What Avoidance Looks Like in Anxiety
If you’re struggling with anxiety, you may notice that your desire to avoid situations in your life is increasing. But what exactly does avoidance mean? Avoidance does not simply mean trying to get out of scary situations. It actually involves a range of behaviors that can limit your sense of satisfaction in life. The discomfort of anxiety can lead you to seek relief through escaping and shrinking away from any situations that might make your anxiety worse.
Some ways avoidance shows up in response to anxiety are:
- Procrastination
- Overthinking
- Reassurance-seeking
- Over-preparing for situations
- Staying busy to distract from anxiety
- Trying to control all possible outcomes
Why Avoidance Feels Helpful in the Moment
Avoidance can feel helpful in the moment, so it makes sense that you might lean on this form of coping. Avoidance offers short-term relief, giving you the sense that you did something to keep your anxiety from spiking. It also gives a sense of control, making you feel like you can lower your anxiety if you just avoid the right situations.
How Avoidance Can Make Anxiety Worse Over Time
While you may feel relief from avoiding anxiety-provoking situations, you are also setting yourself up to potentially experience worse anxiety over time. When you avoid situations because of anxiety, you start to reinforce in your mind that these situations are truly dangerous and unmanageable. That means that the next time you face a similar situation, your anxiety might feel more intense as you’ve taught yourself that the situation is so unbearable that it’s worth avoiding.
Over time, your world may shrink as you fall into a cycle of feeling anxiety, avoiding anxiety-provoking situations, feeling relief, and then avoiding even more once that relief reinforces the choice to avoid.
When Your Life Starts Revolving Around Anxiety
You may be wondering how to know if anxiety-based avoidance is affecting your life in a significant way. To assess this, notice if any of the following examples are showing up in your life:
- Turning down social invitations
- Taking fewer risks
- Avoiding conflict
- Missing work or other responsibilities
- Neglecting to try new things despite your interest in them
- Staying small in relationships, work, and other areas of life
What Acceptance Actually Means
Acceptance can be a difficult concept to embrace when anxiety feels so uncomfortable and overwhelming. Many people feel that accepting their anxiety means that they have to like their anxiety or resign to their suffering.
However, acceptance is more than just giving up the fight with anxiety; it’s actually a liberating process of making room for discomfort so that it no longer runs the show. This can be a freeing process where you recognize that your efforts to control anxiety have led you to worse anxiety, and that opening up to allowing anxiety to come and go allows you more freedom to pursue what matters.
Acceptance Does Not Mean Passivity
Acceptance is not a passive process – you don’t just say “I accept” and that’s it. Acceptance is an active and ongoing process of making room for difficult thoughts, feelings, and emotions, in the service of living a more open, self-compassionate, and meaningful life.
This active process creates more flexibility and choice in your life. Instead of spending all your energy trying to manage, avoid, or control anxiety, acceptance gives you the ability to choose meaningful ways of living. Acceptance is about learning what’s truly in your control and what’s not, and getting into the driver’s seat of your own life.
Acceptance vs. Avoidance in Real Life
What does acceptance look like practically in your day-to-day life? Here are a few scenarios where you can see what avoidance vs. acceptance looks like:
- Work:
- Avoidance behavior: Avoiding a work promotion that you’re interested in because it will involve occasional public speaking, which you find anxiety-provoking.
- Acceptance behavior: Give yourself space to feel the anxiety, while recognizing that committing to this promotion and the anxiety-provoking public speaking also allows you to pursue responsibilities you find engaging and interesting.
- Relationships:
- Avoidance behavior: Noticing that you’re doing all the cooking and cleaning in your relationship, feeling resentful for this, and growing more exhausted, but fearing conflict if you bring it up.
- Acceptance behavior: Acknowledging the fear you feel, while recognizing the benefit of speaking up. Whether your partner reacts well or poorly, you’ll have learned more about your relationship, and you’ll have the satisfaction of having advocated for yourself.
- Social Situations:
- Avoidance behavior: You’re feeling lonely, but public places give you anxiety. You try to convince yourself that scrolling on your phone is similar enough to socializing so you avoid social invitations.
- Acceptance behavior: You recognize the discomfort and worries you feel about going to a new place, but you also recognize your need to meet people and your curiosity about what might come out of these interactions. You try a social event for a hobby you enjoy, and you practice willingness to experience saying awkward things and not knowing how the event will turn out, recognizing that you also might meet someone interesting, or simply have fun doing your hobby in a new setting.
How ACT Can Help You Respond Differently to Anxiety
If you’ve found the approach in this article helpful, you may be interested in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a therapy focused on helping you to build more acceptance for anxiety in order to pursue a more meaningful life.
ACT recognizes that being human involves experiencing difficult thoughts, feelings, sensations, and memories from time to time. The premise of this therapy is that our attempts to escape the pain of these uncomfortable experiences get us caught up in a battle with ourselves that worsens how we feel and pulls us away from pursuing a purposeful life.
ACT encourages you to drop the battle with your anxiety and instead make space for it. By allowing your anxiety to come and go, you have more freedom to notice both your uncomfortable experience, but also the opportunity you have to take charge of your life and follow your values towards a life that feels more alive, present, and connected with yourself and others.
When Therapy Can Help if Anxiety Is Making Your World Smaller
While this approach of making room for anxiety can feel promising, you might find it challenging to figure out what this looks like in practice. A few signs you may benefit from ACT therapy for anxiety are:
- Constant worry
- Panic attacks (or fear of panic attacks)
- Avoidance of situations you once were able to participate in
- Relationship tension
- Difficulty making decisions
- Feeling frozen or numb
If you’ve been experiencing these signs of anxiety, working with a therapist can help you notice how anxiety is running your life, get unstuck from unhelpful control strategies, and clarify the valued direction you’d like to move towards. I’m a licensed professional counselor focused on using the ACT approach for anxiety. If you’re in Texas, click the link below to book a free call with me to explore working together in counseling.