Does avoiding misery make you happy?

It might seem like self-preservation, but the results aren’t necessarily what you’d expect, writes George Loewenstein

26 Sep 2026 - THE GUARDIAN / Saturday Magazine

IN DR SEUSS’S Green Eggs and Ham, the relentlessly upbeat Sam-I-Am spends the entire book badgering a grouchy, nameless narrator into tasting the eponymous dish. He cycles through one inventive but futile pitch after another – in a house, with a mouse, in a box, with a fox, on a train, in the rain – until the narrator, caving just to get some peace, tastes the dish and discovers he loves it. When my son was growing up, “Green Eggs and Ham” was my shorthand for telling him he was avoiding something he’d love if he only tried it.

Of course, not every experience we fear or dread turns out to be a delicious surprise. Misery is an inescapable part of the human condition. We can’t avoid it, yet people try their hardest anyway. We cling to hope even when a situation is hopeless. We push painful thoughts out of mind rather than confront them. We struggle to control things that cannot be changed. And we go to sometimes self-destructive lengths to protect our pride from even the tiniest pinprick. These strategies may sometimes spare us pain in the moment. But while they are intended to promote (or at least preserve) our happiness, over time they have the perverse result of making us much more miserable.

Consider relationships. Declining to chat with the talkative person sitting next to you on a plane avoids one obvious downside – getting stuck in a boring conversation you can’t gracefully exit. But as psychologist Nicholas Epley shows in an extensive body of research, doing this again and again quietly robs us of interactions we might have found genuinely rewarding, though we’ll never know what we missed.

The same instinct to protect ourselves can become more destructive in close relationships, when the misery that we fear is rejection. People who are “rejection sensitive” tend to expect the worst and see signs of the coming apocalypse even in ambiguous behaviour, like 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 their partner in a self-defeating effort to protect themselves. As a result, behaviour that was meant to ward off rejection ends up provoking it.

In my own research, I surveyed a large sample of adults, asking whether they take too many risks, too few, or roughly the right amount – both overall and across key areas such as work, health, and relationships. The results were striking. 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, again and again, was a desire to avoid miserable emotions like fear and regret.

We reach for distraction, numbing, and busyness to keep from thinking about what causes us pain. One of the great engines of misery is “counterfactual thinking”: our mental habit of imagining how things might have gone differently. While we have the capacity to imagine better and worse outcomes, research shows that we 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 we didn’t take, the romantic connection we didn’t pursue – tend to leave us feeling regretful and dissatisfied with the reality we actually have. This asymmetry punishes those who assiduously avoid every opportunity that might result in pain or heartbreak, because such avoidance inevitably creates a stockpile of upward counterfactuals, all the roads not taken. Psychologists distinguish regrets of commission from regrets of omission; it’s the latter – the things we could have done but didn’t – that haunt us longest.

We don’t only avoid misery by avoiding risky behaviour; a whole separate category of avoidance happens purely in the mind. We reach for distraction, numbing, and busyness to keep from thinking about what causes us 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. This flatness is easy to mistake for equanimity, since it doesn’t announce itself as pain. The protagonist in Stefan Zweig’s story Fantastic Night lives this numbness for years, until one reckless act cracks it open – and what rushes back in isn’t relief but a flood of feeling, the discovery that his calm had been an absence, rather than peace.

Research on physical pain finds, surprisingly, that focusing on pain can diminish its intensity more effectively than trying to distract from it – and there are 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, is self-undermining. It reduces the kinds of experiences available to us, including those of the “Green Eggs and Ham” variety that may prove incredibly meaningful.

My father, born a German Jew, spent part of the second world war in a French prisoner of war camp. He and the small pack of close friends he made there were hungry enough to dig up worms for food and chew on shoe leather. But he once told me that, due to the companionship and challenge of that ordeal, it was the peak experience of his life. Avoidance of misery rests on a false premise about how happiness actually works. 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.

George Loewenstein is university professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, and author of The Opposite of Happiness (William Collins).