What Is Avoidance-Anxiety?

Avoidance is a normal behavior and necessary for survival. Avoiding harmful situations helps keep you safe. If you have avoidance-anxiety, however, your level of avoidance is extreme because you tend to perceive even relatively safe situations as threatening.

Avoidance-anxiety is a common feature of many anxiety disorders. It is characterized by an intense fear of social situations, feelings of inadequacy, lack of self-confidence, and super sensitivity to perceived negative criticism or rejection, making it hard to connect with others.

It may also lead you to go out of your way to avoid people, situations, or activities that trigger your anxious feelings instead of addressing your stressors and learning how to cope with them.

The Purpose of Anxiety and Other Emotions

God created us with emotions to enable us to make sense of the world around us and to be able to connect with Him and others. They are a reflection of what is going on in our hearts and minds, as well as the way the brain responds to and gauges situations to determine whether or not they are safe for us.

Emotions are signals the brain uses to help us navigate life, make choices, form relationships, and drive us to action. It uses fear, for example, to alert us to real or perceived danger, which in turn may cause us to feel anxious as our body responds to the fear.

Common Symptoms of Avoidance-Anxiety

Avoidance-anxiety can include a variety of symptoms such as low self-esteem, feeling socially inept and inferior to others, and isolating oneself. Even though you might like to interact with others, you tend to avoid social activities for fear of doing something wrong and being criticized, disapproved of, or rejected, and often feel as though you are unwelcome, even when this is not the case.

In work or social situations, you may be afraid to speak up for fear of saying the wrong thing and keep examining the faces of those around you for signs of approval or rejection.

You are also inhibited in your intimate relationships because of the fear of being shamed or ridiculed, which limits your ability to be fully present and engaged with your partner. You are reluctant to take risks or engage in new activities because you fear being embarrassed or viewed as a failure.

Why Avoidance-Anxiety Increases Your Dread

Avoidance-anxiety leads to avoidance behavior, which is a primary contributor to the maintenance of anxiety because anxiety thrives on avoidance. When you avoid a stressor instead of confronting and addressing it, you reinforce the idea that the situation is a threat you are unable to handle, which increases your dread and limits your ability to develop coping skills.

Although avoidance may help you deal with your anxiety short term, the two maintain and reinforce each other, typically leading to what is known as the anxiety-avoidance cycle, where you end up experiencing more of the very thing you were trying to escape.

The Anxiety-Avoidance Cycle

Avoidance prevents you from addressing the stressors behind your anxiety and refuting their validity, and the more you continue avoiding them, the less likely you will be able to break free of the vicious anxiety-avoidance cycle, which looks like this:

Anxiety You feel anxious about doing something or facing a certain situation you perceive as posing a potential threat. This creates symptoms such as a racing heart, shortness of breath, ruminating thoughts, and/or trouble focusing.

Avoidance The symptoms you feel as a result of your anxiety are distressing and you want to make them stop so you avoid the circumstance causing them, which gives your brain the signal that you can’t handle this stressor, which, in turn, causes you to feel a little more anxious about it the next time around.

Relief The symptoms go away, and you feel relief that you did not have to confront the situation that was causing your anxiety. However, the relief is only temporary, and the symptoms return the next time you face a similar situation, increasing your anxiety and leading to more avoidance, which starts the cycle over again.

Reinforcement. This repeating cycle reinforces the belief that you are unable to handle the stressor that caused the anxiety and that avoidance brings relief, thus decreasing your self-confidence and strengthening and maintaining both the anxiety and avoidance behavior.

Reversing The Cycle

The more you keep your anxiety in check by avoiding something, the more likely you are to continue avoiding it. The good news, however, is that the anxiety-avoidance cycle can be reversed.

Avoidance behavior is learned through something called fear conditioning. If, for instance, you got bitten by a dog, you may, going forward, feel anxious every time you see a dog and do everything you can to try and avoid doing so.

What you are anxious about is typically not the stressor itself but rather the feeling of anxiety. Avoidance will only make the anxious feelings worse over time because it keeps you from addressing the actual issues behind them. The only way to reverse the cycle is by confronting the stressor and learning how to manage it through effective coping techniques.

Mentally prepare yourself to confront your stressor by creating an image of it in your mind and exploring your anxiety while visualizing it. Your brain cannot tell the difference between a real situation and an image. Remind yourself that you are safe and that your feelings are just emotions that will pass.

Look for positives instead of focusing only on the negatives, and try to reframe your thoughts and see things from a more realistic perspective. Identify resources, for instance, that you may not have realized you had, or hidden benefits in the situation you did not notice at first, or for a different way you can approach the situation that does not involve avoidance.

Learn to tolerate uncomfortable feelings by using stress relief strategies such as grounding techniques that center you in the present moment or meditating or breathing through the feelings and allowing them to pass and move on.

Start slow and take small steps to gradually reduce the number of circumstances you avoid, beginning with the ones that feel the least threatening.

Consider therapy. A trained mental health professional can help you recognize and address your avoidance patterns, learn how to confront your stressors rather than avoid them, equip you with healthy coping strategies for managing your anxiety, empower you to face it without trying to avoid it, and enable you to live a more fulfilling life.

Pray and seek God’s guidance. He cares for you and wants you to bring Him all your concerns instead of being anxious about them. He promises that if you do, He will replace them with His peace that surpasses all understanding.

Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him because he cares for you. – 1 Peter 5:6-7, ESV

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. – Philippians 4:6-7, ESV

Trials and hard times are to be expected in this fallen world. However, you don’t have to face them on your own. Those who have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ have someone they can lean on when things are tough.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. – Isaiah 43:2, ESV

If you need more help than this article on avoidance-anxiety could provide, consider setting up an appointment to meet with one of the faith-based counselors in our online directory. Your first appointment is risk-free.