The email I didn’t open

Let’s go down my memory lane back into my PhD times (oh those good old times)….

I remember receiving a notification that an email has arrived from my PhD supervisor the subject line read some like “Feedback.”

I was standing in the bathroom with toothbrush in one hand and my phone in the other, and my heart is going a thousand kms per hour which is somewhat unreasonable and disproportionate given that the email came from a kind woman at a good university.

So I do what I have done, in various forms, for most of my adult life. I swipe the email into the archive. The inbox is clean… out of sight, out of mind kinda thing. And almost immediately, there was a loosening sensation I can only describe as the feeling of having narrowly avoided a bullet.

That was relief!

And relief, I have spent the last several years learning, is not the same thing as safety.

I should probably introduce myself. My name is Jorge Pereira Campos. I now have a PhD from the University of St Andrews, where I studied technology, human behaviour and the perception of risk. I am Portuguese, I now live in between Porto, Vilnius, and London, and I run an education consultancy that works with families across the entire world. I have spent a good portion of my academic life researching how people interact with technology focusing, with some fantastic colleagues from The Netherlands on location tracking in peer-to-peer and parenting relationships.

I am currently writing a book called The Relief Trap, and its central argument is that most of the behaviours we judge most harshly - avoidance, people-pleasing, jealousy, the need to control, even some forms of infidelity - are not moral failures (perhaps a controversial take). They are neurobiologically driven strategies for chasing relief at the cost of genuine safety. They are what a nervous system does when it learned, very early in life, that the world is not a safe place for distress.

This newsletter is where I think out loud about that argument as the book takes shape. I am not going to be writing polished extracts, promotional BS, or AI-generated synthetic stuff. I will be posting about research that surprises me, the personal patterns I keep catching myself in, some case studies and interviews I have been conducting for the past 5 years (both in technologically mediated / enabled relationships as well as in ‘analogue’ relationships).

But first, I want to explain why the distinction between relief and safety matters.

Relief is what I felt when I archived that email. Anxiety disappears when removing a perceived threat (e.g., cancelling a difficult conversation, a glass of wine after a hard day, checking your phone for the fourth time in ten minutes to see if they have replied or even seen your message). It works amazingly well and I believe that is the problem with it. And because it works, we do it again, and again, and again. And each time we do, we are telling our nervous system to believe that the thing we just avoided was genuinely dangerous and the behaviour that provide relief (checking phone, drinking, smoking) is to be reinforced.

Safety, at least the kind that I am interested in, does not come and go as it pleases. It is a deeper physiological state. A particular configuration of the nervous system that allows a person to tolerate uncertainty, to sit with discomfort, to stay present in a difficult conversation without shutting down or bolting. It is the internal capacity to say: fucking shit! This is fucking hard, and I do not like it, and I am going to stay here anyway.

The difference plays out in practice more often than most of us realise. Two people receive the same piece of critical feedback at work (I know this sounds familiar). One feels a spike of anxiety, sits with it, engages with the feedback (e.g., asks questions, pushes back where appropriate, absorbs what is useful, whatever…). The other feels the same spike and immediately begins to manage it: deflecting, agreeing with everything to make the conversation end, or going quiet and shutting down entirely only for resentment and self-criticism to grow. The situation is very similar, in my opinion. The difference is purely internal: one person has access to a felt sense of safety while the other does not, so they reach for relief instead.

Where does this internal resource come from? Why do some people carry it without thinking, while others - often highly intelligent, highly self-aware, deeply functional people (trying to boost my self esteem here - spend their lives scrambling for substitutes?

I interviewed people about their relationships. I remember a woman, ‘Annie’ (pseudonym) telling me she checks her adult daughter’s location on her phone fifteen to twenty times a day. When we moved into trying to understand the ‘why’, she, at some point, said: “The relief I get is like a drug.”

This was not a parent describing a parenting strategy. She was describing a nervous system that cannot tolerate not knowing. The checking does not make her daughter safer. It makes the mum feel less afraid, for a few minutes, until the fear returns and she checks again. Relief. Not safety. This somewhat hits home as I write openly in the book as it is a pattern I have dealt with for the longest part of my life.

The developmental origins of how a nervous system learns whether the world is survivable are what the book is about. Attachment theory, polyvagal neuroscience, the mechanics of how early caregiving literally shapes the architecture of emotional regulation. I have been navigating quite rough waters as this has the potential to be somewhat controversial especially around infidelity, and parental behaviours. So, I write quite thoroughly that I am not assigning blame. The parents who appear in these pages, including my own, are not villains in the slightest sense of the word. Most of them were doing what they could with what they had. My objective is for the book to discuss mechanism. I firmly believe that if you want to change a pattern, you need to understand the machinery that drives it… you cannot fix an engine by shouting at the car (I tried it).

I will be writing here every week. Some of it will be science translated, some might be personal (which is an entire world of its own), some will be from my own research, and from families I have interviewed or worked with.

The stuff people read in some books that “you are enough”, or that “your trauma is your superpower”, or that “healing is a journey of self-love” you will not read or hear me saying any of that stuff. I personally find that kind of language unhelpful; I am more interested in how things work than in how they should feel.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, I am glad you are here. If you know someone who spends a lot of energy managing their anxiety without ever quite resolving it (i.e., someone who understands their patterns perfectly but cannot seem to stop) you might consider sending this their way (I would thank you).

The email, by the way, contained a single paragraph of measured feedback and a suggestion to rephrase a couple paragraphs. I opened it the next morning. It was fine. It was always going to be fine. But my nervous system, which has its own annoying agenda, did not know that. It just learned the wrong lesson, a long time ago, about what happens when you let difficult things reach you.

That is what we are going to talk about here, amongst other things.

Jorge