One of the more interesting things (imo) to come out of the widespread adoption of brain scanning techniques and the improved understanding of neuroscience, has been the number of areas in which traditional Freudian theories have been shown to be out of kilter with how the brain really works.
Despite this, culturally and professionally, his theories are still deeply embedded in the ways in which many of us analyse what goes on in our lives and seek to reflect on our minds.
One area in which his work has been shown to have some empirical backing was his pleasure and pain principle, in which he suggested that the brain is wired to seek pleasure and minimise pain. While this might seem quite self-evident, there’s been a lot of work in this field relating to some of the subtleties of the balance between the two (or indeed if there even is a continuum between pleasure and pain).
“Nerve endings think they see
Pleasure coming I know better” – Kristin Hersh
The brain has a developed reward system primarily in the mesolimbic pathway which is the dopamine system and linked to pleasure, reward and motivation. The studies around motivation have tended to show that more people prioritise the drive to move away from pain than the drive towards pleasure. This is the kind of thing that seems to make sense evolutionarily, where mitigating against risks would leave you able to fight back another day. Whether these evolutionary biases make as much sense in the modern world (in which we’re not trying to balance out the risk/reward of taking on a sabre-toothed tiger for his lunch, but are pondering the hygiene ratings of our local takeaways), is an interesting question, which then also prompts the debates on how, once you’ve contextualised that, you can move away from nature’s wiring to something that might serve you better.
Tversky and Khaneman’s Prospect Theory explored this in the field of behavioural economics. It demonstrated, in simple terms, that given the choice between gaining £100 but having to give £50 back, or being given £50 outright, the latter is viewed more favourably. (That it’s better to have won smaller and not lost, than won greater and lost, even if the end result is the same).
The theory suggests that there’s two steps that we take when making decisions
- The editing phase
- The evaluation phase
In the editing phase we’ll decide what information we use in forming our judgement and tends to be the point at which we introduce biases which cloud our judgement, we also take shortcuts and filter the options to identify which ones are good and rank them. It’s at this point that we’ll assign a baseline, and it’s at this point that we’ll tend to overweight the likelihood of extreme events.
The evaluation phase is when we take all that information and weigh up the probabilities to make our final judgement, but the decisions aren’t necessarily made rationally and we’ll tend to act in a more risky fashion when the stakes are low, but more cautiously when the stakes are high.
What this all means is that we’ll tend to be more sensitive to losses than gains.
This then, in turn feeds into the sunk cost fallacy (colloquially referred to as throwing good money after bad). If we bail out, it frames our previous decisions as a loss and thus makes them real. We’ll prefer to take further risks in an effort to avoid that ‘loss’ and underweight the likelihood of further losses.
So, with all that whistlestop theory, what useful things can a coach glean from it all?
There’s a somewhat trite (and not always empirically accurate) assertion that the first stage in tackling an issue is to know about it and be aware. Once we’ve noted and acknowledged the hurdles, the obstacles and the discomfort that we’d need to address, overcome and push through in order to get to the rewards, then we can look to the detail of how we can make that happen.
There’s a tyranny in the blank page and so actually getting underway (in a manageable way) at least lets you begin to understand what course corrections you might need to take in practice. Putting the mind to the task of minimising the pain, contextualising it, circumventing it, allows you to start to make progress.
Clarifying the goal, and really getting to grips with crossing the finish line and the practical tangible benefits of doing so is also a way of gaining motivation through the tricky journey.
At core, what that preceding theory really leads us to is that through a structure like coaching you’ll be able to get a better and more realistic take on what the pain points are that have prevented you from making progress. Indeed, what the pain points are that have stopped you from even starting.
The prospect of pleasure, in itself, will tend to be outweighed by the desire to avoid the pain.
Which in elliptical fashion leads me back to that good old stoic Epictetus… just to show that in a couple of thousand years we’re still rediscovering the same basic tenets of life and still repackaging and rearticulating them for a modern audience.
“For it is not death or pain that is to be feared, but the fear of pain or death.”
Epictetus
And more recently the advice Patti Smith gave the members of REM