Every leader recognises this moment. A decision that carries real weight sits in front of you, yet your attention drifts elsewhere — into numbers, strategy refinement, mentoring, or operational detail. It all looks like progress. It often is progress. But in that moment, something more subtle is happening beneath the surface.
Your brain is not choosing based on importance. It is choosing based on chemistry.
When a task creates discomfort — uncertainty, resistance, or tension — the cortisol loop activates. That discomfort is not experienced as a clear signal to investigate; it feels like something to move past. Almost immediately, your attention shifts toward something more familiar.
That shift brings relief. And that relief is rewarded.
This is where the dopamine loop takes over. The moment you move away from discomfort and into something that feels manageable or rewarding, your brain releases dopamine. You feel better. More in control. More productive. The brain records the pattern: “this worked.”
Over time, this becomes automatic.
You are no longer consciously choosing to avoid the difficult task. Your system is simply repeating what has been rewarded before. The activities themselves are not the problem — they are often valuable, intelligent, and necessary. The problem is when and why they are chosen.
Together, these two loops form the most expensive pattern in executive execution. In our study of 100 CEOs and senior executives in the UK technology sector, the reward-avoidance pattern accounted for an average of 51 days of lost progress per team of ten, every month — 23 days from attention shifting toward what feels rewarding, and 28 days from resistance delaying the work that matters most. None of it registered as avoidance. The days felt full, and the activities that filled them were often genuinely valuable. The sequence driving them was not.
Your Reward–Avoidance Patterns
To understand how this shows up in your own work, start by observing where your attention goes when something feels uncomfortable.
Avoidance at the executive level rarely looks like avoidance. It looks like leadership. It looks like responsibility. It looks like progress. But the underlying pattern is the same: tension → shift → relief → reward.
You might recognise it in moments like these:
- Diving deep into reports, forecasts, or financial models because the numbers feel controllable, while a direct conversation with your Sales Director remains unaddressed.
- Investing time in developing others because it feels meaningful, while delaying a difficult decision that carries risk.
- Getting involved in operational detail, reviewing processes, or solving team-level issues because it feels productive, while avoiding a strategic shift that lacks clarity.
- Creating new frameworks, KPIs, or structures because it feels like forward motion, while the underlying issue remains unchanged.
- Revisiting strategy, vision, or long-term direction because it feels expansive, while short-term execution challenges remain unresolved.
- Rechecking numbers or financials not because they changed, but because certainty feels rewarding, while volatility feels uncomfortable.
- Moving toward new opportunities because novelty is stimulating, while unresolved problems in the current business remain in place.
- Running multiple scenarios, models, or “what-ifs” because thinking feels safe — instead of committing to a direction that carries risk.
Each of these actions can be justified. Each can be valuable. But in the moment they are chosen, the driver is often not progressing — it is relief.
Related article: Read how this loop fits within the broader Neurochemical Decision Cycle — the three-stage model that explains how chemistry shapes decision-making, daily execution, and recovery and rest.
Awareness Changes the Pattern
The objective is not to force different behaviour. It is to see the pattern clearly.
Start noticing where your attention goes when something feels uncomfortable. That moment — the shift toward something easier and more rewarding — is the loop in action.
Once you see it, the dynamic changes. You stop interpreting the behaviour as preference or priority, and recognise it as a reward system at work.
From there, the shift is natural. The brain can begin attaching reward not to relief, but to awareness and progress. Execution becomes more aligned, not through discipline, but because what feels rewarding starts to change.
When the Pattern Becomes the Culture
This pattern does not stay contained to one leader. When a CEO’s reward-avoidance sequence goes unexamined, teams adapt to it — learning which conversations get delayed, which work gets prioritised, and how discomfort is handled at the top. Over time, one person’s chemistry becomes the organisation’s default way of executing.
The reverse is also true. When leaders build a shared language for these patterns, the whole system changes with them — as one executive described:
“We’ve seen cross-functional collaboration improve because the shared language of the program — around reward and avoidance-driven activity — has helped everyone navigate challenging conversations more constructively. I’ve become far more deliberate and less reactive in my day-to-day leadership. The cultural impact has been both visible and measurable.”
— Richard Eglon, Chief Marketing Officer, Nebula Global Services
See Your Own Pattern
If you’d like to see how your current decision-making patterns perform under pressure — and whether logic or chemistry has the stronger hand — take the Neurochemically Optimised Executive Assessment to establish your personal baseline.
It isn’t a personality test. It measures the intensity of the internal signals — reward, avoidance, alertness — that shape your decisions before logic engages. It takes five minutes, it’s free, and it gives you the same baseline measurement used with the 100 CEOs in our study.
To explore the full findings behind this article, visit the Study of 100 CEOs.
About the author
Tomasz Drybala is the founder of the Neuro-Based Leadership Centre and the architect of a neuroscience-based regulatory framework designed for CEOs, founders, and senior executives. His work focuses on measuring and regulating the neurochemical feedback loops that shape executive decision-making, daily execution, and recovery cycles — operating at the level where perception is formed, before logic engages. Alongside building his executive framework, he pursued targeted programs through institutions including Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, and the University of California, Berkeley, and leads an applied research body that examines how feedback loops involving dopamine, cortisol, oxytocin, serotonin, and testosterone influence judgment, timing, and execution in real organisational environments.