Anxiety and avoidance are closely linked. The fear associated with anxiety can drive you to avoid situations or tasks. And this is natural, because it comes naturally to us to try to avoid anxiety.
However, avoiding anxiety-provoking situations tends to perpetuate a cycle of further anxiety and avoidance, which tends to escalate over time.
In the moment, avoidance can feel like a pretty effective way to manage anxiety. Afraid of talking in front of others? Don’t speak up in meetings or class, and bam! No anxiety!
But avoiding that anxiety often creates more stress and anxiety in the long run. In the above example, staying quiet in class may interfere with your education. You might feel unfulfilled and hard on yourself for not sharing your ideas.
Avoidance can increase anxiety
Avoiding things sends a message to our survival brain that we have successfully escaped danger through avoidance. This message reinforces that the danger was real. The next time you are in a similar situation, chances are you will feel even more anxious about it.
Excessive avoidance is a core feature of several anxiety disorders. It is a distinctive feature of social anxiety disorder, phobias, and agoraphobia. It also contributes to the persistence of anxiety symptoms in generalized anxiety and panic disorder.
When you feel anxious, avoidance can help you feel less upset, worried, and afraid. The resulting rapid decrease in anxiety feels very reinforcing. However, what your brain has learned is, “Oh, good thing I avoided that threat! I’m safe now! I won’t try that dangerous thing again!”
The Anxiety and Avoidance Spiral
Not surprisingly, this cycle reinforces the avoidance, making it harder to eventually face your fear. This is why anxiety and avoidance can easily generalize from one thing to another.
Our brain mistakenly thinks it is protecting us from harm by avoiding something anxiety-provoking. In its attempts to keep us safe, our brain finds more and more things to “protect” us from.
When you eventually need to face a situation you have avoided, the experience can be highly overwhelming. Because your brain learned that avoiding the situation has kept us safe, engaging in the situation feels truly dangerous!
These experiences of high anxiety can then trigger additional levels of unwanted feelings, such as frustration, guilt, shame, or despair.
Even though it’s normal to want to avoid anxiety, it’s important to remember that anxiety itself is not dangerous. It’s an unpleasant feeling, that may signal danger, but may be an overactive nervous system.
Anxiety and Avoidance: Do You Need Therapy?
Because avoidance usually increases anxiety over time, avoidance behaviors are generally considered to be maladaptive forms of coping. As a result, reducing avoidance behaviors is almost always an important target in therapy for anxiety.
Therapy for anxiety often focuses on facing your fears, and learning to manage your stress instead of avoiding it. In turn, learning to cope with stress decreases anxiety and avoidance, making it easier to face your fears.
Do you need therapy if you have anxiety and avoidance? The answer really depends.
If you find yourself living smaller than you want to, and your anxiety keeps increasing, therapy might right for you. It can help you to try out new behaviors with less anxiety. And, you can learn to return to activities that you previously felt able to do. Your life, and your confidence, will expand.
Your world may have become smaller and smaller over time, as your “things to avoid” category expands. You may not think much about the anxiety-provoking things that you are avoiding. Instead, it may just feel like you’re going about your business and doing things in your preferred fashion.
Then one day, you realize that you are having trouble doing things that you want or need to do. Errands or social activities that used to be easy now feel impossible.
This is the point where I see many people reach out for help with therapy.
That said, many people are able to take advantage of self-help ways to manage anxiety. It is not impossible to reverse the anxiety and avoidance spiral on your own. Books, podcasts and online courses are a great place to start if therapy doesn’t feel right for you currently.
Many of my clients with anxiety tell me that they start therapy because they feel like they’ve lost control. Their attempts to manage their anxiety on their own are not working, and so they reach out.
Helping people decrease their avoidance is a big part of what I do as a therapist and educator. Why? Because it helps! Anxiety is very treatable.
What is Adaptive Avoidance?
But wait, don’t try to stop avoiding everything in the name of improved mental health! It’s important to note that there can be healthy avoidance, too.
Avoidance can be an adaptive way to react when we feel threatened. When the brain detects a threat, we naturally want to avoid it in order to protect ourselves. In this sense, avoidance can actually keep us safe and protect us from actual danger.
So how do you know when your avoidance behavior is adaptive, and when it should be, er, avoided?
In some situations, behavior that we think of as avoidance or escape strategies can be good coping strategies or ways to deal with problems.
Let’s say that you avoid something stressful by doing something healthy. For example, you go on a walk instead of staring at a blank canvas and freaking out.
You didn’t approach the problem directly, but you did take an action that positively affected your response to the problem. You’ll likely return to that canvas in a better headspace. (The key is to return to it, though, and not avoid it forever!)
It is healthy to practice techniques that help you feel calmer as you face difficult situations. In this way, you empower yourself to face your stressors more effectively.
When used appropriately, you can use avoidance to strengthen your sense of control over a situation or a possible threat. Avoiding a stressful situation to regulate your emotions sets you up for facing that situation successfully.
There is research supporting this idea that, depending on their roles, avoidance strategies can be a beneficial part of managing anxiety.
Avoidance as a Coping Strategy for Anxiety
Avoidance can be a short-term strategy to manage your emotional response to a stressful situation. It can have a protective role in the short term, even though in the long-term avoidance is likely to increase your anxiety.
Avoidance and Grief
For example, using denial as a coping mechanism when you’re grieving a loss can protect you. You can process the loss in smaller increments when you move in and out of denial. Otherwise, it can be too much to intellectually and emotionally digest all at once.
In this case, denial is a form of avoidance that helps titrate your exposure to the painful feelings around your loss.
Seen in this way, denial and avoidance help us regulate our emotions in the aftermath of a traumatic event. You need some mental space if the situation is too painful to cope with immediately. This is not pathological; this is called being human.
Avoidance and Stress Management
On a smaller scale, avoidance can help you step back from stressful situations, giving you space to sort out your thoughts and feelings.
Even if it’s a small stressor and not a trauma, taking this mental space can help you better cope with difficult feelings. It affords you some time to step back before reacting. It also gives you time to implement coping skills, such as breathing exercises or challenging irrational assumptions.
In short, escaping or withdrawing from a stressful situation for a short time is a legitimate short-term strategy to deal with your emotions. It can help you protect your bandwidth, shore up internal and external resources, and maintain your boundaries.
It’s important to be honest with yourself about your avoidance, however. If you find yourself navigating avoidance and anxiety on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to spend some time sorting out what avoidance is helping you, and what may be prolonging or increasing your anxiety.
Summary: Anxiety and Avoidance
Avoidance is typically discouraged in dealing with anxiety, because it can contribute to the maintenance and increase of anxiety symptoms.
But, sometimes avoidance can be healthy. If you can be strategic about it, avoidance can be used as a tool, to manage your bandwidth, give you a sense of control, and empower you to side-step things when your energy would be better used elsewhere.
Research supports that some avoidance may be adaptive. If a situation feels too unpredictable and/or dangerous, short-term disengagement can strengthen your sense of control, and help you re-engage in a better headspace.
Because anxiety and avoidance are so intertwined, it’s a good idea to stay aware of your avoidance patterns. A certain amount of brutal honesty with yourself may be involved!
If you want help from a therapist for anxiety and avoidance, I encourage you to reach out to me. I have over 20 years of experience helping people overcome anxiety, and I am authorized to treat people in online therapy in 40 states.
You can schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation with me here. If I’m not the right therapist for you, I can provide you with resources so that you can find the help that you need.
Remember, anxiety is treatable! There is relief for you.
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