Comfort: Avoiding Unpleasant Emotions

COMFORT: AVOIDING UNPLEASANT EMOTIONS

Soldier mindset helps us avoid negative emotions like fear, stress, and regret. Sometimes we do that with denial, like the "This is fine" dog. Other times, we reach for comforting narratives about the world, and opt not to scrutinize them too closely. Everything happens for the best. People get what’s coming to them. The darker the night, the brighter the stars.

In Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Grapes,” a fox spots a bunch of juicy grapes, high up on a branch he can’t reach, and concludes that the grapes were sour anyway. We use similar “sour grapes” reasoning when we don’t get something we want. When someone we had a great first date with doesn’t return our calls, we may decide they were a bore anyway. When a job offer slips through our fingers, we conclude, “It’s for the best; the hours would have been brutal.”

A close cousin to the sour grape is the sweet lemon: when it doesn’t seem feasible to fix a problem, we may try to convince ourselves that our “problem” is actually a blessing, and that we wouldn’t change it even if we could. Until very recently in human history, excruciating pain was an unavoidable part of childbirth. Since there was nothing we could do about that, many doctors and clergy argued that pain was a good thing, because it promoted spiritual growth and strength of character. Labor pains were allotted by God, “and most wisely we cannot doubt,” one obstetrician assured people in 1856.

Now that we have access to epidural anesthesia, we no longer insist on the sweetness of that particular lemon. But we still say similar things about aging and death—that they’re beautiful, and they give meaning to life. “Perhaps mortality is not simply an evil, perhaps it is even a blessing,” argued Leon Kass, who chaired the President’s Council on Bioethics under George W. Bush. Maybe, he suggests, our ability to feel love depends on our awareness of the finitude of our lives.

To add a wrinkle to this story, the comforting thing to believe isn’t always optimistic. Sometimes it’s the opposite: that there’s no hope, so you might as well not worry about it. If you’re struggling to keep your head above water in a difficult class, it can be tempting to conclude “This is pointless, I’m never going to do well enough to bring my grade up.” The moment of giving up offers a rush of sweet relief. Or you might decide that there’s no point in preparing for a potential future disaster like an earthquake or tsunami, so you don’t have to think about it. “Most people throw up their hands and say, ‘It’s fate, it’s out of my control,’” says Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology at New York University who studies the psychology of disaster preparation.