Anxiety and Avoidance - How To Spot Avoidance

Anxiety and Avoidance: How Do I Know If I’m Avoiding?

Are you struggling to identify whether your behaviors are forms of avoidance in your anxiety recovery journey? Let’s look at the often murky and uncertain nature of avoidance habits, emphasizing that nobody navigates these waters flawlessly. We’ll share insights on how distinguishing between necessary avoidance for safety and avoidance driven by anxiety can help you better understand your reactions and improve your recovery process.

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How Do I Know If I’m Avoiding?

If we start from the premise that avoiding triggers and trying to prevent or instantly stop uncomfortable internal experiences like feeling anxious or experiencing panic attacks is a bad idea, then we wind up in a situation where we might be wondering if or when we are avoiding?

If this is a new concept for you, you’ll want to pop back and listen to some of my older podcast episodes to get the lay of the land. I can point you at episodes 266, 284, and 287 (see below) which are all less than a year old and explain a bit more why avoidance is a bad idea.

I am often asked by anxious people interested in doing recovery “right” if they are accidentally or secretly avoiding anxiety without knowing that they are doing that. Excellent question.

Sometimes … You Just Can’t Know

The really short answer is … sometimes you just don’t know because you can’t be totally clear on how you feel and what you are thinking. That’s normal. We don’t always have perfect self knowledge or self-awareness because we are imperfect humans, which means that sometimes you just won’t be able to tell if you’re tapping out because you’re tired, simply not interested, or afraid of how you feel. It might be combination of multiple reasons when you skip activities, go into retreat mode, or exit a particular situation or context. The first rule when it comes to identifying avoidance is to stop demanding that you do this perfectly at all times. Nobody does it perfectly. Everyone winds up in grey areas where they are unsure.

Does This Uncertainty Bother You?

Don’t like that? Don’t like being unsure? Does not recovering properly or perfectly today make you uncomfortable? Congrats! You’ve unlocked a new exposure target. Can you work WITH that discomfort today rather than trying over and over to eliminating it by looking for perfect clarity and infallible instructions to follow?

PLEASE AVOID ACTUAL HARM OR DANGER!

Another thing we have to mention here is that there are in fact some things in life that we do want to avoid. When we are being abused, harmed, manipulated, injured, attacked, or are in actual real imminent danger … please avoid if possible. There is NO PART OF RECOVERY OR EXPOSURE that involves intentionally putting oneself in the path of actual harm or injury. If your partner is abusive, you are not avoiding by leaving the relationship. If your job is causing you physical or mental harm, looking for a new job is not avoidance. If there is a hurricane bearing down on your town, evacuating is not avoidance.

Avoidance of Internal Experiences

Here we are talking about trying to avoid internal experiences – feelings, emotions, thoughts, and bodily sensations – that we insist we must never experience because they are “too much” in some way. Those are the experiences we’re talking about here. But that being said, it’s also not required for anyone to continually run at full speed toward discomfort during every waking moment to build character or accelerate recovery. That doesn’t work. It’ll backfire. Did you work on breaking your avoidance habits in some way today? Cool, then also make sure that you take time to take care of yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, or however other way you need to tend to yourself.

Resting after a long day is NOT avoidance … unless you’ve been “resting” all day already because you feel like you can’t risk being triggered. On some days, you won’t actually be able to clearly identify if you’re resting because you won’t be able to clearly identify if you’ve been avoiding all day or not. That’s OK. Do the best you can and see if you can use this confusion or uncertainty to work on tolerating THAT discomfort.

So …. How can you tell if you are avoiding? Here are five basic facts about anxiety and avoidance that you can lean on.

Intent Determines Avoidance

Are you making choices specifically to try not to get triggered? Are you doing things with the specific intent of managing, preventing, or stopping your anxiety? Are you focusing all the time on coping skills that are intended to calm you down or short circuit anxiety? Are you planning your days based on how you feel so you don’t do “too much” and wind up “too anxious”? Are you following all the wellness instructions and anxiety hacks you can find online because they “stop panic” or “are good for anxiety”? Intention is the number one indicator of anxious avoidance in the context of chronic or disordered states of anxiety. What are your intentions when you make your choices?

Motivation Can Determine Avoidance

If your motivation is to not feel bad or to feel good (which are totally understandable by the way and not crimes against recovery), then you might want to re-think that. It’s perfectly OK to WANT to feel good. It’s not really OK to engineer your entire life in ways that you kinda hate just to try to feel good or at least not feel bad. Be mindful of wants vs action. Want to avoid and retreat? No problem! But DO YOU then avoid or retreat? That’s an issue you’ll want to pay attention to. You can be motivated in two directions at the same time – comfort and progress. Which action path will you choose?

Emotions Can Drive Avoidance

If fear is the dominant emotion in any situation, then you are either in harms way and should listen to that (regular anxiety), or you are afraid of how you feel and might be making avoidant choices to get around those feelings. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which emotions we are experiencing. That’s OK. Do the best you can to see if you can identify what you’re feeling when you’re trying to make activity and life choices. Fear based choices move us away from recovery. VALUES based choices move us closer to recovery. See episode 59 of the Disordered podcast I do with Josh Flectcher for more on values.

A Sense of Urgency Can Signal Avoidance

Sometimes in life we are faced with situations that are urgent and worthy of immediate action to find solutions or safety. How we feel is not usually one of those situations. Are your thoughts, bodily sensations, and emotions feeling urgent or like you are in an emergency situation because of how you feel? Are you feeling frantic or out of control trying to manage or fix how you feel? This is a sign that you are primed for avoidance or escape.

There Are Two Kinds of Avoidance

There is a difference between macro-avoidance and micro-avoidance. What does this mean? Macro-avoidance is the avoidance that most anxious people can instantly recognize. You get invited for lunch with friends but say no because you’re feeling too anxious today. You quit your job because driving that far makes you anxious or triggers panic. You refuse to stay home alone for even a few minutes because you don’t want to feel too anxious or panic while alone. You spend hours immersed in behavioral or mental compulsion loops that your OCD or GAD tells you are good ideas, so you can avoid the bad feelings and scary thoughts you might have.

Special GAD Note

Special note to my GAD folks. You know the excessive planning, problem solving, analyzing, worrying, ruminating, and overthinking? That’s the avoidance. You do that to avoid feeling a certain way, even when doing that often makes you feel the very way you’re trying to avoid. It’s OK to stop engaging in active worry or rumination. You’re not avoiding your problems if you do that.

Sneaky Micro-Avoidance

Micro-avoidance, on the other hand, is often hidden and it can be really sneaky! Examples of micro-avoidance might be sticking to rigid rules about sleep, nutrition, or self-care so that you can try to minimize the odds that you’ll feel things you are afraid to feel. Getting glued to routines and tightly managed schedules to try to manage your anxiety can be a sneaky form of micro-avoidance. Only choosing to shower or go to bed or leave the house unless specific conditions are met can signal micro-avoidances. Only consuming mental health, personal growth, or wellness content in books, videos, podcasts, and on social platforms can be a form of micro-avoidance After all, I can’t read a fun book and risk missing the magic anxiety tip, can I? I must be managing my anxiety at all times, right?

Start With Micro-Avoidance If Need Be

The life of an anxious person is usually heavily seasoned with micro-avoidances that have become habits and are often not even noticed. If you want to start working on breaking your avoidance habit because it’s causing you problems, see if you can start to look at your daily rituals and routines to find micro-avoidances. This is a perfect acceptable place to start and in some cases it’s even the preferred way to start because working on micro-avoidances leads us to easier to conceptualize exposure work that is often a better way to start the whole “face what you fear” experiment. If you’re agoraphobic you’re not going to start recovery by driving across the US from coast to coast. Targeting micro-avoidances can be a great first step.

Take The Lessons – Don’t Beat Yourself Up!

Remember that the opposite of avoidance is tolerance and navigation. When we avoid we learn that we are incapable of allowing our own feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations. When we tolerate and navigate we learn that we’ve been wrong about this all along and that feeling things really is safe – even if it is uncomfortable and difficult at times.

So if you’re reading or listening to this because you’re trying to break the avoidance cycle, good for you! But how do you know for sure if you are avoiding in any given circumstance? Often you can’t, and that’s OK, but see if you can use the framework I’ve presented here to help you make your choices.

If you wind up making a choice that seems legit on Tuesday, but you can clearly see was avoiding on Wednesday … so what? Every experience gives us an opportunity to learn and grow. If you blew it and avoided … you didn’t blow it! You’re learning to improve your avoidance detection skills, so take what you can from the experience and do the best you can going forward. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that at all.

Links Of Interest

The Anxious Truth Episode 266
https://theanxioustruth.com/266

The Anxious Truth Episode 284
https://theanxioustruth.com/284

The Anxious Truth Episode 287
https://theanxioustruth.com/287

Disordered Episode 59
https://disordered.fm/59

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.