Dys-Comfort

Hi, I’m Sandra. Welcome to The Happyist.

Today, I want to talk about the things we do to comfort ourselves that are actually harmful. Sounds fun, yes? But let’s examine this dysfunctional form of comforting, because we all indulge in this behavior. How do I know that? Because we’re human.

And when I say dys-comfort, I mean it with d-Y-s, as in dysfunctional, as in dysregulating. Which is the antithesis of actual comfort.

We do this with food and eating too much, with booze and drinking too much, with drugs and sex and isolation, with forms of physical self-harm. And all of that starts out with relief. At first, it feels good, like exactly what we needed. So we do more. We have more, take more, with the goal of feeling less. We indulge until that good feeling fades into something sickly, distressful, disappointing, frustrating or scary. And what we did to make ourselves better in one aspect of our lives causes us to feel worse in another way.

Sound familiar? We’ve all done it. Even in celebration. Yes, celebrating is a form of comforting. Why? Because there’s a bit of stress in that success or achievement. Even in our relief and elation, we’re processing the alternate ending, we go over all the work it took to get there, what was sacrificed, the anxiety of the endless “what-ifs” on the way to our goal. So we’ll crack open that bottle of champagne, eat that bag of chips, devour that tub of ice cream, treat ourselves to a night out, do that drug, sleep with that hottie, all in the name of feeling even better.

Bad news or bad days can be dealt with the same way.

I’m not saying this with any sort of judgment. This isn’t about morals. This is asking ourselves how we feel before, during and after these forms of self-soothing. If it truly brings us satisfying comfort, good. If not, why do we do that to ourselves?

What starts off as an attempt to comfort, turns into a sort of punishment. And that can occur in both big and small ways.

It’s like going out for your favorite dinner that, somehow, no longer agrees with you. The first time, that’s a surprise. When did that happen? And why? The second, well, guess it’s not a one-off. But the third, fourth and tenth time? Why do we do it? Yes, there is the pleasure of it that hits us first. But then that pleasure turns into dys-comfort, into pain and disappointment, frustration and feeling unwell.

Why we do this could be because we want what we want and we want things not to change, and we are going to keep doing what we want until things change back. But that’s not how it works, right?

So, when we drink too much or eat too much, or do whatever we know we really shouldn’t, and we do that not for the first time, we know what we are getting into. We know what the after effects will be, granted, in a range of degrees. But we do it anyway. Why?

There are other acts we might partake in, which we may also have evidence that they will not be helpful or satisfying in the bright light of day. And, yet, we indulge in them. Why?

Photo by Adrian "Rosco" Stef on Unsplash

I’m not asking these questions to open the door for judgment, but for curiosity. The act of dys-comfort itself is truly human and normal. Repeating the acts that make us feel cruddy is worth questioning, worth getting curious about. We should want to know why we are doing things that hurt us. And, usually, that reason is a bit of self-loathing.

We do it subconsciously. We feel bad about ourselves so we actually make ourselves feel bad. And that’s why we need to reconsider those actions. Not because of a moral imperative, but for a self-love imperative.