Do you or someone you know never take things seriously?
Some people seem to move through life with a seemingly carefree attitude.
This may seem an ideal way to live a happy, healthy, stress-free life. But the inability to take anything seriously can actually have the opposite effect.
Not treating relationships, work, or societal problems with the seriousness they deserve, can cost you those things.
Like most things in life, balance is the key.
If you find your inability to take anything seriously is harming your life, it may help to understand why.
And as with most things, psychology offers us some answers:
1. Defense mechanisms.
These are strategies we subconsciously develop to protect ourselves from anxiety, emotional pain, and other psychological issues.
These mechanisms serve a protective function, but they can interfere with our ability to take things seriously.
A few examples include denial, humor, and displacement.
People in denial refuse to accept the reality of a situation.
If they’re faced with serious circumstances, they will often minimize the issue, making it out to be far less significant than it is.
Denial is harmful because it causes a person to underestimate a problem until it completely blows up in their face.
Humor is a defensive coping mechanism for many.
Some people make jokes to deflect and avoid the seriousness of a situation. This isn’t always bad unless it prevents them from addressing and dealing with the issue.
Displacement is the subconscious redirection of strong emotions from one source to another.
For example, a person who is angry at their partner for not being supportive may avoid having a serious conversation about this and will instead blow up about a trivial issue like the dishes not being done.
2. Fear of vulnerability.
The fear of being vulnerable creates emotional barriers that are hard to overcome.
Fear of vulnerability typically comes from a reluctance to share our true thoughts and feelings because it makes us feel exposed and unprotected.
As a result, we avoid the deep emotional engagement that’s required in serious situations.
Emotional detachment is common when people fear vulnerability.
You may distance yourself from your emotions or the emotions of others to prevent becoming invested in the situation. This often gives the impression that you’re indifferent or untroubled by whatever’s going on.
Or perhaps you don’t want to show you care about a situation, because you think it makes you look weak. So you act like it’s no big deal because you’re bigger than whatever the issue is.
3. Cognitive distortions.
Cognitive distortions are habitual patterns of biased or irrational thinking that lead to inaccurate perceptions of reality.
These distortions can affect our ability to take things seriously by skewing our understanding and emotional responses to a situation.
There are many types of cognitive distortion. Minimization and mental filtering are two.
Minimization distorts perception by causing an individual to downplay or dismiss significant events to avoid having to deal with them.
Mental filtering can be positive or negative. If you’re someone who often uses a positive mental filter, you ignore the negatives of a situation, and instead focus exclusively on the positives.
Whilst this can be beneficial, it can cause us to perceive things through ‘rose-tinted glasses’ and therefore ignore serious aspects of a situation that need dealing with.
4. Past trauma.
Many people don’t realize just how deeply past trauma can affect the present.
When it comes to taking things seriously, trauma causes people to create emotional barriers and influences their perception of present events.
Hypervigilance and avoidance are a common result of trauma.
When you’ve experienced trauma, you’re constantly on the lookout for potential threats so you can avoid them to ensure you either aren’t triggered or harmed again.
By doing so, you may keep your distance from a situation that requires your engagement.
Trauma survivors may also experience heightened emotional reactivity. That is, they react strongly to seemingly minor triggers or stressors.
This emotional dysregulation makes it challenging for the survivor to maintain a balanced perspective on matters.
In many cases, they’ll avoid situations that trigger their emotional reactions altogether, which may mean avoiding engaging with serious issues.
5. Attention difficulties.
Attention differences, such as those associated with ADHD, can interfere with someone’s ability to deal with serious matters.
ADHDers may struggle to stay on task or commit to serious conversations, particularly if it’s not something they’re finding stimulating or rewarding.
Impulsivity and novelty-seeking are common traits in some ADHD types. An individual may act unexpectedly without fully considering the seriousness or significance of their actions.
Impulsivity pairs with hyperactivity, which creates restlessness. This restlessness can manifest either externally or internally and can cause the person to become or appear disengaged.
In ADHD, differences in executive function can make it hard to prioritize and plan the mundane but important aspects of life, despite your best intentions.
For example, you may commit to an important conversation after work but completely lose track of when to finish up, because of time blindness.
If you have ADHD but aren’t yet aware, it can make you feel as though you don’t take anything seriously because you don’t yet have that understanding of how your brain works.
6. Low self-esteem.
Low self-esteem can often manifest as an inability to take things seriously.
Negative self-talk and low self-worth can make us think we don’t deserve success, happiness, or fulfillment.
Because of that, we may self-sabotage by not taking those things seriously. The result is that we lose out, which only reinforces our negative self-view.
Some people with low self-esteem rely on external validation to boost their self-worth.
As a result, they prioritize pleasing others by conforming to the social expectations of the people they want approval from.
If the people around them act like they don’t care, the person seeking validation also acts like they don’t care.
A fear of failure can also keep you from engaging meaningfully because you don’t want your worst fears confirmed.
You don’t want to be confronted with the idea that your negative self-perception is correct. So you adopt a blasé attitude and avoid anything that involves serious effort.
7. Parenting styles.
Parenting styles significantly influence the way a child develops into an adult.
They can impact the attitudes a child adopts when it comes to dealing with serious situations.
For example, permissive parenting typically has few rules and boundaries, giving children a great deal of freedom and independence.
That fosters creativity and autonomy, but it may also cause the child to adopt a carefree attitude because they don’t understand the importance of rules or the consequences of actions.
Authoritarian parents, on the other hand, enforce strict rules and expect obedience without question. Their children may not develop the skills needed to work through serious situations, because all they’ve been taught is to blindly follow the rules for fear of punishment.
Inconsistent parents erratically flip between permissive and authoritarian styles, meaning the child may never learn when things need to be taken seriously, and when they don’t. As a result, they may avoid dealing with serious situations altogether.
8. Personality traits.
Certain personality traits can predispose a person to take things seriously or not.
It doesn’t mean we can’t learn otherwise; it’s just we may not naturally view a situation with the gravity it deserves.
If you’re naturally a laid-back person, you likely have a relaxed attitude toward life, which can make it hard to adjust your mentality when it comes to tackling serious situations.
If you’re an optimistic person, you likely look for the good or positive in most situations. As a result, you may dismiss or gloss over serious aspects of a situation if you perceive them as negative.
If you’re a risk-taker, you’re naturally inclined to seek out adventurous and novel experiences. This may mean you don’t fully consider the seriousness of situations or the consequences of your actions.
9. Social influence.
Social influence plays a large role in shaping attitudes and behaviors, including just how seriously we might interpret a situation.
The most common social influence is peer pressure.
Peer pressure can sway an individual to adopt the behaviors and attitudes of their group, even if they aren’t in line with their own values.
In a group where a devil-may-care attitude is encouraged, the person may find themselves mirroring that behavior.
Cultural attitudes towards seriousness affect the way members of that culture interact with the world.
If it’s common in a culture to turn everything into a joke, a person from that culture is going to have a difficult time keeping up a serious conversation.
Different role models influence the way people act, often subconsciously. If role models like parents, teachers, or celebrities aren’t prone to behaving seriously, the people who mimic their behavior may not either.
10. Mental health problems.
Not taking things seriously doesn’t necessarily mean treating them as a joke. It can mean you just don’t perceive or tackle serious situations with the gravity they require.
Mental health issues can play a role here.
Things like schizophrenia and psychosis are known to distort our perception of reality, and thus affect how seriously we take certain situations. However, depression and anxiety influence perceptions more subtly.
A depressed person experiencing a troubling situation may not be able to take it seriously because they just don’t feel anything about it. And an anxious person may understand the seriousness of the situation, but be so overwhelmed that they just can’t take action.
