14/11/2022
Sometimes we are better off when we are worse off…
People will often mistakenly assume that it takes longer to recover from an intense pain or distressing experience than a mild pain or mild distressing experience, in fact this may not be the case.
Meet the “region beta paradox” which is a “phenomenon that people can sometimes recover more quickly from more intense emotions or pain than from less distressing experiences”.
If you only take action to improve something when it reaches a threshold of badness or pain, sometimes better things can feel worse than worse things.
When something isn’t too bad we may just chose to ignore it, but when it’s awful, we will do something about it, theoretically lessening its intensity.
If you have a severe episode of sciatica, you will likely take action to do something about it, if you have some nagging back pain you may never do anything about it. So you end up stuck in region beta, where the less worse thing lasts longer than the worse worse thing…
Small things don’t trigger our defence systems so we don’t take action to change it
How may people do you know who are stuck in region beta, that family member who mentions her hip to you every Christmas or that friend who constantly complains about their job or marriage, but it isn’t quite bad enough to reach the threshold to do something about it and change course.
I've been thinking about this paradox and how it relates to what triggers a patient to book in to see us. Is there a threshold of badness, does it have to be pain level, or can it be what it's stopping us from doing currently?
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