Are We Raising Emotionally Avoidant Adults and Calling It Self-Care?

Recently, a student emailed me to let me know that she wouldn’t be attending class for the next few weeks because she was ‘prioritizing herself’. It’s something that I’ve been seeing more frequently. This one message stood out to me, not because self-prioritization is inherently wrong, but because of how commonly withdrawal is being reframed as growth. When did avoiding challenges become synonymous with strength?

I frequently hear phrases like ‘protecting my peace’, ‘this is triggering’, ‘I need to step away for my mental health’, or ‘I don’t have the capacity for this right now’. Mental health absolutely matters, and there are times and situations when stepping back is necessary, such as illness, grief, and acute mental health crises. Compassion and flexibility matter, but ordinary stress, frustration, or challenges are not the same as harm, and if we continue to treat them as such, we risk shrinking the very capacities that young adults need to develop. If higher education becomes organized primarily around comfort, it ceases to prepare students for life beyond university.

University is inherently demanding, and intellectual growth requires some cognitive discomfort. Similarly, relational growth often requires navigating conflict. If we are truly trying to help young adults to prepare for life after graduation, we must allow space for discomfort, not to overwhelm, but to teach them how to regulate, endure, and ultimately solve problems with increasing independence. 

Digital environments increasingly allow us to curate not only our social interactions, but our ideas. When young adults are consistently shielded from intellectual friction, confirmation bias deepens, and critical thinking can be short-circuited. Growth, whether emotional, relational, or cognitive, requires engagement with, not elimination of, discomfort.

The Line Between Regulation and Avoidance

An important distinction that is often missing from this conversation is that emotional regulation is not the same as emotional avoidance. On the surface, both can look similar; both may involve stepping back, taking space, or reducing intensity. But psychologically, they’re different processes with very different outcomes. 

Emotional regulation involves recognizing distress, calming the nervous system, and then re-engaging with the challenge from a calmer, steadier place. It isn’t about eliminating discomfort but rather increasing one’s capacity to remain present within it. For example, emotional regulation allows one to acknowledge that ‘this is difficult’, and ‘I need to gather myself so that I can face it.’ Over time, this process builds confidence because each successful encounter with stress becomes evidence that hard things can be managed. 

In late adolescence and early adulthood, identity formation is a central developmental task. This period is characterized by change, instability, and increasing responsibility. The capacity to manage stress doesn’t develop by removing it. It develops through repeated, supported exposure to manageable challenges. 

Emotional avoidance, in contrast, removes the stressors rather than building capacity to face them. It may involve withdrawing from a difficult conversation, dropping a demanding course, ignoring feedback, or avoiding situations that provoke discomfort. In the short term, avoidance reduces anxiety. The relief that comes from avoidance is immediate and can even feel empowering. Digital environments have made avoidance easier than ever; a mute button, an unfollow, a closed tab, and in so doing have normalized it as a default response.

Social media platforms reward emotional certainty and moral clarity. They often amplify language about ‘protecting your peace’, ‘cutting off toxicity’, often without nuance or context. Algorithms privilege content that validates rather than challenges, and decisive emotional messaging spreads more easily than developmental complexity.

At the same time, constant exposure to curated lives and public commentary heightens social comparison and perceived threats. Ordinary stress can feel amplified if it seems like everyone else is succeeding. The threshold for tolerable discomfort shrinks when the nervous system is saturated. 

If avoidance becomes the primary strategy for managing stress, the nervous system never learns that discomfort can be tolerated and worked through. The difficult class is never completed, the tense discussion is never repaired, and the challenging assignment is never revised after failure. Each escape reinforces that discomfort is something to be avoided.

In higher education, this distinction is especially important. University is not just a place to acquire information; it is a developmental training ground for adulthood. Students aren’t just learning content, but also how to handle deadlines, disagreements, evaluations, uncertainty, and responsibility. If the default response to stress is to disengage, many of these developmental opportunities can be missed.

None of this suggests that students should push through genuine crises or ignore serious mental health needs. It's also worth acknowledging that not all withdrawal is unfounded. Some students are navigating genuinely under-resourced environments, inadequate mental health support, or institutional failures that make discomfort feel less like growth and more like neglect. The answer in those cases isn't more endurance, it's better support. But that's a different problem than the one this piece is addressing. If ordinary academic and relational challenges are consistently framed as threats to well-being, we may be inadvertently making things harder for our students in the long run.

Beyond the Classroom

The consequences of this shift don’t end at graduation. Patterns rehearsed in adolescence and early adulthood tend to solidify over time. If withdrawal becomes the primary stress response, young adults may enter the workplace less prepared for feedback, less tolerant of ambiguity, and more likely to interpret ordinary professional pressure as personal harm. 

Work environments often require navigating criticism, managing deadlines, resolving conflict, and persisting through projects that are sometimes neither exciting nor affirming. Relationships might require repair after disagreements. Parenting requires endurance. Civic life requires engagement with perspectives that may not align with personal views. None of us is exempt from these demands. 

When distress tolerance remains underdeveloped, anxiety often increases rather than decreases. Novelty feels threatening, feedback destabilizing, conflict intolerable. Resilience is not only built in moments of crisis; it’s also built in the ordinary, repeated experiences of doing difficult things and realizing one can survive and even grow through them.

Building Capacity Instead

So what might a healthier model look like?

First, we must reclaim the original purpose of self-care. Self-care was never meant to eliminate challenge. It was meant to restore capacity. Rest isn’t the same as relief. Where relief removes discomfort, rest rebuilds strength. When self-care becomes synonymous with exit, we confuse temporary ease with long-term resilience.

Healthy self-care allows a student to say, “I need a moment,” not “I am done.” It creates space for recovery so re-engagement becomes possible. Regulation is what allows us to return. Avoidance ensures that we don’t.

For example, a student overwhelmed by deadlines might take an intentional evening of rest, stepping away from screens, sleeping, exercising, or speaking with a friend, and return the next day prepared to complete the work. Or a student upset by difficult feedback might pause to regulate the initial surge of emotion before revisiting the comments with curiosity rather than withdrawal. In digital life, logging off temporarily to calm comparison or outrage can serve the same purpose. In each case, rest restores capacity so that engagement remains possible. The challenge isn’t erased; the student is strengthened.

Second, we must acknowledge the role of digital architecture in shaping our thresholds for discomfort. Digital platforms are designed to reduce friction. They offer immediate distraction, curated agreement, and emotional validation at scale. When relief is always one scroll away, the skills required to sit with discomfort weaken. If our environments consistently remove cognitive and emotional friction, we shouldn’t be surprised when tolerance declines.

This doesn’t mean abandoning digital media. It means becoming intentional about it. Following diverse perspectives rather than only affirming ones. Pausing before disengaging from ideas that unsettle us. Creating spaces, online and offline, where disagreement is navigated rather than muted. If algorithms are optimized for comfort and certainty, development may require us to deliberately reintroduce complexity and nuance.

For example, a student who notices rising frustration while scrolling through political or social content might resist the instinct to immediately mute or unfollow. Instead, they might pause, read the argument fully, and ask, “Why does this unsettle me?” This does not require agreement, but it builds cognitive flexibility. Similarly, intentionally following a small number of thoughtful voices across perspectives can counteract the narrowing effect of algorithmic curation. The goal is not exposure for shock value, but exposure for growth.

Third, institutions of higher education can model a different narrative. Compassion and accountability are not opposites. We can validate distress while still inviting growth. We can design classrooms that normalize struggle as part of mastery. We can teach emotional regulation and distress tolerance explicitly, rather than assuming they will emerge naturally.

Early in a semester, an instructor might discuss the difference between harm and discomfort, explaining that confusion, frustration, and cognitive strain are often signs of learning, not failure. Students can be taught simple regulation strategies: how to pause before reacting to feedback, how to break overwhelming tasks into manageable steps, and how to tolerate the discomfort of not immediately understanding. When struggle is normalized and skills are named, students learn that difficulty is not a signal to exit but an invitation to grow.

Across my recent writing, I’ve returned repeatedly to a similar tension: we are mistaking comfort for well-being. In digital life, we mistake stimulation for meaning. In self-care culture, we mistake relief for restoration. In education, we risk mistaking avoidance for strength. The through line is consistent: when friction disappears entirely, growth stalls.

The goal is to raise adults who know that feeling overwhelmed is survivable. Adults who can rest, recalibrate, and return. Adults who can sit with disagreement without collapsing. Adults who can encounter difficulty without immediately interpreting it as harm.

If we want resilience, we can’t build lives organized entirely around the elimination of discomfort. We must build lives and learning environments that teach young adults how to move toward and through challenges with steadiness rather than away from them. That student who emailed me may eventually return to class, or she may not. Either way, the question isn't whether she needs space. It's whether that space is being used to prepare for re-entry, or to avoid it entirely.