text: **A significant number of persons engage in paradoxical behaviors, such as extreme food restriction (up to starvation) and non-suicidal**
  **self-injuries, especially during periods of rapid changes, such as adolescence. Here, we contextualize these and related paradoxical**
  **behavior within an active inference view of brain functions, which assumes that the brain forms predictive models of bodily variables,**
  **emotional experiences, and the embodied self and continuously strives to reduce the uncertainty of such models. We propose that not**
  **only in conditions of excessive or prolonged uncertainty, such as in clinical conditions, but also during pivotal periods of developmental**
  **transition, paradoxical behaviors might emerge as maladaptive strategies to reduce uncertainty—by “acting on the body”— soliciting**
  **salient perceptual and interoceptive sensations, such as pain or excessive levels of hunger. Although such strategies are maladaptive**
  **and run against our basic homeostatic imperatives, they might be functional not only to provide some short-term reward (e.g. relief**
  **from emotional distress)—as previously proposed—but also to reduce uncertainty and possibly to restore a coherent model of one’s**
  **bodily experience and the self, affording greater confidence in who we are and what course of actions we should pursue.**