18 Happiness, Sadness, and an Avoidance

About the Author

Carissa Olson Crowton grew up in a small town called Grangeville, Idaho. She lived on a farm there until she moved in with her wonderful grandparents at the age of 18. After serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she began attending USU. While exploring majors, she met her amazing husband. She is currently pursuing Music Therapy. In her free time, she enjoys singing and admiring animation with her husband.

This essay was composed in November 2021 and uses APA documentation.

I SCROLL THROUGH MY PHONE, waiting for a sign. My final paper sits unfinished on my HP laptop. It’s due tomorrow, but I can’t bring myself to finish it. I look around the room, searching for anything that needs to be done in the house. I see the dishes piling up in my tiny sink and think to myself that I need to wash them for lunch. It’s 1:00 PM. I get up from my comfortable brown couch and put on my purple rubber gloves. I’ve done it. I’ve effectively rationalized not finishing my essay by finding literally anything else to do of barely equal urgency and importance. Fast forward. It’s 11:00 PM. I feel the intense anxiety and weight of my previous procrastination come to a head. I open my laptop and the Word document that holds my final paper. I can stall no longer, and I settle down for a long, intensive, late-night writing spree prompted only by the impending deadline of 11:00 AM the next morning. Seven pages, 12 hours, my laptop, high anxiety, inspiration, and me.

Many students can relate to this experience. Avoiding things can be considered a common practice in student culture and sometimes even worn as a badge of honor. “How was your night last night?” “Well, I watched a movie, played games with friends, and wrote my final paper.” “THE WHOLE THING?” “Yep!” [insert smug smile]. This is a typical conversation regarding finishing assignments last minute. Of course, not all students procrastinate their assignments, but many still avoid other important things. These things could include anything that instills a feeling of dread. For some, this is calling their parents and for others, mopping the floor. For still more, it’s exercising, eating healthy, replying to text messages, and feeling emotions from painful relationships. The list could go on and on. Each person’s triggers for avoidant behavior are unique and instill strong feelings that the person does not wish to feel. This reaction is understandable, but most people can agree that it is not always effective. Sometimes we can get away with avoidant behavior, but sometimes these choices have dire consequences. Sometimes this means getting a lower grade that costs you your overall GPA, losing friendships, and experiencing high anxiety levels.

Some people have the opposite problem. These people take on so much that they experience burnout and engage so much in things that it hinders them from doing their best. For these people, they may still be using avoidant behavior, but for feelings that drive them to be over-involved in things. These feelings could be the fear of missing good opportunities, disappointing others or oneself, or even avoiding the possibility of a label “lazy” by family members or friends. These behaviors can also have dire consequences, such as turning in lower quality assignments, exhausting friendships, and still experiencing high levels of anxiety.

Avoidance can even affect our mood and perceptions of how happy we are. To understand this relationship, we must understand how overall feelings work, namely that we experience life through a comparative lens. This means you cannot have your desired feelings without experiencing your undesired feelings. “Good” feelings only feel good because they are a relief or resolution from “bad” feelings (even though there are no such things as good or bad feelings, we just tend to label them that way). In other words, people can’t feel happy without feeling sad. If avoiding sadness or other unpleasant emotions becomes standard practice for someone, they will feel a reduction in happiness. This type of avoidance can come from people who used to feel an extreme amount of unpleasant emotions and wish to avoid this same pain or those who know they have never experienced the extreme emotions that others have and therefore fear having to experience them.

“Let’s watch a movie.” I want to cry, but I nod. I try to shut out the pain of hurtful memories and focus on the moment. The opening credits come on. My husband puts his arm around me, and I snuggle into his soft shoulder. I silently fade into a pit of worry. I try to silence the thoughts that I may have seen my abusive ex at the store while getting the bread—the beautiful animation scrolls across the screen. Though the emotional wounds still eat away at me, I refocus my attention and don’t speak.

Avoidance can be counterproductive in many ways. But if avoiding is so unhelpful, why do we tend to do it? At its heart, people tend to avoid because avoidance is a coping mechanism. In short, whenever our brain perceives a threat, we unconsciously engage in a coping mechanism. Even though a test can seem silly to be perceived as a threat, it makes overall logical sense when we consider our brain’s overall goal to survive. For example, we know our grade depends on the assignment, our later income depends on our grade, and our later life depends on our income. Suddenly a huge snowball effect has occurred that lets your brain know that the test is important and that failure would not benefit your survival.

There are many coping mechanisms at our brain’s disposal. Avoidant and approach coping are two of the most prominent. Avoidance coping is characterized by avoiding a stressor rather than interacting with it. This avoidance can span many areas and can apply to changing what you do to avoid thinking about something, feeling something, or doing something hard (Scott, 2021). Conversely, approach coping refers to when a person faces a problem head-on and accepts everything entailed (Scott, 2021).

We can see how all the examples in the first few paragraphs dealt with avoidant coping. Avoidance coping is considered “maladaptive” because it does not typically accomplish the overall goal a person needs or wants to achieve (Scott, 2021). The use of avoidant coping has also been linked to increased anxiety or “distress symptoms” that amount to more than would have been experienced during solely dealing with a stressor. Yet, it is often used. While this frequency of use may not apply to everyone, many students often use avoidance coping. This frequent use is sometimes perplexing because avoidant coping does not always yield the best results, as described above.

Approach coping is another mechanism that yields better results, but it is rarely used when it really counts. This can be due to many factors. Two main factors are how a person sees a threat and their ability to respond to it. These are called appraisals of self-efficacy and appraisals of threat. “Appraisals of self-efficacy” refer to the belief that you assign to a stressor about whether you as a person have the ability to work through it (Donald et al., 2017). The “appraisal of threat” refers to how a person perceives a stressor regarding how much it is a threat to them. This refers to how much it will impact their life, meaning their survival, and whether it will be in a negative way (Donald et al., 2017)

When it comes to self-efficacy appraisals, there is a common trend that those who feel they can reliably work through a stressor are more likely to use an approach motive. The idea states that if you feel more confident in an area, you will be more likely to tackle the problem than run from it. Conversely, if a person thinks they cannot reach a goal, they are less likely to try but instead avoid it (Donald et al., 2017). Approach coping reduces stress and is typically more effective than avoidant coping. In this way, higher self-efficacy appraisals can be beneficial to an individual.

For threat appraisals, if a person sees a stressor as something that could negatively impact them, they will likely attempt to avoid it. This is a basic form of protection that we are all prone to and is natural and normal. However, this behavior leads to avoidant coping and doesn’t allow a problem to be solved in the best way. This means that tasks of lower importance to one’s life are more likely to be engaged due to the greater likelihood of approach coping being activated in a less threatening situation.

This information explains why many college students would procrastinate on an assignment. College is about learning new things, accomplishing feats you’ve never achieved, and improving upon established abilities. It makes sense then that many students may have a lower self-efficacy appraisal for certain assignments and be prone to use avoidant coping in response to that stressor. Additionally, as a final weighs heavily on a grade, this may be exacerbated further by the threat appraisal that their paper is a threat to a currently good grade. Again, this will lead someone to an avoidant coping mechanism. However, some students seem to tackle many new things with vigor. They may be avoiding other feelings that would come if they did poorly in school, which overrule their self-efficacy or threat appraisals related to the assignment. Still, another possibility is that they are engaging in approach coping.

In these instances, approach coping would lead to more favorable results than avoidant coping. Ironically, the avoidant coping mechanism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in which a student doesn’t do as well as hoped and affirms their low self-efficacy and threat appraisals. With approach coping, however, people are more likely to make improvements they may not have assumed they could and get an even higher grade. This approach will increase self-efficacy beliefs and diminish the worries of higher threats. If a student continues to engage in avoidant coping, they may experience the opposite and lose whatever joy they may have had in learning, growing, and improving. Sometimes, it may be as if a student can’t bring themselves to stop engaging in avoidant coping even though they are aware that it could be hurting their case. This situation would suggest that anyone on a downward streak has little hope of recovering, and those who get ahead stay ahead. However, an equalizing factor may be more manageable for some that will impact whether a person engages in approach coping or not.

This equalizing factor refers to how a person relates to their stressor, specifically their thoughts. “Cognitive defusion” is one such way of relating to stress-related thoughts. This refers to how far a person is psychologically from their thoughts. If a person is cognitively “defused,” they can put distance between themself and their thoughts. They can see their thoughts just as thoughts and not as themselves. They then can evaluate and react to the thoughts rather than being controlled by them. Researchers have found that if a person is “defused,” they are more likely to engage in approach coping than avoidant coping regardless of their threat or self-efficacy appraisals. This means that if students can relate to their thoughts to evaluate and react to these thoughts, they will be more likely to engage in approach behaviors.

An example of this would be if a student has to prepare for an exam and feels dread about it, they can look at their thoughts, see what is causing the feeling, and evaluate whether that thought conveys truth or not. Our fears are often valid, but the actions we feel we need to take may be extreme. For example, a music major may need to practice their instrument but doesn’t want to. They may recognize that a recurrent thought surrounding practicing messes up a certain phrase. Knowing this will make them feel less capable; they may want to avoid the task. However, if a student can evaluate that thought, they will find that messing up that phrase does not mean they are less capable, but instead that they are capable of improving and will improve if they practice. There may still be some undesirable feelings left behind, but many will fade away just from a simple evaluation of a thought. Thus, practicing being “defused” can help students feel better about the task and avoid the anxiety and lesser product that would have come from avoidant coping.

With this information, many students could engage in more learning opportunities, live a fuller life, and experience more happiness. While this could become a reality for some students, the tendency to overdo it and engage in so many things that one becomes exhausted is a concern that could come with a mindset of “doing more is better.” While this can be true for people who actively avoid so many things that they start to feel a reduction in happiness because of an avoidance of hurt, it can be harmful for those who do so much that they can’t perform well. For these people, doing less is more of the answer they are looking for to be effective.

The key in these circumstances is to have a sense of equity and balance. In an overall emotional realm, this can be understood much better. The idea is to feel an overall sense of happiness in life. Two extreme consequences can come from not engaging in enough activities or too many. First, if there is too much avoidance and not enough engagement, there is an absence of feelings of sadness, struggle, and pain. Sometimes, we think this is the ultimate goal because it means we will not feel any negative feelings. The problem with this idea is that we feel emotions comparatively. Therefore, we will not feel joy if we do not feel sadness. To feel the relief of struggle, we must experience a struggle first. The other struggle with engaging in too many activities is that it will often lead to too much struggle, so much that one cannot perform well. In this way, one must find the balance of doing enough that there is a struggle to find relief and joy while not taking on so much struggle that it becomes maladaptive. If this is done, a person will be able to feel a sense of overall happiness. While a person may also feel more difficult emotions, many would argue that feeling difficult emotions followed by desired emotions is preferable to no feelings. This is evidenced by a common symptom of major depressive disorder. Many with this mental illness will go to therapy to attempt to regain any feeling at all, not just happiness (Gotter, 2018).

For some with mental illness, coming to this state of a life filled with more happiness may be more difficult than for neurotypical people. However, research has shown that engagement in avoidant coping increases undesirable symptoms while approach coping decreases them. In this way, practicing cognitive defusion may help relieve symptoms and contribute to a happier life.

Overall, avoidant coping mechanisms can be detrimental to a student’s grades, mental health, and relationships. Even though many know this, it is still likely that students will at some point engage in avoidant behaviors. This is due to the novelty of the tasks students may need to accomplish at this time in their life combined with their self-efficacy and threat appraisals. Luckily, students can change this likelihood of using avoidance over approach coping by engaging in more cognitive defusion. Once this is done and approach coping becomes easier for a student, the final step is to develop a sense of balance between approach and avoidant coping mechanisms. This strategy will allow enough struggle to feel happiness without burning a student out. Ultimately, this will lead to a happier and more fulfilling life.

I look over at my husband, the pain of an abusive relationship with a previous partner stuck in my mind. He pulls me in. Warmth. I cry into his chest, and he holds me tighter. Love. The pain of past hurt begins to melt away. I breathe deeply, letting all my emotion leave me with each exhale. I feel the weight slowly lifting from my chest. I remember every sharp word, every figurative knife twisted in my heart. I feel all the sadness and hurt those experiences caused, ones I have avoided for years. Finally, they all come out in the safety and security of the arms of my love. In time, I begin to feel better. A sense of relief washes over me. It’s over. I finally look up into my husband’s eyes. Compassion. Caring. Hope. I feel the joy of a better love and a happier circumstance. We smile. I am happy.

References

American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Apa Dictionary of Psychology. American Psychological Association. Retrieved December 18, 2021, from https://dictionary.apa.org/threat-appraisal

Donald, J. N., Atkins, P. W. B., Parker, P. D., Christie, A. M., & Guo, J. (2017). Cognitive defusion predicts more approach and less avoidance coping with stress, independent of threat and self‐efficacy appraisals. Journal of Personality, 85(5), 716–729. https://doi-org.dist.lib.usu.edu/10.1111/jopy.12279

Gotter, A. (2018, September 18). Feeling numb: Causes and treatment for emotional numbness. Healthline. Retrieved December 18, 2021, from https://www.healthline.com/health/feeling-numb

Scott, E. (2021, February 22). Why avoidance coping creates additional stress. Verywell Mind. Retrieved November 21, 2021, from https://www.verywellmind.com/avoidance-coping-and-stress-4137836.

Self-efficacy defined. (n.d.). Retrieved December 17, 2021, from https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Bandura/BanEncy.html#:~:text=Perceived%20self%2Defficacy%20is%20defined,think%2C%20motivate%20themselves%20and%20behave