Read Online Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) by Peg Streep - Free Book Online Page B

danger—thinking the lion might be at the watering hole can leave you dying of thirst—not only can mean lost opportunities for growth and development but may even propel a person or an animal closer to the very thing he or she seeks to avoid.
    What makes some people approach-oriented and others governed by avoidance? The answer, friends, is childhood—yes, back to the nursery—and upbringing, especially attachment to parents or caregivers. We’ll return to this subject in the next chapter.
    Conflicting Goals
    Given the complexity of human nature and desires, all goals are, unfortunately, not created equal; nor are they always compatible with each other. For women and men alike, the ongoing cultural dialogue about having it all is, of course, about conflictinggoals—balancing the need or desire to work with the goal of being an attentive and available parent, fulfilling one satisfying aspect of life without sacrificing another, being in close relationships without losing sight of ourselves and our own needs. Understanding the harmful effects of conflicting goals—such as emotional distress, the loss of general well-being, and a negative impact on health—is another reason that being able to consider real goal disengagement is an important life skill.
    Psychologists Robert Emmons and Laura King conducted a series of experiments to examine the effect of conflicting personal goals. Participants were asked to compile a list of fifteen goals, which could be motivated by either approach or avoidance. (Examples of avoidance goals given by the participants, who were college students, included avoiding dependence on a boyfriend and avoiding spreading malicious gossip.) Lists in hand, they were then asked to answer which goals were in conflict and, then, whether succeeding in one goal “had a helpful, harmful, or no effect on another striving.” Finally, the participants were asked about ambivalence—whether succeeding at one goal over another would make them unhappy. Emmons and King followed up with this group a year later.
    Not surprisingly, the results revealed that people were most ambivalent about goals that were in conflict with other goals. Both conflict and ambivalence were associated with loss of psychological well-being and health problems.
    In a second experiment, after they filled out the goal lists and noted conflicts and ambivalences, the participants filled out mood reports twice a day for twenty-one days. They listed both positive (happy, joyful, pleased) and negative (unhappy, angry, anxious) emotions. These were then correlated with self-reports on health as well as health records from the prior and current years. A third experiment had the original participants from the first study report on their thoughts and actions, prompted by beepers that went off at random intervals.
    What Emmons and King found reflects on both the cost of conflicting goals and the value of goal disengagement. First, theyfound that when there’s conflict between personal goals, people ruminate more, but do less, about the goals—another variation on the “stuck” theme: “Conflict appeared to have an immobilizing effect on action and was associated with lowered well-being.” As the researchers explained, besides leaving people stuck, conflict between goals also hurt people’s psychological and physical health.
    It turns out that conflict between goals without disengagement can literally make you sick, not to mention profoundly unhappy. The story of Linda and George demonstrates what conflicting goals look like in real life.
    Linda, age sixty-two, and George, sixty-five, have been married for eighteen years, and while their living arrangement is unconventional—she lives in San Diego and he’s in San Francisco, so they’ve always commuted—it’s hardly unique. They own a place in Colorado together. It was a second marriage for each of them, and when it