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 poisoning more than once, steering clear of that restaurant may be a good idea.  However, if avoidance is used in situations that are not appropriate, it can backfire and enlarge our problems. Instead of teaching us to confront our fears and grow in our ability to tolerate adversity, avoidance encourages us to be wary of change and more risk averse.

It is common for conflict to cause a sense of anxiety. Initially, avoiding conflict by steering clear of conversations that could generate conflict might feel like you are making progress. However, when you avoid having difficult conversations, it can create room for the underlying problem to grow.

What may have been a small conflict can become larger because it was not handled early. When situations like this escalate, it reinforces the negative feelings toward conflict and encourages further avoidance. This can lead to the issue growing and can cause more relationship problems.

With those things that cause us to feel anxious, avoidance is an unhealthy (or maladaptive) way to cope because it merely causes that sense of anxiety to grow. You typically end up experiencing more of the very thing you were trying to avoid. The more you try to avoid, the more that builds negative sensory stimuli and associations related to what you are avoiding. This cycle makes it that much harder to overcome.

Although avoidance can lead to immediate relief from anxiety feelings, it can generate other unwanted emotions such as sadness, frustration, as well as guilt and shame.

Signs of Avoidance Anxiety

How can you tell if you are using avoidance as a coping mechanism? Below are a few things that can help you pinpoint unhealthy avoidance.

• Your symptoms of anxiety causes you avoid certain situations, activities, locations, or people. If an occasion to encounter any of these comes up, you do everything possible to make sure you are not there, or that you are there for the shortest time possible.
• You knowingly or unknowingly sabotage a task or situation in some way. Avoidance may push you to try to bury or forget the task. You may also employ tactics such as missing deadlines, forgetting to put the event on your calendar, creating a scheduling conflict, or deliberately missing your appointments.
• Procrastination is also another way to avoid situations or things that make us anxious. This may look like doing something half-heartedly or distracting yourself with other tasks and forgetting your deadlines.
• Failing or delaying to make a firm decision on something may be a sign of avoidance.
• Avoidance can make one resort to people-pleasing to avoid conflict and stress in relationships.

Overcoming Avoidance Anxiety

Instead of avoiding the things that make us feel anxious, it is far better to begin confronting them so that you do not get stuck or allow anxiety to snowball into something much larger. It is important to learn how to cope with difficult things by approaching them head-on instead of avoiding them.  

Instead of taking the path-of-least-resistance and avoiding the things that cause you to experience anxiety, learning to confront your fears or aversion enables you to tolerate and face adversity. It can also teache you to adapt to difficult situations and overcome your feelings of anxiety. 

It's important for you not only to recognize that avoidance does not always work, but also that avoidance comes with a cost. It impacts our health and relationships, not to mention our sense of competence, which can be undermined when we avoid doing difficult things. 

A few things you can do to overcome anxiety through addressing it and not through avoidance include: 

Identify your stressor or cause Know what initiates your feelings of anxiety by marking the symptoms and observing the negative thought processes and/or patterns that accompany certain situations. This deeper awareness can bring understanding about how these patterns reinforce defensive and avoidance behaviors. These include feeling victimized, procrastinating, checking your phone, using escape tactics to avoid people at social gatherings, or the inability to say no to people.

Learn to tolerate the uncomfortable In life, you will encounter many things that are not comfortable. Avoiding these means that there is a higher likelihood that you will do so the next time such situations are presented. When you can sit with difficult and uncomfortable feelings, you have more options available to you about how you want to face the problem. You can allow yourself to stay in the situation and experience those feelings until they pass. 

Use cognitive restructuring To confront your avoidant behaviors requires learning to recognize distorted thought patterns and not trusting or believing them. Cognitive restructuring is about challenging your belief system and negative patterns of thought by disrupting these and replacing them with observations and thought processes based on reality. Our fears often magnify situations and build them up to be more than they are, and these ideas need to be dismantled. 

Try exposure The other side of avoidance is exposure. This is a systematic process through which you gradually face your fears step-by-step. You repeatedly expose yourself to low levels of stress in the situation that you're anxious to avoid. When you slowly teach your brain (specifically, your amygdala) to tolerate anxious feelings and begin to make positive associations with the object of your fears, that will gradually lessen that anxiety and fear. 

You can enter the situation you typically avoid by driving past a particular location, then practicing walking up to the entrance, then entering the place with a friend, then walking around alone, and so on, until your feelings of anxiety around the location or activity lessens and/or your ability to manage the feelings increases.

Develop a growth mindset Our anxious feelings are often centered on the possibility of rejection, failure, or the unknown. Rather than experience these, we opt to avoid the situation altogether. To overcome these, it requires that we teach ourselves that it is okay when things do not go okay or the way we envisioned they would go. We grow in our ability to adapt to situations by being willing to experiment, adjust, and learn through trial-and-error. 

Instead of looking at it through the lens of failure or success, a growth mindset promotes self-awareness and an open-minded curiosity about new situations. New situations can be looked at as challenges to be tackled and problems that require skill to be solved.

Get and stay healthy Eat and sleep well, avoiding caffeinated beverages, for instance, as they tend to increase feelings of anxiety. Exercise, whether that's walking, running, swimming, kayaking, strength training, yoga, or cycling. Exercise can help you relax and get you prepared to face challenging situations with more emotional and physical capacity.

Exercise is great for using up nervous energy and elevating your mood through the release of endorphins. It is, however, important that you do not rely on exercise to avoid a situation that is causing you to feel anxious. Going for a run every morning is great for helping you release energy and get those "feel-good" hormones flowing through you so that you can tackle office interactions. But it can also be used to avoid situations. 

Going for a run every time something nerve-wracking comes up so you do not have to face it may just be an avoidance method. You can take on other practices that support your mental and emotional health, such as journaling and meditation. These are highly effective for managing emotional stress and helping you become more aware of your triggers.

Develop your skill set Part of why we often avoid the things that make us feel anxious is that we may not have the skills to deal with them. If you learned early on to avoid certain social situations, for example, that early learned behavior may mean that you never developed the skills to be in social situations. It gets harder and more awkward the older you get, thus increasing the possibility of turning to avoidance as a coping mechanism.

Similarly, if you are anxious about conflict, it may be that you do not have conflict resolution skills that will allow you to tackle conflict in a healthy way. Instead of avoidance, consider that it's not too late to learn the skills you need to know how to navigate difficult situations.

Ask for Help It can be hard to make changes to your well-worn patterns of being that rely heavily on avoidance behaviors to deal with anxiety. You may find that you are not even sure where to begin with making necessary changes. If that is your situation, we have many counselors who are able to walk this journey with you. A counselor can help you develop the tools you need to replace old ways of thinking about and responding to symptoms of anxiety with more effective ones. To learn more about how a counselor can help, contact our reception team today.