550 v. AFFECTI vE PROCESSES
a more conscious deliberation on the likeli -
hood of success. If the person has had a lot of 
experience in some domain, memories from 
those experiences are encoded with a great 
deal of redundancy. When things get diffi -
cult in that domain, people often rely heavily 
on those memories to inform them about the 
likely outcome of the current effort.
This sometimes works to people’s advan -
tage (if the memories are mostly successes). 
But all too often, the residual sense is one of 
doubt or inadequacy. If that residual sense 
is strong enough, the person will experience 
an impulse to give up at the first signs of ad -
versity. When doubts are deeply ingrained, 
you may not even attend well to what’s going 
on in the current situation. Being convinced 
that the situation will end badly, you fail to 
realize that the difficulty you are experienc -
ing is minor and easily resolved. You give up 
trying, and the doubt strengthens further. 
This can eventuate in a tendency to “cata -
strophize” (Turk & Rudy, 1992).
This automatic overreliance on heavily en -
coded doubts might be viewed as a case in 
which people bring their own “stress readi -
ness” to the situation. There are many situa -
tions in life in which real but minor impedi -
ments arise. The person who brings a heavy 
burden of doubt into the situation is creating 
further impediments that need not be there. 
These further impediments constitute a 
source of stress for some people in situations 
that are not stressful for others.
Premature Disengagement of  Effort
Consider further the consequences of doubt. 
As we described earlier, doubt can cause 
people to scale back on goals or to give up 
on goals entirely. It can be bad for this to 
happen too readily. A person who gives 
up whenever things get difficult will have 
trouble reaching any goal in life. Disengag -
ing too fast keeps you from trying your best, 
and it short-  circuits potential successes (cf. 
Steele, 1997).
Sometimes the result is a repetitive pat -
tern of quitting and going on to something 
else. Such a lack of persistence, moving the 
person endlessly from goal to goal, can be 
a serious problem. It is not clear that it in -
volves great stress, however. If people really 
can put the failures behind them and move on, the stress of failure should be brief. Only 
if the recurring lack of commitment serves 
as a source of problems in and of itself will 
stress be maintained.
There is also a more subtle pattern as -
sociated with premature disengagement. It 
involves disengagement of effort,  but a con -
tinued commitment to the goal. This person 
is no longer trying, but has not gotten the 
goal out of mind. This combination may 
be reflected in rumination, efforts at self- 
distraction, off-task thinking, temporarily 
leaving the scene of the behavior, or cogni -
tive interference (Sarason, Pierce, & Sara -
son, 1996). Despite these goal-  irrelevant 
activities, the goal has not been abandoned. 
But any attempt to move toward it is spo -
radic, disrupted repeatedly.
The process is presumed to go like this: Dif -
ficulty leads to an interruption, and the per -
son’s doubts prompt disengagement, which 
is deflected into mental disengagement. This 
cannot be maintained, because the person 
has not given up the goal and eventually re -
confronts it. There then is a reengagement of 
effort, which may quickly lead to renewal of 
doubts and renewal of the impulse, too. Be -
cause there is continued commitment to the 
goal but no movement toward it, the person 
also experiences distress (Carver & Scheier, 
1990, 1998; Klinger, 1975; Pyszczynski & 
Greenberg, 1992).
In summary, premature disengagement 
of effort represents another case of an im -
pediment to movement toward a goal. The 
impediment in this case is the lack of effort, 
following from doubt. This situation could 
be made less stressful by devoting greater ef -
fort to goal attainment (and making prog -
ress in that direction), by abandoning the 
goal altogether, or by scaling the goal back 
to something more attainable.
Struggling Too Long toward  Unattainable  Goals
If there are drawbacks to withdrawing ef -
fort too quickly from goals that might be 
attained, then it is also bad to keep strug -
gling toward goals that are unattainable. 
Giving up is an indispensable part of self- 
regulation, because people need to be able to 
retrace their steps, back out of corners, free 
themselves to go elsewhere (Mens, Wrosch, 
& Scheier, 2015; Wrosch & Scheier, 2020; 