Maybe you already know that avoidance makes anxiety worse in the long run — you have heard it, and intellectually you might even believe it.

Yet, the voice in your head might tell you: “The relief I feel when I avoid tells me I made the right call. Sure, avoidance might make things worse eventually, but not today. I can't quite cope with this right now. I'll do the harder thing tomorrow — or the next time.”

If that voice sounds familiar, keep reading. I want to give you information that will help motivate you to do the more difficult thing — the one that actually helps in the long run. And truly, it can help significantly.

Avoidance does not get rid of your anxiety. Instead, it teaches your brain two things. First, thanks to your "dopamine reward circuitry" — which I will explain in a moment — it teaches your brain to keep relying on avoidance. Second, it teaches your brain that the thing you are avoiding is genuinely dangerous.

Avoidance Teaches Your Brain to Keep Avoiding

This is what happens when you avoid: your brain registers that you were anxious about an upcoming event, or something looming in the future. Your brain registers that you did something and you felt better, the anxiety drops. The thing you did was avoid. So the brain believes that the avoidance is a good thing.

The relief you feel triggers a hit of dopamine. Just as a puppy will repeat an action when it gets a treat, your brain wants the "dopamine" treat and learns to repeat the action - the action of avoiding.

This relief-based reinforcement causes you to avoid more and more often (and as I'll mention again below, it causes you to avoid a wider and wider variety of things).

Research shows that people who are more anxiety-prone have a stronger built-in bias toward withholding action when facing discomfort, particularly under stress.

Avoidance Teaches Your Brain the Threat Is Real

Your emotional brain cannot tell the difference between “I avoided a feeling I didn't like” and “I avoided something genuinely dangerous.”

There are two further things your brain learns — or rather, fails to learn — when you rely on avoidance.

Avoidance Doesn't Allow "Threat Disconfirmation"

Throughout our lives, something happens — we might see a spider, say — and our brain sounds the alarm: “Danger, danger.” Then we realize, “Okay, that's not actually dangerous.” In other words, we either confirm or disconfirm the threat.

If you have social anxiety and you avoid a party, you never let your brain confirm that the party was not actually a threat.

If your brain is in panic mode about giving a speech, and you go through with it, you teach your brain something different: “Okay — not a threat to my well-being. It might be uncomfortable. It might be unpleasant. I may not feel like I did a great job. But my survival isn't threatened.”

Doing the thing lets your brain learn that the situation was never a true survival threat.

The same thing happens with safety behaviors — avoidance is one, but so is bringing a trusted person along, or carrying a particular object in your pocket for reassurance. When you rely on one of these, you credit the safe outcome to the safety behavior itself, rather than to the fact that the event was never life-threatening in the first place. So your brain never gets the chance to learn there was no threat to begin with.

I know that may sound strong to say there was no threat to begin with. Yes, there is a threat of discomfort. There is a threat of embarrassment. There is a threat of feeling like you failed. But none of those threats are a genuine threat to your survival — even though your body and your old brain respond as if it were.

The Threat Generalizes

Over time, avoidance becomes the strategy applied to more and more things.

Maybe you begin avoiding by public speeches. Then you avoid getting up in front of your department to give a presentation. Soon you find yourself with panic feelings at the thought of speaking up in a meeting. In most jobs, it is very hard to get by if you cannot speak up in meetings. This is how the threat generalizes.

When people have a traumatic experience that creates anxiety around a particular event, and they respond by avoiding it, they tend to avoid more and more over time — and this becomes extremely limiting in terms of jobs, functioning, social activities, and happiness.

Research has shown that avoidance almost never stays confined to just one thing.

A Quick Aside: Preference Isn't the Same as Anxiety

A quick aside, because people often ask me about this. Many of you know I am a skier, and I love it. I learned when I was about fourteen — young enough to simply decide, "okay, I can do this." But if you try skiing as an adult and genuinely dislike it, or realize you have no interest in it, that is not a problem. You have simply decided you do not like skiing. This might be because it feels scary, which is ok. The preference is very specific to skiing and has nothing to do with a broader, general anxiety.

We are all allowed to make our own risk assessments. But if your risk assessments are dramatically different from those of most people, and dramatically limit your life, AND you carry a lot of anxiety around that issue — anxiety that keeps growing — then something more than simple preference is at work.

Let me know if that distinction makes sense, and if you have a better way of explaining it, drop it in the comments — I would genuinely appreciate it.

What Actually Helps

So what actually helps? What actually works?

One thing that helps a lot is to allow ourselves to feel the anxiety. To stay with our feeling, rather than run from them. When we do this, we discover they do not last forever. A feeling of anxiety might peak, but it does resolve.

One of the scientific mechanisms behind this is a concept called fear extinction. When you face a fear and survive it, you extinguish that fear.

Here is a typical example. When I was young, I rode horses, and the rule was always: if you fall off, you get back on. It is actually an expression you might have heard applied to many situations "Get back on the horse." That is fear extinction in action.

Or consider a car accident: you come out essentially okay, but now you are afraid to drive again. That fear is understandable and normal — but you drive again anyway, because it is the only way to let fear extinction happen. The memory of doing the thing, and surviving it, gives your brain new safety memories.

Avoidance physically removes you from the thing you fear, so you never get the chance to experience that fear extinction.

Treatment That Works: ERP and EMDR

Exposure and response prevention (ERP) is one of the best treatments for many types of anxiety, provided someone can stick with it. It is highly effective for agoraphobia, panic attacks, social anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

ERP works well, but one of its biggest problems is a 50 percent dropout rate, because it requires people to tolerate a rise in their anxiety as they learn not to avoid and not to turn to a compulsive safety behavior.

In my twenty years as a therapist, I used a technique called EMDR — eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. EMDR offers a gentler form of exposure: you imagine the feared event while sitting with a therapist you feel safe, or safe enough, with. You are in an environment where you can remind yourself that you are secure, even as you imagine the event and watch a light bar move back and forth. [I explain this in more detail in some other videos How Does EMDR Work]

While you imagine the event, your body becomes anxious, but you continually titrate, so to speak, between that anxiety and the safety of the room. I found EMDR extremely effective for most types of anxiety.

Many people who watch my channel do not have access to effective psychotherapy, let alone a trained EMDR therapist. I am an affiliate of a software program called VirtualEMDR, which guides you through the EMDR process step by step.  Click here for more info on VirtualEMDR. (Put AWAKENJOY20 in the Promo Code box upon checkout for 20% off).

If you are generally a fairly regulated person, and you trust that you could re-ground yourself after vividly imagining the feared event, self-administered EMDR with a program like Virtual EMDR can be genuinely helpful. It becomes much more complicated for someone with complex PTSD, and I have a separate video on that — I'll link it here so you can take a look: Is Self-Administered EMDR A Good Idea for Me?.



Let me know if this was helpful, and share any questions or comments you have. I do read my comments and try to respond when I can, and I take them into account when I create new videos.

See you next week.