Why we mistake relief for safety (and why it matters)

Do you ever avoid something difficult just to stop your heart from racing?

Almost a decade ago, I received an email from my PhD supervisor with the subject line “Feedback.” Even though she was a kind and supportive supervisor, my heart immediately started racing. So I did what I’ve done in many moments of my adult life: I swiped the email into the archive and avoided opening it. The relief was immediate, that warm feeling of having narrowly escaped something unpleasant. But as I’ve spent the last several years researching, relief is not the same thing as safety.

A new project

I’m excited to finally share a project that has growing as part of my work at A&J Education.

Over the past few years, I’ve been working on a book, exploring why we often seek immediate comfort instead of building the deeper capacity to tolerate uncertainty.

Many of the anxieties students and families experience around high-stakes education are shaped by this same dynamic: we try to soothe distress quickly, rather than developing the internal stability to sit with it.

Why Substack?

Whilst the book is going through editing and all other phases needed to publish this kind of work

I’ve launched a Substack as a space to think out loud, where I’ll be writing about:

• Research on human behaviour and technology
• Insights from my interview and case studies
• The everyday patterns that shape how we deal with anxiety, uncertainty and relationships

Read the first post: The first piece is live now. It dives deeper into that unopened email moment and why our brains are often wired to prioritise the intoxicating calm of avoidance.

Warmly,
​Jorge Pereira Campos

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