Why Relief Feels So Damn Good
Different forms of relief — from pain, or from the fretful anticipation wrapped up in a political election — look quite similar in the brain.
The Greek philosopher Epicurus famously described pleasure as the absence of pain. And, according to some scholars, Epicurus believed that the greatest form of pleasure comes from the abatement of pain — that is, from relief of some form of torment.
“I think it makes a lot of sense to talk about relief right now,” says Jack Nitschke, PhD, a psychologist and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “I think people are going to be feeling a lot of very strong emotions all at once, and it’s going to be helpful for them to think about those and to try to understand them.”
“Relief requires that there be something unpleasant leading up to it.”
Some of Nitschke’s work has explored “aversive anticipation,” or the ways in which a person’s attempts to predict and prepare for some unpleasant experience can promote anxiety and other debilitating mental states. He says that anticipation and relief are tightly braided. “Relief requires that there be something unpleasant leading up to it,” he says.
