What Is Avoidance Anxiety and How Do I Overcome It?
It is in our nature to want to gravitate to the things that we enjoy, and to steer clear of those that we do not. We typically do not go out of our way to put ourselves in situations where we feel embarrassed, out of place, and not having a good time. The question is, when we experience these adverse situations, what do we do about them? Sometimes, rather than face situations head-on or enter difficult situations more than once, we retreat from them and begin to avoid them. When a situation induces symptoms of anxiety, we can experience sweaty palms, increased heart rate, rapid breathing, and trouble concentrating, to name a few. We can choose to go through whatever is causing us feelings of anxiety, or we can shrink back from it. When we retreat from these situations, we are engaging in avoidance. When we use that as a coping mechanism to deal with anxiety, it can often lead to anxiety feelings growing over time. What Is Avoidance? Avoidance is a term often used to describe a way of coping to protect us from real or perceived harm, and it is an effective survival mechanism. When something makes us feel anxious, we tend to avoid that thing. At first, we might feel less anxious as a result. The issue is that after a while, the thing we are anxiously avoiding can seem harder to approach, and the problem seems much larger than before. Avoiding fearful situations seems to make rational sense, but in truth, it actually increases and fortifies our fears. While this is the most common result of avoidance, there are some benefits to avoidance. Not all avoidance is unnecessary. The nervous system does a good job of helping us avoid things that can truly harm us. It is when we associate harm with things that are not harmful that we experience difficulties. For instance, if you eat at a particular restaurant and get food [...]
