of the 32 subjects in an experiment preferred to accept intense electric shocks immediately rather than wait for lesser shocks. Why? Because they felt dread, and dread fires off pain sensation in the brain. The anticipation of pain is just as painful, in the brain, as actually experiencing physical pain. These subjects, called “extreme dreaders” prefer to get it over with, instead of having to wait.

To an observer, choosing immediate pain looks like self-sabotage, but it’s actually reasonable. These dreaders avoid the pain of dread by inflicting upon themselves what they dread.

A dater may become rude or insulting when he is fairly certain his beautiful date will later reject his attempt at a good-night kiss. An employee might turn a small disagreement into a big argument with the boss when the employee believes the boss already dislikes her and nothing can change that. The debtor feels the sword of bankruptcy dangling overhead, so he chooses to recklessly spend money to cut the string and be slain by the force of certain, overwhelming debt.

Can you help dreaders avoid self-sabotage?

Four suggestions come to mind.

1. Simply divert their attention away from future misery toward the something more pleasant, past or present.
2. Create doubt and uncertainty about the likelihood of the outcome.
3. Offer support and resources to alter the situation.
4. Increase awareness of new or different behaviors they can choose that will likely create better outcomes.

If you happen to be an extreme dreader yourself, you can give these tips to colleagues, friends, and family so that they can support you, as you learn the skill of changing your own thinking and states. Everyone is capable of learning how to shift his or her own states and giving themselves more choices, with practice.

In the future,

when you find yourself thinking another is crazy; ask yourself, what pain might he or she be avoiding?

With time, you may be shocked to find that all human behavior makes perfect sense when you realize others have positive intentions. Avoiding dread and other forms of pain is a positive intention. All human behavior, from the point of view of the actor, has an underlying logic. People don’t self-sabotage in their own minds.

Greatness as a leader and peace of mind as a human being comes with the ability to give up judging others as sick, evil, wrong or crazy, and understanding that all behavior, no matter how initially shocking, makes perfect sense, in a human sort of way.

(keywords: Leadership, avoidance behavior, understanding people, overcoming fear)