In Green Eggs and Ham, Sam-I-Am keeps urging a nameless narrator to try something unfamiliar. The narrator resists, then finally tastes the dish—and discovers that he likes it.
The story offers a simple illustration of a broader problem: avoiding discomfort can sometimes mean avoiding experiences that might have been rewarding. Misery is an inescapable part of human life, but attempts to preserve happiness at all costs may eventually make people more miserable.
The protective habit that can backfire
Psychologist Nicholas Epley’s research is described as showing how avoidance can close off ordinary opportunities for connection. People who avoid speaking with strangers, including fellow passengers on a plane, may also miss interactions that could have been rewarding.
A similar pattern can occur around rejection. People described as “rejection sensitive” tend to expect the worst and may interpret an unanswered text message as evidence that they are being rejected. To protect themselves, they may withdraw or reject someone else first. That response can create the rejection they were trying to prevent.
The issue is not that caution is always misguided. Rather, treating possible discomfort as a reason to avoid contact altogether can shrink the number of experiences available to a person.
Why regret keeps attention on the road not taken
A survey of a large sample of adults found that about half felt they took roughly the right amount of risk. Among the rest, the overwhelming majority said they took too few risks, often because they wanted to avoid emotions such as fear and regret.
That concern is linked to counterfactual thinking: imagining how events might have unfolded differently. Research described in the source suggests that people are more likely to focus on how things could have been better than on how they could have been worse.
These “upward counterfactuals” can centre on an unaccepted job offer or a romantic connection that was never pursued. They can feed dissatisfaction, particularly when a person keeps returning to what might have happened. Psychologists distinguish between regrets of commission—things people did—and regrets of omission, or things they left undone. The latter can haunt people longest, according to the account.
What emotional avoidance can cost
Distraction, numbing and constant busyness can provide ways to avoid painful experiences. But suppressing sadness may also narrow a person’s emotional range. The practised avoider may become emotionally flat rather than happy, with less intensity, curiosity and aliveness.
The research described here does not suggest that people should seek misery or regard pain as inherently valuable. It points instead to a difference between experiencing a difficult emotion and allowing that emotion to organise an entire life around avoidance.
In research on physical pain, focusing on the pain is described as reducing its intensity more effectively than distraction. Related work on emotion has found that affect labelling—putting feelings into words—can dampen neural reactions to distress. Another group of studies found that people who accept a negative emotion, rather than suppressing it, recover faster emotionally and physiologically. Findings about negative emotions are described as more mixed than the physical-pain research, and the available account does not quantify the effects.
A broader view of happiness
George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon and the author of The Opposite of Happiness, is identified with the argument that happiness can become self-undermining when it is pursued mainly through avoidance.
An account of his father’s experience makes the point in an especially striking way. His father, a German Jew, spent part of the Second World War in a French prisoner-of-war camp and later described that period as the peak experience of his life because of its companionship and challenge. The example does not make suffering desirable. It shows that even extremely difficult circumstances can contain experiences—such as connection and shared challenge—that a simple pursuit of comfort might overlook.
A more useful question than “How can I avoid feeling bad?” may sometimes be “What am I giving up in order not to feel this?” That question does not require deliberately courting pain. It leaves room to notice when fear, rejection or regret is protecting a person—and when it is quietly making life smaller.
AI tools were used to assist with the preparation of this article.
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