I hate the stuff so much. A: how would you ever provide evidence in favour of this wildly generic statement and B: even if you did, individual differences would trump whatever tiny effect you could prove significant.
> Studies, such as those highlighted by Jeffrey M. Schwartz in "The Mind and the Brain," illustrate how our neural pathways strengthen with repetition, making familiar behaviors easier to perform over time. When change is introduced, the brain must adapt, creating new pathways and weakening old ones, a process that can feel uncomfortable and energetically expensive.
You don't "feel" neural pathways in any sense of the word. While the description of how pathways strengthen may be correct on a high level, there are likely details that matter how those processes actually work (I'm won't pretend to understand this stuff), but that doesn't matter here because an individual neuron is a completely different thing than a complete brain, and the inner workings of the brain is a completely different thing than the social mechanisms of the workplace.
They could just as well have described a proton-electron pair and saying it's the same attraction mechanism behind heterosexual love. Not wrong but not true in any meaningful way.
The article also mentions neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps's research to support an attendant claim that "When the prefrontal cortex is under stress, our capacity for learning, memory, and decision-making is compromised". But her research on stress's effects on cognition that I can find actually suggests stress is often beneficial to learning and performance, and her work on fear response conditioning focuses on timing of interventions, not energetic expense or discomfort.
What's so worth hating about this kind of vacant-eyed patronizing crap, this "neuroscience-based approach" and "blueprint for L&D professionals", is how it authoritatively name-drops experts and science-y words as an appetizer, without inviting any actual engagement or understanding, and proceeds to dish up warmed-over PD workshop slop for the next 9/10ths of the article. Those L&D professionals may have no substantive understanding of neuroscience, but they know that you need to feel "discomfort" and bear "energetic expense".
Not all learned/acquired behavior works like that, at least at the subjective level that we can experience as human being (putting apart obviously the fact that we all have different subjective experiences).
But it makes a lot of sense. Generalized as all these statements may be, who here can argue that humans are not more inclined toward the comfortable and familiar, preferring instead to stick with what we know rather than struggling through the unknown? We all do this, to some degree, with some of us being a bit more adventurous or seeking different knowledge, or whatever, but returning to the known comforts feels safer to all of us.