Avoidance Anxiety
Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health conditions globally, affecting millions of people every year. Avoidance is one of the most commonly overlooked behavioral symptoms.
Avoidance behavior can significantly impact an individual's daily life, making it difficult to engage in academic pursuits, work, social interactions, and personal growth.
This article explains the relationship between anxiety and avoidance, including its causes, prevalence, and treatment options, to provide a comprehensive understanding for those affected and their supporters.
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What Is Avoidance Anxiety?
Avoidance anxiety involves staying away from specific situations, objects, thoughts, or feelings in an attempt to sidestep the feelings of fear or perceived threats because of the anticipated discomfort.
While offering temporary relief, avoidance anxiety can significantly disrupt daily functioning and perpetuate the cycle of anxiety and avoidance. Avoidance anxiety symptoms manifest through these behaviors, highlighting the intricate relationship between mental health, anxiety disorders, and the mechanisms individuals adopt to protect themselves from thoughts and feelings of distress.
Avoidance anxiety can manifest in various forms, such as avoiding social events, specific places, or even engaging in particular thoughts that trigger anxiety. While avoidance may provide temporary relief from anxiety, it can reinforce the anxiety in the long term, leading to a cycle that can be challenging to break.
Key Mechanisms of Avoidance Anxiety
- Behavioral Response to Fear: Avoidance is a common reaction to fear or anxiety, but it becomes problematic when it negatively affects a person’s functioning and quality of life.
- Maintenance of Anxiety Disorders: Avoidance can develop into anxiety disorder, stem from anxiety disorder, and can maintain it, creating a vicious cycle of anxiety and avoidance.
- Short-term Relief, Long-term Problems: While avoidance behaviors can provide relief from anxiety, it is only temporary. Over time, these avoidance behaviors can lead to more severe anxiety, depression, and other harmful behaviors.
Avoidance Anxiety Symptoms
Avoidance anxiety is characterized by behaviors intended to evade direct confrontation with stressors or challenges. Common symptoms include:
- Social Avoidance: Avoiding social interactions due to fears of embarrassment, judgment, or a lack of control in interpersonal settings.
- Situational Avoidance: Avoiding particular scenarios or places, like crowded rooms or public transportation, where escape might be challenging.
- Cognitive Avoidance: Evading specific thoughts or memories that are linked to anxiety. This can also include distracting oneself to prevent engaging with these thoughts.
- Emotional Avoidance: Shying away from situations that may evoke strong emotions or vulnerability, which can include avoiding deep relationships or meaningful life events.
Examples of avoidance anxiety can include:
- Specific phobias, such as fear of heights, flying, insects, or nature because of wild animals.
- Social anxiety, avoiding social interactions.
- Relationship anxiety, steering clear of intimate connections.
- Health anxiety, avoiding doctors, medical information, or health-related situations.
Avoidance coping, a maladaptive form of coping, involves altering behavior to escape from thinking about, feeling, or facing difficult situations.
Avoidance anxiety not only fails to address the underlying issues that cause problems with anxiety but can exacerbate them, leading to increased frustration for both the individual and affected others.
Examples of avoidance coping include escapism, substance misuse, and chronic procrastination, among others.
By understanding these behaviors and their underlying causes, individuals can begin to address and manage their avoidance tendencies more effectively.
To see if anxiety might be playing a role in your symptoms, rate your level of anxiety using our free one-minute instant results Anxiety Test, Anxiety Disorder Test, or Hyperstimulation Test.
The higher the rating, the more likely anxiety could be contributing to or causing your anxiety symptoms, including feeling like impending doom symptoms.
Causes
Medical Advisory
Talk to your doctor about all new, changing, persistent, and returning symptoms as some medical conditions and medications can cause anxiety-like symptoms.
What Causes Avoidance Anxiety?
Avoidance anxiety often develops as a coping mechanism to control anxiety, especially the strong feelings of anxiety. Avoidance behaviors are based on the belief that avoiding a situation, object, thought, or feeling will prevent the discomfort of fear, anxiety, and potential dangers.
Several factors contribute to the onset of avoidance behaviors, including:
- Early Life Experiences: Having traumatic or negative experiences when growing up can set off avoidance behavior as a way to keep safe.
- Later Life Experiences: Traumatic or negative experiences later in life can trigger avoidance behaviors as a protective strategy.
- Personality Traits: Individuals with certain personality traits, such as those more prone to nervousness or negativity, may be more likely to develop avoidance behaviors.
- Environmental Factors: Stressful environments, such as high-pressure work settings, can exacerbate or trigger anxiety and avoidance behaviors.
As with any of the underlying factors that contribute to the development of anxiety disorder, they can also trigger avoidance behavior as a way to cope with feelings of fear, anxiety, and danger.
Types of Avoidance Behaviors
There are several types of avoidance behaviors, including:
Situational and Cognitive Avoidance
- Situational Avoidance: This behavior involves avoiding specific people, places, or situations that trigger anxiety. Examples include shunning crowded places like malls, stores, and elevators or avoiding direct eye contact in social settings.
- Cognitive Avoidance: Individuals may try to block distressing thoughts or memories by telling themselves not to think about them or engaging in distracting activities. This can manifest as chronic worrying or obsessive thought patterns.
Protective and Somatic Avoidance
- Protective Avoidance: Actions such as compulsive cleaning or carrying talismans are undertaken to create a sense of safety, often seen in individuals with obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders.
- Somatic Avoidance: Avoiding situations that cause physical symptoms similar to those experienced during anxiety, such as extreme temperatures or emotional events like falling in love.
Substitution and True Avoidance
- Substitution Avoidance: Internally, this might involve replacing feelings of sadness with anger. Externally, it could look like using substances or engaging in activities to avoid emotional pain.
- True Avoidance: Examples include dropping a course that requires public speaking or changing jobs to avoid presentation responsibilities.
Escape and Partial Avoidance
- Escape: This could involve leaving a social event early or finding a hiding spot during a gathering to avoid anxiety-provoking interactions.
- Partial Avoidance (Safety Behaviors): Engaging in minimal verbal communication, avoiding eye contact, or speaking in a lowered voice are all tactics to reduce anxiety in social settings.
Additional Safety Behaviors
- Additional Safety Behaviors: Talking rapidly, avoiding eye contact, or dressing inconspicuously to avoid attracting attention are strategies used to cope with anxiety in social environments.
Avoidance Coping
- Avoidance Coping: This maladaptive strategy involves altering behavior to escape confronting stressful thoughts, feelings, or actions, which often worsens the stress over time.
The Consequences of Avoidance
As a maladaptive strategy, avoidance coping involves altering behavior to escape confronting stressful thoughts, feelings, or actions. This approach often exacerbates stress rather than reduces it, leading to a complex cycle of anxiety and avoidance. Here are some of the consequences of avoidance behaviors:
- Increased Anxiety Over Time: While avoidance may decrease anxiety in the short term, it significantly increases long-term anxiety. The more an individual avoids a trigger, the more intense the anxiety can become.
- Worsening Mental Health Conditions: Persistent avoidance can lead to severe mental health issues, including increased depression and anxiety. It fosters a false sense of control over life's events, which can be detrimental when this control is challenged.
- Impact on Daily Life and Relationships: Avoidance behaviors can severely disrupt day-to-day activities and personal relationships. The reluctance to face challenges can strain interactions with others and hinder personal and professional growth.
- Long-Term Stress and Nervousness: Over time, avoidance coping can lead to heightened levels of stress and nervousness. This prolonged state of stress can deteriorate one's health and well-being.
- Breakdown of Self-Confidence: The frequent use of avoidance coping can erode self-confidence. By not facing fears, individuals may feel less capable of handling future challenges, leading to decreased self-esteem and self-efficacy and eroded resilience and confidence.
- Explosive Emotional Outbursts: Suppressed feelings due to avoidance may not remain hidden indefinitely. Over time, these repressed emotions can surface explosively, harming the individual and their relationships.
Understanding these consequences and the need for strategies that confront and manage avoidance behaviors is vital.
Recovery Support
The Recovery Support area of our website contains thousands of pages of important self-help information to help individuals overcome anxiety disorder, hyperstimulation, and symptoms.
Due to the vast amount of information, including a private Discussion Forum, many of our Recovery Support members consider it their online recovery support group.
Treatment
Addressing Level One and Level Two anxiety disorder recovery can reduce and eliminate avoidance anxiety. As the individual applies healthy recovery strategies, they learn not to fear feelings of anxiety or potential threats.
Working with an experienced anxiety disorder therapist is the most effective way to address Level One and Level Two anxiety disorder recovery, as a self-help-only approach seldom produces sufficient or lasting results.
While self-help information and support groups can be helpful, they generally don’t get to the core underlying factors that drive unhealthy anxiety. Working with an experienced therapist will.
Thankfully, avoidance and other anxiety symptoms can be effectively treated through evidence-based therapies, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT).
These approaches help individuals gradually overcome the situations they fear while also challenging the negative thought patterns and beliefs that fuel unhealthy anxiety.
By addressing anxiety's underlying factors, avoidance, and other anxiety-related behaviors, individuals can break the cycle of fear and anxiety, regain control over their lives, and improve their overall well-being.
With the right information, help, and support, individuals can overcome the debilitating effects of anxiety disorder and go on to live a more fulfilling, rewarding, and anxiety-free life.
NOTE: Exposure therapy is especially helpful when extinguishing fears and addressing avoidance anxiety. However, it should only be undertaken when the individual is properly equipped with healthy recovery skills. Premature exposure therapy has the potential to entrench fears and avoidance behaviors further.
Prevalence
Estimates suggest that up to 70 percent of people with an anxiety disorder engage in some form of avoidance behavior. It appears to be particularly prevalent and problematic in specific phobias and social anxiety disorder, where it can significantly contribute to the persistence of anxiety over time.
Common Anxiety Symptoms
Additional Resources
- For a comprehensive list of Anxiety Disorders Symptoms Signs, Types, Causes, Diagnosis, and Treatment.
- Anxiety and panic attacks symptoms can be powerful experiences. Find out what they are and how to stop them.
- How to stop an anxiety attack and panic.
- Free online anxiety tests to screen for anxiety. Two minute tests with instant results. Such as:
- Anxiety 101 is a summarized description of anxiety, anxiety disorder, and how to overcome it.
Return to our anxiety disorders signs and symptoms page.
anxietycentre.com: Information, support, and therapy for anxiety disorder and its symptoms, including Avoidance Anxiety symptoms.
Hofmann, Stefan, and Hay, Aleena. "Rethinking Avoidance: Toward a Balanced Approach to Avoidance in Treating Anxiety Disorders." Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 1 April 2019.
Beckers, Tom, and Craske, Michelle. "Avoidance and Decision Making in Anxiety: An Introduction to the Special Issue." Behavior Research and Therapy, Sept 2017.
Arnaudova, Inna, et al. "Pathways towards the proliferation of avoidance in anxiety and implications for treatment." Behavior Research and Therapy, Sept 2017.
Ball, Tali, and Gunaydin, Lisa. "Measuring maladaptive avoidance: from animal models to clinical anxiety." Neuropsychopharmacology, 15 Jan 2022.
Rudaz, Myriam, et al. "The moderating role of avoidance behavior on anxiety over time: Is there a difference between social anxiety disorder and specific phobia?" PLOS ONE, 3 July 2017.