Avoiding misery may seem like a sensible strategy for protecting happiness, but research suggests it often backfires, leaving people more miserable in the long run. Psychologists distinguish between occasional caution and a life-organising principle of unhappiness-avoidance, with the latter proving self-undermining.
The paradox of avoidance
Misery is an inescapable part of the human condition, yet people try their hardest to avoid it. They cling to hope even when a situation is hopeless, push painful thoughts out of mind, struggle to control things that cannot be changed, and go to sometimes self-destructive lengths to protect their pride. These strategies may spare pain in the moment, but over time they have the perverse result of making people much more miserable.
In relationships, declining to chat with a talkative stranger on a plane avoids one obvious downside – getting stuck in a boring conversation – but doing this again and again quietly robs people of interactions that might have been genuinely rewarding. The instinct to protect oneself can become more destructive in close relationships when the misery feared is rejection. People who are “rejection sensitive” tend to expect the worst and see signs of coming apocalypse even in ambiguous behaviour, such as an unanswered text message. When they think they see rejection coming, they try to avoid it by rejecting first, responding with hostility or pulling away from a partner in a self-defeating effort to protect themselves. Behaviour meant to ward off rejection ends up provoking it.
Regret and emotional flatness
In research surveying a large sample of adults, about half felt they took the right amount of risk, but among the rest, the overwhelming majority felt they took too few – and the reason they gave was a desire to avoid miserable emotions like fear and regret. One of the great engines of misery is “counterfactual thinking”, the mental habit of imagining how things might have gone differently. Research shows that people are much more likely to dwell on how things could have been better than to consider how they could have been worse. Such “upward counterfactuals” – the job offer not taken, the romantic connection not pursued – tend to leave people feeling regretful and dissatisfied with the reality they have. Psychologists distinguish regrets of commission from regrets of omission; it is the latter – the things one could have done but didn’t – that haunt people longest.
Avoidance also happens purely in the mind. People reach for distraction, numbing, and busyness to keep from thinking about what causes pain, but you cannot anaesthetise sadness without anaesthetising everything nearby. Emotional systems don’t come with a dial that turns down grief while leaving joy untouched; suppress one and the whole range tends to flatten. The practised avoider often ends up not happy, exactly, but flat – free of acute suffering, perhaps, but also missing the intensity, curiosity, and aliveness that make the good parts of life feel good.
Focusing on pain can help
Research on physical pain finds, surprisingly, that focusing on pain can diminish its intensity more effectively than trying to distract from it, with parallel, if somewhat more mixed, findings for negative emotions generally. One line of inquiry shows that “affect labelling” – simply putting feelings into words – dampens neural reactions to distress. Another set of studies finds that people instructed to accept a negative emotion, rather than suppress it, recover faster, both emotionally and physiologically.
None of this is an argument for deliberately courting misery, or for treating pain as good in itself. But unhappiness-avoidance, adopted as an organising life principle rather than an occasional and reasonable caution, reduces the kinds of experiences available to us, including those that may prove incredibly meaningful. The person who spends a life dodging unhappiness does not arrive, in the end, at a life free from misery. Unhappiness avoided is not happiness gained, but more often just misery in disguise.
