Some people, both children and adults, have brains that say “no” to everything. It’s a bit like a switch that flicks down as soon as we think of doing anything, even things we wanted, like eating cake. It makes the idea of doing these things feel very bad so we want to avoid them. This is known as pathological demand avoidance . About pathological demand avoidance Although pathological can mean a having a bad habit (like pathological liars), when doctors talk about pathological, they mean something is caused by an illness or by the body itself. The doctor who named pathological demand avoidance wanted to show that it is caused by the way brain is built - a bit like how wanting to run away from foxes is built into rabbits. Pathological demand avoidance happens without us thinking about it, so we often don’t notice it, and the bad feelings it gives us (like eating cake being horrible) can seem real. We often only notice it when something is pushed on us by someone else, l...
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