Baumeister (1990, 1991) explored escapism in light of selfhood, that is, people’s innate ability to monitor, assess, and reflect upon their self-presentations, aims and goals, and their own identity. With this ability for selfhood, it follows that our failures and losses also may be scrutinized in hindsight, which may lead to considerable distress, and when becoming disturbing to an intolerable extent, even lead people into suicidal behavior (Baumeister, 1990; Vohs and Baumeister, 2002). Selfhood may also lead to considerable distress for future occurrences, due to humans’ ability to imagine prospective situations and outcomes (Blouin-Hudon and Pychyl, 2015). According to Baumeister (1991), humans seek ways to unwind from this constant self-consciousness through endorsement of activities that pull focus away from their self, if just for their own psychological reward. Moreover, such escapes from self are embedded in our popular culture, such as supporting one’s favorite soccer, hockey, or basketball team every Sunday, going to the movies or concerts, or binging Netflix series (Stenseng et al., 2021). However, no efforts to operationalize these forms of everyday escapism were suggested by Baumeister (1991) and his colleagues based on their theoretical work, which stalled empirical investigations of these ideas.

One way of losing oneself is to engage in physical activity, which normally facilitates continuous focus on specific tasks, rules, and actions. The state of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) has often been used to describe the psychological condition of being cognitively and emotionally absorbed into activities, which has been highlighted as a motivational factor in sport activities. The flow state is defined as an engagement in which one’s abilities transcend the demands of the activity, which leads to intense cognitive focus, alertness, and a feeling of mastery and joy (Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre, 1989; Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). A self-report questionnaire was developed to assess nine aspects of flow (see Jackson and Marsh, 1996), which facilitated psychometrical assessments of flow that have spurred a large body of empirical studies (for a review, see Stamatelopoulou et al., 2018). In many respects, flow resembles the state of escape (Stenseng et al., 2012), and correspondingly, it has also been argued that flow has a darker side, instigating an addiction-like interest (Partington et al., 2009). Nevertheless, the concept of flow does not take into account the psychological drive behind the flow-producing activity engagement, and as such, does not fully illuminate the “escape” motives embedded in escapism, a prerequisite clearly stated in the definitions of the term.

Stenseng et al. (2012) presented a two-dimensional model of escapism and developed a corresponding self-report scale (the Escapism scale, see Stenseng et al., 2012, 2021). In their model, the dimensions Self-Suppression and Self-Expansion were identified, stemming from antagonistically different motivational mindsets. Self-Suppression is rooted in prevention motives (Higgins, 1998), in the sense that the individual engages in an activity to prevent, or suppress, troublesome thoughts or emotions. With this type of escapism motivation, the main goal of the activity engagement is to distract oneself from uncomfortable mental processes, such as thinking about future challenges and/or rumination about the past (“repetitive, prolonged, and recurrent negative thinking about one’s self, feelings, personal concerns and upsetting experiences;” Watkins, 2008, p. 164). When these mental processes stir negative emotions, individuals become triggered to suppress and/or alleviate them, and a common response is to dim these troublesome thoughts by pursuing experiences that may outshine them, at least momentarily. A similar motivation is seen in procrastination, simply defined as “putting off for tomorrow what one should have done today” (Milgram et al., 1988, p. 197), where individuals avoid an urgent task due to lack of a proactive mindset; simultaneously, the task becomes more and more pressing, and the situation more uncomfortable. However, the suppression of negative emotions also dampens positive ones (Gross, 2002), resulting in forms of engagement, independent of type of activity, that are less likely to be accompanied by positive effect. As shown by Stenseng et al. (2012, 2021), self-suppression is related to more trait emotion suppression and lower self-control, as well as fewer positive emotions in activity engagement. Importantly, self-suppression is also negatively related to subjective well-being (Stenseng et al., 2012, Studies 1 and 2; Stenseng et al., 2021).

With the other type of escapism, self-expansion, the motivation is rooted in promotion motives (Higgins, 1998). Individuals who engage out of motives to promote positive emotions are likely to gain more positive effect during the activity engagement, but they also experience more long-term benefits from the engagement. This type of motivation is related to more harmonious passion (Stenseng and Phelps, 2016); that is, an interest in an activity that nourishes one’s subjective well-being (Vallerand et al., 2003). It has also been shown to be associated with more flow experiences in the activity, compared to self-suppression (Stenseng et al., 2012, Study 3; Stenseng and Phelps, 2016). Moreover, self-expansion has been shown to be related to more basic need satisfaction (e.g., autonomy, relatedness, competence; see Deci and Ryan, 2000) during gaming (Stenseng et al., 2021, Study 1), as well as more positive affect experienced during the activity and higher general subjective well-being (Stenseng et al., 2012, Study 1). Also, when related to online streaming, self-expansion was related to an approach-oriented coping style (Moritz et al., 2016), which normally means acknowledging the challenges and then actively seeking to resolve them, whereas self-suppression was more strongly related to avoidance coping (Stenseng et al., 2021, Study 2), which is characterized by procrastination, suppression, or other measures to temporarily avoid the problem cognitively, in concordance with the cognitive appraisal hypothesis of psychological dependence (Szabo, 1995; see also Berczik et al., 2012).

In sum, there is considerable support for a two-dimensional operationalization of escapism, one maladaptive and one adaptive, across several types of activities. The two dimensions, Self-Suppression and Self-Expansion, are differently related to, for example, trait self-regulation, flow and effect in the activity, and subjective well-being. Still, no empirical studies have explored this model in relation to running, which truly is an activity where different psychological mindsets and states are evident (Masters and Lambert, 1989; Siebers et al., 2022), and which also is an activity with enormous popularity (Pereira et al., 2021).

As argued above, escapism may either be nourishing for one’s subjective well-being, or a threat to it, depending on which motivational mindset the escapism behavior reflects. In its maladaptive form, escapism appears to overlap with psychological characteristics of exercise addiction or exercise dependence (for a differentiation of these two, see Szabo et al., 2018).

First, when it comes to personality variables, both self-suppression and exercise dependence are related to lower self-control (Stenseng et al., 2012, Study 1; Zimanyi et al., 2021), but higher trait emotion suppression (Stenseng et al., 2012; Kun et al., 2022, Study 1), and avoidance coping (Egorov and Szabo, 2013; Stenseng et al., 2021, Study 2). Second, both are related to negative effect, or lack of positive effect, during activity engagement as well as after (Hausenblas and Symons Downs, 2002; Stenseng et al., 2012, Study 1; Stenseng et al., 2021, Study 1), as opposed to self-expansion. Third, both self-suppression and exercise dependence are related to intra-and interpersonal conflicts (Stenseng et al., 2012, Study 1; Stenseng et al., 2015). Fourth, both are related to obsessive passion for the activity, whereas self-expansion appears unrelated (Paradis et al., 2013; Stenseng and Phelps, 2016). Finally, both concepts are related to diminished life satisfaction (Hausenblas and Symons Downs, 2002; Stenseng et al., 2012, 2021).

The above-mentioned studies highlight the empirical overlap between self-suppression escapism and exercise dependence. However, these two concepts are anchored in quite different theoretical underpinnings. Most research on exercise dependence is focusing on the phenomenon itself; that is, addiction-like engagement in the activity and its correlational ties to personality characteristics (e.g., self-control, perfectionism, and coping) and as a framework to assess prevalence of this type of addiction across different populations (e.g., Lichtenstein et al., 2014). These empirical investigations have established exercise dependence as a sound, valid phenomenon, with both general and clinical relevance (Hausenblas and Symons Downs, 2002; Terry et al., 2004). However, by predominantly focusing on addiction-like sides of exercise dependence, inspired by other addictions, such as alcoholism (Szabo et al., 2015), this research does not fully illuminate why people maintain their maladaptive activity engagement, although some theoretical alleyways have been suggested (see Berczik et al., 2012; Egorov and Szabo, 2013). This is, after all, the great paradox: why do people keep on engaging in something that is detrimental to their emotional well-being and to their social bonds? What are the psychological nutrients in intense activity engagement that are so rewarding that people keep on doing what is bad for them?

The “state of escape” is arguably one such nutrient in activity engagements (Baumeister, 1991; Stenseng et al., 2012), and it may thus partly explain the paradoxical behavior of exercise dependence. However, in contrast to exercise dependence, the two-dimensional model of escapism targets two separate routes toward the escape experience, and thus suggests that the mere psychological experience in the activity must be seen in light of its motivational mindsets (prevention vs. promotion). To our knowledge, no studies have explicitly studied running from such a dualistic conceptualization of escapism. In fact, very few researchers have explored escapism in running at all. As an exception, Kerrigan et al. (2014) conducted interviews with runners on how musicalization affected their running experiences. These researchers found several examples on how participants used music to create soundscapes to their running, which promoted their focus during running and thus enhanced their experience of pleasurable escapism in running. Besides this one study, escapism as a motivational factor in running seems to remain unexplored.

Participants were recruited from social media sites for individuals with a particular interest in running (e.g., www.facebook.com/groups/lopeprat). Administrators for these sites were contacted by email to ask for permission to include the link to our online survey questionnaire in their news feed or in their forum. In addition, to recruit additional participants, a sponsored Facebook post was published with the inclusion question: Are you a regular runner? If the response was “yes,” they were forwarded to our questionnaire. Ethical concerns were addressed on the first page of the questionnaire, including confirmation of informed consent. On beforehand, the authors aligned the project with the internal policy for research ethics at the respective university. Also, a clinical psychologist was accessible to the participants throughout data collection per e-mail. Only fully answered questionnaires were submittable, ensuring data without missing values. The final sample consisted of 227 regular runners, 115 women and 112 men, with a mean age of 42.7 years (SD = 11.1 years). On average, they spent approximately 5 h on running per week (SD = 2.54). Nine participants ran more than 10 h per week.

Although the Escapism scale (Stenseng et al., 2012) has proven relevant across several types of activities, a factorial assessment of the scale was performed in order to examine its performance in relation to running specifically. Thus, a confirmatory factor analysis was performed in Mplus 8.01 (Muthén, 2016). The two-factor solution was examined by means of maximum likelihood estimation, which resulted in good model fits: χ²(43) = 74.78, p = 0.002, RMSEA = 0.057, SRMR = 0.052, CFI = 0.997, TLI = 0.992. Standardized factor loadings for items on the Self-Expansion dimension ranged from 0.84 to 58 and from 0.83 to 0.55 on the Self-Suppression dimension (see Table 1). Results supported the two-dimensional operationalization of escapism embedded in the Escapism scale and that this motivational dualism is found in recreational running.

Bivariate correlation analyses showed, most notably (see Table 2), that Self-Expansion was positively correlated with subjective well-being (r = 0.17, p < 0.05), whereas Self-Suppression was negatively correlated (r = −0.38, p < 0.01). Somewhat surprisingly, both Self-Expansion (r = 0.34, p < 0.01) and Self-Suppression (r = 0.53, p < 0.01) were positively correlated with exercise dependence, but to substantially different degrees. Self-Expansion and Self-Suppression were only moderately correlated (r = 0.22, p < 0.01). Of notice, Self-Expansion and Self-Suppression were not differently related to gender (r ≠ p = 0.46), age (r ≠ p = 0.37), or amount of running (r ≠ p = 0.08).

In sum, the correlational analyses supported the two-dimensional conceptualization of escapism, in the sense that Self-Expansion and Self-Suppression were substantially differently correlated to exercise dependence and subjective well-being, but not differently related to age and gender, and they only modestly overlapped each other.

As suggested in the introduction, the two sets of escapism motives could play an explanatory role in how exercise dependence and life satisfaction are empirically entangled. To test this more dynamic approach to the data, which calls for the control of overlapping variance between study variables, we turned to path analyses (Kline, 2015). We are aware of the distinct limitations restricting any causal inferences from path analyses on cross-sectional data (Kline, 2015), and we emphasize that this approach was taken to give a clearer image of the interrelations of the variables, not their true causal structure.

A structural path model was defined in AMOS 28 from the theoretical assumptions outlined in the introduction: Exercise dependence hampers subjective well-being, but the two escapism dimensions add explanatory power to this relationship, controlling for gender, age, and amount of running per week. First, a simple model was tested, containing only exercise dependence as predictor and subjective well-being as outcome, but also including each of the control variables. As expected, a significant relationship was found, also when controlling for these third variables (ß = −38., p < 0.001). Then, when including both Self-Expansion and Self-Suppression as predictors in the model, with additional covariates between all endogenous variables, the relationships between exercise dependence and well-being waned but were still significant (ß = −0.28, p < 0.001). However, both Self-Suppression (ß = −0.31, p < 0.001) and Self-Expansion (ß = 0.32, p < 0.001) had significant predictive value in the model, and in opposite directions (negative vs. positive, respectively), emphasizing their explanatory role in predicting the variance in well-being over and above exercise dependence (see Figure 1).