Mercedes Coffman

They're designed for that.

They're designed for rewarding avoidance because it's all about novelty.

It's about dopamine.

It's about new matches every single day.

And nobody really spends the time to emotionally invest in one particular relationship anymore.

Well, there's several different ways.

It's terrible for the nervous system, first, because an avoidant person, although, for example, an emotionally unavailable person who largely is avoidant, they don't just present themselves as emotionally unavailable.

They usually present themselves with intensity, with love bombing, and so you get pulled into that dynamic pretty quickly, even if you're an emotionally available person.

And so now you're getting attached to an emotionally unavailable person.

But once you start requiring effort and consistency and substance of the relationship, a lot of these people tend to reveal their true selves, which is a lack of capacity.

They cannot sustain relationship responsibilities.

And so your nervous system has this, you

And then it slowly starts to have to withdraw, which is kind of like this dopamine spike of excitement.

But then there's a crash because this emotionally unavailable person pulls away.

They become more and more avoidant.

And what tends to happen is you're now dealing with micro grief.

You're now wondering what happened.

And your nervous system now is spiking in cortisol, which is your stress hormones.

And so a lot of the times this changes people because they are experiencing fatigue, mood disorders, sleep disturbances, appetite disorders.

So I think that avoidance in general and emotional unavailability is changing people's nervous system.