Trying to Avoid Stress is Counter Productive

A paper by H. Harrington Cleveland and Kitty S. Harris exploring  the processes that trigger cravings and prevent some addicts from building a sustained recovery. They found that recovering addicts who deal with stressful social experiences (such as ' hostility, insensitivity, interference, and ridicule' from others) by trying to avoid those experiences, have 'twice the number of cravings in a stressful day compared to persons who use problem solving strategies to understand and deal with the stress.' 


 'According to Cleveland, the findings suggest the impulse to avoid stress is never going to help recovering addicts because stressful experiences cannot be avoided.  "If your basic life strategy is to avoid stress, then your problems will probably end up multiplying and causing you more problems."