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### Neurobiological Substrate

The enforcement of non-compete agreements operates through the neuroscience of threat and constraint. When workers know that exit from current employment carries legal risk, their behavioral repertoire is narrowed in ways that parallel the threat-response inhibition documented in studies of perceived entrapment. The anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal circuitry involved in action-selection show characteristic suppression when subjects anticipate punishment for explored options — a neural signature of constrained choice. Workers subject to enforceable non-competes report elevated stress, lower job satisfaction, and reduced willingness to raise workplace concerns, all consistent with the phenomenology of perceived entrapment. The aggregate population effect is a dampening of the exploration-exploitation dynamic that produces labor market mobility: workers who would otherwise move toward better matches stay in suboptimal positions because the threat of litigation makes exploration too costly.