We can all agree that anxiety is not a pleasant experience. Your anxiety might present as a constant internal dialogue of catastrophic thinking, imagining worst-case scenarios, or thinking through all the possible ways something could go wrong.
Or you might predominantly experience uncomfortable body sensations like nausea, muscle tension, or an elevated heart rate when you’re feeling anxious.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
I often joke with my clients that it would be so much easier if there were just some surgical procedure that could take out the part of our brain that makes us feel anxious.
But since we can’t do that, we should just avoid anything that makes us anxious, right?
WRONG!
Let me explain how avoidance can backfire and what you can do instead. But first, let's define anxiety.
There are many different definitions of anxiety, but one of the most helpful ways I’ve found in describing it to my clients is this: anxiety is your brain and body’s response to a perceived future threat. This differs from fear, which is a response to a current threat.
We all worry and feel anxious from time to time, and a degree of anxiety and worrying is normal for humans (thank you, pre-frontal cortex!). For example, most people would find themselves anxious and worried about making rent and being able to pay bills if finances are tight and they just lost their job.
However, anxiety that is excessive, persistent, or out of proportion to the real situation or threat is where it can turn into an anxiety-related disorder if it is causing significant distress or impairment in your life.
There are many different forms of anxiety-related disorders depending on the nature of the excessive worrying (e.g., social, health-related, worries across multiple domains in life, etc.).
Regardless of the specific “type” of anxiety, all anxiety has one thing in common: It feeds on the many different forms of avoidance we use to try and not feel anxious. And why wouldn’t we naturally try to avoid the thing that is making us anxious?
I’m sure we can all agree that anxiety is NOT enjoyable. But the exact thing that might help us feel better in the moment is the exact thing that anxiety uses as its fuel to grow bigger and stronger.
Thus, avoiding creates more distress or problems in our lives in the long term.
Anytime you avoid something that you are feeling anxious or afraid about, you are actually feeding your anxiety a protein-packed meal that helps it to grow bigger and anxiety.
The reason that avoidance helps our anxiety grow bigger and stronger is because our brains, particularly when it comes to the emotional parts of our brain, learn best through experience.
Every time we avoid something that makes us anxious, our brain uses that to reinforce its belief that the perceived threat is indeed dangerous. The brain thinks that the only way to stay safe is to keep avoiding whatever is causing the anxiety and worry to begin with.
The graph below illustrates how this works: avoidance ultimately increases our anxiety over time despite relief in the moment, and it also contributes to an increased likelihood of continuing to avoid.
Below are a few examples of how the avoidance “trap” can keep us stuck and holds us hostage to our anxiety.
| Anxiety and Worry |
Avoidance-Based |
What Your Brain Learns |
You worry about rejection or being negatively perceived by others in an upcoming social or professional event. |
You do not attend the event. |
Going out and engaging with others is dangerous; staying home is safe. If you were to experience judgment or rejection, you wouldn’t be able to handle it. |
If I don’t wash my hands every time I touch something, I could catch a serious disease. |
You wash your hands every time you touch something (avoiding the anxiety regarding not washing your hands). |
Your brain learns that the only way to avoid catching a serious disease is by continuing to worry about it and washing your hands after touching anything (even if it's becoming excessive to the point of consuming hours of your day or causing impairment in other parts of your life). |
On the way driving to work, you start worrying that you forgot to turn off the oven. Then, you start imagining the worst case scenario that it leads to burning your house down. |
You turn around to double-check that the oven is off despite this choice making you late for work. |
When you get home and see that the oven is off, your anxiety about it being left on goes away. However, your brain learns that the way to get relief from anxiety regarding catastrophic “what ifs” is to keep worrying and double checking even if it causes more long-term impairment in other areas of your life (e.g., consequences for being late for work). |
To decrease our anxiety in the long term, we want to teach our brain one of two things:
Now, how do you teach your brain that?
There are many different approaches to helping our brain re-learn, but going back to how the emotional part of our brain learns most effectively through experience—the antidote to the anxiety/avoidance reinforcement trap is… exposing yourself to the anxiety and feared situation.
Of course, this will be uncomfortable at first, but over time, the exposure will become easier and easier as the anxiety decreases.
Why?
Because your brain will re-learn that the perceived threat is not actually real or as dangerous as you had thought or the anxiety felt it to be.
Below is a graph that illustrates how anxiety ultimately decreases over time with repeated exposure to the fear-inducing situation.Let me give you a personal example.
When I was a kid, going to the dentist terrified me. Whenever the dentist’s office left a voicemail reminder for an upcoming appointment on my parents’ old-school phone landline, I would delete the message so that my parents wouldn’t remember I had an appointment.
Each time I avoided going to the dentist as a kid, the idea of going to the dentist became more and more anxiety-producing. Thus, the more adamant I became in my avoidance-based strategies.
Fast forward to becoming an adult. I realized dental healthcare appointments are really not in my best interest to avoid (and I’d only be on my parents’ health care so much longer.
So, I finally was able to require myself to schedule a dentist appointment for an initial exam. I was so anxious the days and hours leading up to the appointment that I lost my appetite and couldn’t think about much else except worrying about the upcoming appointment. Then, walking into the building for my appointment, my heart was pounding, I was sweaty, and I even felt a little nauseous.
About ten minutes into the appointment, the physiological symptoms of anxiety (i.e., sweaty, heart pounding, nauseous) subsided as my body started to believe I was actually safe.
The perceived threat wasn’t as scary as I’d thought or felt it to be. Unsurprisingly, after having avoided the dentist for years due to my anxiety, I had additional dentist follow-up appointments and procedures that I would have to attend to.
However, each time I followed through and made an appointment (not only did I reap the benefits of dental healthcare), my anxiety got smaller and smaller to the point that dentist appointments started to feel the same as any other medical appointment.
Well…. to be honest, they are still my least favorite, ha!
But anxiety is no longer so powerful that it interferes with me taking care of my dental healthcare.
And that’s what we all want, right?
We need to be able to invest in all areas of our well-being and pursue the things that matter to us without anxiety taking over, keeping us hostage, or making our lives smaller by convincing us that we need to avoid anything that makes us uncomfortably anxious.
If you are interested in learning more about the services Dr. Williams offers, you can contact her directly by calling 406-747-4656, email honeywilliamspllc@psychmtwa.com, or check out her website at honeywilliamspsychology.com
Related reading: "What Is Emotional Intelligence?"