Does avoiding misery make you happy?

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

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.