Getting Off the Anxiety-Avoidance Rollercoaster
How Confronting Anxiety Can Help to Reduce It
What is the anxiety-avoidance rollercoaster?
A common feature of anxiety is a number of uncomfortable anxiety symptoms that leave us feeling on-edge or distressed. When our anxiety is especially intense, these symptoms can feel intolerable, leading us to engage in various avoidance behaviors to quell the discomfort. These avoidance behaviors provide an immediate relief from anxiety. For example, if you find yourself feeling anxious at a party, you might choose to leave. Alternatively, if you’re anxious about an assignment or deadline, you might hop on TikTok or find some other way to distract yourself from your worry.
In the short-term, these avoidance behaviors feel good. They provide us with a sigh of relief and help to settle our emotional systems, and every now and again, that’s not such a bad thing. This relief however is part of what makes them so seductive to the mind. When we end up avoiding situations that we’d rather be able to stick out, we begin to reinforce avoidance as a strategy for managing our anxiety. The mind sees it like this: “When I feel anxious in social situations, I know that leaving makes me feel better. I should leave again in the future.” This both reinforces the connection between anxiety and avoidance in the brain and robs us of opportunities to develop other strategies for coping that don’t result in us missing out. What’s worse, avoidance often results in our anxiety rearing back stronger the next time around.
Remember, some amount of anxiety is normal and serves an adaptive function. If you’re feeling anxious on a date with someone who turns out to be a bit of a creep, that anxiety may be signaling you to be careful and plan your exit. If you find yourself anxious while walking alone through a dangerous neighborhood at night, that anxiety is preparing your body to quickly detect and respond to threats to your safety. However, more often we find ourselves frustrated by our anxiety when it gets in the way of us accomplishing things we’d otherwise like to do, whether that be conquering procrastination, flirting with someone we are romantically interested in, or just going about our day-to-day lives.
Well, I don’t like this ride! How do I get off of the anxiety-avoidance rollercoaster?
Getting off the anxiety-avoidance rollercoaster is an important step in more effectively managing your anxiety, but getting started can be a challenge. Here are a few tips on how to do just that, with a small caveat first: these strategies are NOT a replacement for anxiety treatment and will be most effective when used under the guidance of an anxiety therapist. Okay, let’s take a look at what you can do to start running the ride in reverse:
Set a goal for yourself. In order to address avoidance, it’ll be important to first establish a clear goal for what you’d like to be able to achieve. It’s important that this goal be realistic and attainable. For example, if you experience social anxiety at parties, it may not be realistic to expect you’ll be the most social person there, at least not initially. Try to think about the smallest next step in the right direction. What would change, and how would you feel different?
Keep the long-term goal in mind. Avoidance is as attractive an option as it is because it offers us temporary and immediate relief from the difficult symptoms of anxiety. Of course, this avoidance is a bit of a faithless friend and in the long-term will only make matters worse. Your goal is to find opportunities to choose instead to not avoid your anxiety, while simultaneously building new skills for better tolerating it. This will necessarily be uncomfortable— to a degree, that’s how you know it’s working. Keeping in mind the long-term benefit, like being more comfortable making friends at a party, can make the challenging moments feel more worthwhile and tolerable.
Work backwards from your goal and create a list of anxiety-provoking scenarios. If you’re at all familiar with video games, you’ve probably noticed that the big boss battle is saved for the endgame. In the early levels, the game gives you an introduction to its mechanics: you learn that the A button is to jump, the B button is to dodge, and that the joystick propels your character. Progressively, the game challenges you with new mechanics and scenarios; suddenly, you have to quickly jump, then dodge to avoid obstacles, and there’s probably a mini boss along the way. Think of anxiety in a similar way. For example, if you’re trying to practice being more assertive rather than avoiding conflict, it wouldn’t make sense to take on the scariest person in your life first. Instead, you might want to try lower risk scenarios initially, like asserting your preference for a restaurant when your friends are deciding where to eat or returning food if it’s not to your liking. Get creative about this, and see if you can organize an entire hierarchy of increasingly challenging situations. If your anxiety makes this too difficult to do, you’ll want to take this step with the guidance of an anxiety therapist. Be careful not to progress through this hierarchy too quickly; if your anxiety is ever so bad that you begin to shutdown, disassociate, or panic, you should scale back to something on the lower end of it.
Practice relaxation and deep breathing techniques. Anxiety is as uncomfortable as it is because it activates our body’s physiology and our fight-or-flight response. This is a bodily experience that is often accompanied by shallow, rapid breathing, a racing heart, digestive discomfort, sweaty palms, dry mouth, and other physical symptoms. One of the most effective ways to respond to this cascade of physical reactions is to address them with strategies that promote relaxation in the body. For example, deep breathing (as opposed to the shallow breathing characteristic of anxiety) signals to the body that it can relax. This can help to make your anxiety a bit more tolerable as you choose to stick around rather than to avoid it. You might want to get started with some diaphragmatic breathing exercises or with progressive muscle relaxation, for example. Try using these when you’re calm as well as when you’re anxious so they’re well-rehearsed and at the ready when you really need them.
Visualize what success looks like. This may seem a bit silly, but visualization is a legitimate strategy for combating anxiety. We call visualizations of anxiety-provoking experiences imaginal exposures to them (whereas real-life exposure is said to happen in vivo). For those of us afraid of spiders, for example, simply imagining one crawling along our skin is going to increase our state anxiety, just like watching a horror film makes us fearful even though we’re under no immediate threat to our safety. Will our anxiety be as bad as if it were happening in real life? Of course not! But most of us are not ready to hold a spider from the beginning, and imagining anxiety-provoking situations while practicing relaxation techniques can be an effective way to begin to conquer them. You can place these visualizations in your list of challenging scenarios and may even want to visualize the “best case scenario” for anxiety-provoking events if it helps to build your confidence. Be careful, however, that you don’t use this best case scenario as a means for avoiding the discomfort of imagining things not going so well.
Be patient and practice self-compassion. The connection between your anxiety and avoidance behaviors likely didn’t develop overnight, nor will you sever that connection so quickly. Tackling anxiety can be a gradual, deliberate process, and you may experience a few setbacks along the way. Be careful to look out for labeling (e.g., “I’m such a loser”), catastrophizing (“I’ll never get better!”), and other obstructive thinking patterns that may worsen your anxiety and make it harder to get back on the horse. Feelings like shame only serve to get in the way, so treat yourself with compassion and care and take stock of your progress as it unfolds!
Need an anxiety therapist? Interested in working together for anxiety treatment in DC?
I would be happy to support you in getting off the anxiety-avoidance rollercoaster and taking greater control over your life. Check out the rest of my website to learn more, or send me a message through my Contact page to get started.
