Emotional Distress Is Not a Curse to Be Lifted, But a Warning to Be Heeded
Fight the fire, not the alarm.
Our culture regards emotional distress as a malady to be cured: with psychotropic drugs, comforting words, or pleasant distractions. But emotional distress is not a malign curse to be lifted, but a beneficial warning to be heeded.
When something in your house is on fire and your smoke detector is blaring, there are two ways to try to silence the alarm. You can address the alarm itself (by muffling or disconnecting your smoke detector), or you can extinguish the fire.
Say there’s a matter at work that worries you: an uncomfortable conversation with your boss you need to have. Every time it crosses your mind, you get a dose of distress. So, to feel better, you put off dealing with it. You pursue some other activity instead: maybe another job task that is less important, but also less unpleasant.
Such procrastination is a form of what psychologists call “mood repair.” But it’s a short-lived and shallow fix at best. So long as the underlying issue is still a problem, it will still weigh on you subliminally. You will still hear the muffled alarm, and its incessant sound will drive you to distraction. And problems tend to get worse the longer they are neglected. So the fire may spread and later trigger even louder emotional alarms.
So what is the appropriate response to emotional distress? Fight the fire, not the alarm.
A matter that distresses us is often the last thing we want to deal with. But we should consider it the first thing to deal with. Preparing to have that uncomfortable conversation with your boss (scheduling the meeting, drafting talking points, etc), and then actually having it, will cause your distress to spike at first. But then once you have the talk, the source of your distress will have been at least partly dealt with. And then you will enjoy sustained and genuine relief.
Fleeing displeasure is the flipside of chasing pleasure: a variant of hedonism. In this, as in all instances, hedonism is self-defeating.
Emotions that cause us to go into "mood repair" reminds me of a "black box" - a system in which we can view the inputs and outputs, but not the inner workings.
The source of our emotions can be mysterious like a black box. There's 3 things we can do… 1. fight the black box, 2. Remove or resolve the input into box, or 3, understand the black box.
As you mentioned, it's much easier to solve the problem directly and firstly rather than numb/distract ourselves. But, I think there's the 3rd option of convincing yourself that certain things aren't important.
Sometimes we deem activities as so important (for a variety of explicit and implicit reasons) that we lose the forest for the tree. Our "black box" is what's causing such grief, the sooner we can realize what we specifically want, the less mood repair we'll have to do.
Clarity of our "inner workings" results in clarity of purpose. Sometimes events have no meaning and we're simply assigning it. The more we assign meaning, the more we trip ourselves up. The fewer things we find meaning in, the more clarity of purpose we have.