Wanting to avoid adverse experiences is human. Every one of us will at times use avoidance to protect ourself and it can be an adaptive behaviour. While avoidance can help us stay safe, or may seem as harmless as putting something off for tomorrow, avoidance can also lie at the heart of mental health difficulties.
Sometimes avoidance comes at the cost of pursuing our goals and can make it difficult to function. Minimising perceived risk or pain can become a band-aid — protective in the short term, but not necessary or helpful long term. Like overuse of a band-aid, continual reliance on avoidance can cause problems to fester, impair healing, and make us feel weaker than we are. Let’s explore what exactly avoidance is, when it’s healthy and when it’s not, and what we can do if we’re over using this coping strategy.
What is avoidance?
Avoidance is when we choose (consciously or subconsciously) to not engage, or to only partially engage, in an experience. Experiences can be a behaviour or situation (like talking in front of a group of people, or going to the shopping centre), but can also involve thoughts and emotions (like feeling sadness or thinking about a difficult memory).
People tend to use avoidance to limit a real or perceived threat to their physical, mental or emotional safety. What a threat could be differs between people. For some people, being evaluated by others may be a threat, or the prospect of performing poorly on a test. A threat could also be an emotionally experience, for example a desire to avoid feelings like anxiety, or shame, or boredom. We may prefer to eliminate the physiological symptoms of these emotions such as our heart beating quickly and feeling shaky. Avoiding the experience altogether (e.g., not doing the speech, repressing emotions) is one form of avoidance. A milder form of avoidance may be only partially engaging. For example, we may temper our emotional experience by staying on the ‘head/logical’ level, or we may use limiting safety behaviours (such as attending a party but only speaking to the people we know).
What is the advantage of avoidance? When does avoidance hurt us more than help us?
Avoidance as a behaviour makes sense in evolutionary terms. When humans encountered dangers such as predators it was adaptive to avoid these threats. The physiological response to danger for humans is even labelled ‘fight or flight,’ with flight being an avoidance of danger. Avoidance of genuine threats is adaptive (for example, avoiding walking alone late at night in an area known for crime). But with the way our mind processes information it can become difficult, especially when emotional, to discern what is strategic avoidance and when avoidance is self-limiting.
This is because, on some level, avoidance works. Problematic avoidance is a band-aid: in the short term it does its job (we feel better), but long term we may not be reaching our goals and living the life we desire. Problematic avoidance can manifest as not doing things that scare us even though we need or want to do them (like public speaking, socialising, learning something new). Some avoidant behaviour comes with its own set of problems too (e.g., procrastination increases stress, substance use causes health issues, detaching from others leads to disconnection). Avoidance can limit our functioning and produce emotional distress (such as stress, disconnection, frustration, shame etc.).
Our self-image can also be affected by avoidance. We can begin to believe that we can’t do or feel certain things. The longer we leave the band-aid on, the worse the imagined pain is of removing it. Just like physical wounds, emotional distress needs air to heal. Hiding away our pain through avoidance makes it harder for others to help us.
How to avoid avoidance
If you’re in a pattern of unhealthy avoidance there are several things you can do. The first step is to recognise that your avoidance is not helping you (to stop buying into the short-term gains). You may choose to write down the costs of avoidance to help you remember why you want to change.
Self-compassion is so important when dealing with avoidance. There is no need to shame ourselves or push for immediate change when addressing avoidance. As discussed, avoidance is on some level functional and certainly an understandable response to stress.
Recognising that change takes time can be helpful. The brain is plastic, meaning it has the capacity to change and we can learn new ways of thinking and being. However, change takes time and we need to give ourselves the chance to consistently practise a new thought pattern and behaviour before it becomes automatic.
You can ‘rip off the band-aid’ of avoidance, so to speak, by doing the experiences you are fearful of. This can be very challenging and it may be easier to break down the steps towards the avoided experience and gradually work towards change. Psychologists can help during this process and it is essential to make goals realistic. A professional can also give you alternative coping strategies to replace avoidant behaviour and can help you identify and reduce any ‘safety’ behaviour you perform (things you do to avoid the full feared experience).
Acceptance of difficult emotions and learning distress tolerance can also help in learning to confront feared experiences. Sometimes we may even have to address our core beliefs and attitudes to reduce avoidant coping. For example, unhealthy attitudes towards emotions (that we cannot feel or express certain emotions), can fuel avoidance. Avoidance can also come from maladaptive beliefs about ourselves or others (such as having low self-worth or believing others can’t be trusted).
In summary, avoidance is a common response to threats that can be adaptive or unhelpful. There can be many ways in which avoidance manifests and it can occur for a variety of reasons. Healing from chronic avoidance can be an empowering journey. If you are struggle with avoidance and would like assistance, please contact us and book in.
Written by Erica South, Psychologist
