The symptoms of anxiety can influence your behavior in obvious ways, like trouble sleeping, panic attacks, or worrying constantly. While it’s well worth your time to pursue support and healing for these clear signs of anxiety, it’s also worth working on the more subtle, but often just as limiting, ways anxiety, and avoiding your anxiety, influences your behavior.
Avoidance is one such subtle but damaging attempt to cope with anxiety; often, people don’t even realize they’re doing it. It’s easy to convince yourself you have good reasons to not go for that work promotion, or to skip an outing with friends, but oftentimes that avoidance is rooted in anxiety, not in your values and how you want to live your life.
For those across Long Island, from Nassau County to Suffolk County, Suffolk DBT offers anxiety treatment that works, where using DBT can help you stop avoiding your anxiety.
What is avoidance?
Avoidance is an attempt to reduce the frequency and intensity of your anxiety symptoms by staying away from anxiety triggers. Avoiding anxiety may lead you to avoid places that spike your anxiety (like doctors’ offices, movie theaters, or even driving), you may avoid people, events, or connections that feel intimidating, you may avoid learning or taking on work challenges because of anxiety around failure, and you may even try to avoid thoughts and feelings that make you anxious. Sadness, anger, or even joy can all provoke anxiety, leading you to try to avoid being yourself and bringing up shame, fear, and judgment.
Why is avoidance a common way to cope with anxiety?
Anxiety can be an intense experience. Racing heart, racing thoughts, sweating, chills, body aches, fear, worry, sleep issues, eating issues, and more. It’s hard to handle, especially if you don’t have a strong suite of coping skills to use, and so avoiding it can seem like the best option.
While it makes sense to avoid things that are truly harmful or unpleasant, anxiety makes you hypervigilant, sensing danger and concern just about anywhere. It can make a simple conversation feel like the end of the world, or even the thought of trying something new feel impossibly hazardous. It can even make our thoughts and feelings seem dangerous.
Avoidance also reinforces itself; when anxiety temporarily eases because you avoided something, your mind will pick up on that change and push you to repeat it, as it now feels like the safest option. But avoiding anxiety is not a long-term solution; the anxiety always comes back.
This overwhelming sense of danger can lead you to avoid normal parts of life, and even cause you to miss out on experiences you’d otherwise enjoy. It can make your life feel small and unsatisfying, and it can even worsen your anxiety symptoms, creating a cycle that shrinks your life even further.
DBT skills that help you avoid avoidance
DBT for anxiety avoidance offers many options you can use one at a time, or in combination, to free yourself from the avoidance patterns that shrink your life and hold you back
Opposite Action DBT skill to help you when you’re avoiding your anxiety
Opposite Action in DBT encourages you to take a step back and examine what you’re feeling (anxiety, fear, worry), and understand what behavior that feeling is pushing you to do. When you notice that anxiety is pushing you to avoid something, Opposite Action encourages you to try to do the opposite. If this feels like too much at once, allow yourself to start with small Opposite Actions and work up to bigger ones.
This breaks the avoidance/reinforcement cycle, so your mind can absorb that feeling anxiety isn’t the end of the world (even if it feels like that in the moment, the moment will pass!), and shows you that even if you feel anxious, you can still live your life.
What does the opposite of avoidance look like? It can look like:
- Instead of avoiding talking to new people, smile at someone nearby and say hello
- Instead of avoiding taking on responsibility at work, ask your team for one new task to take on
- Instead of avoiding presentations or large groups, take a public speaking class
- Instead of acting like everything is all right after someone hurts your feelings, speak up
- Instead of avoiding driving, take a short drive to a familiar place and back
WHAT DBT skill for avoidance
The WHAT skill encourages you to focus on what is happening, and what you’re doing, instead of acting without thinking, or getting bogged down in trying to understand “why” you feel the way you do. This mindfulness skill helps you overcome avoidance by making it easier to deal with anxiety-inducing experiences, helping you focus and live more fully in the moment.
- Observe: Notice what’s happening around you and within you. Don’t judge yourself, don’t try to avoid tough feelings or thoughts, just observe.
- Describe: Describe to yourself your surroundings, the situation, and what’s happening within you. Don’t jump to conclusions about why you feel the way you do, or what it might mean (anxiety doesn’t always mean immediate danger), just describe the facts.
- Participate: Put all your attention and energy into what you’re doing in the moment. When you notice your attention drifting to anxiety or urges to avoid, gently remind yourself of what you’re doing, and return your attention to the activity at hand.
The DEAR MAN DBT skill helps you when you want to avoid tough conversations
You will need, at some point in your life, to ask for help, explain your point of view, prove you’re the right person for a job, defend yourself, or otherwise meet a goal through a conversation. When anxiety comes into play, you may try to avoid the conversation entirely, making it difficult or impossible to meet your goal.
DEAR MAN gives you steps to take to have a successful goal-oriented conversation, even if you’re feeling anxious and want to avoid it. Before you begin, have your goal clear in your head. Then, approach the conversation and:
- Describe the facts of the situation to the person you’re speaking to
- Express how you feel about the situation
- Assert yourself. Your point of view is valid and worth hearing.
- Reinforce the positives of things going your way
- Be Mindful of your overall goal in the conversation, and stick to a calm approach that will meet your goal.
- Appear confident. Maintain eye contact and upright posture, use a confident voice, and don’t over-apologize
- Negotiate. Consider whether a compromise that still supports your goal is possible.
Suffolk DBT can help you work through anxiety, instead of avoiding it
Avoidance can feel unavoidable when anxiety is pushing you to react to triggers. DBT for anxiety opens up a new possibility: choice. Instead of feeling like avoidance is the only option, DBT makes it possible for you to choose what you want to do. It may make sense to avoid some situations! But with DBT skills, you get to decide, instead of anxiety deciding for you.
Whether you’re based in NYC, Nassau County, or Suffolk County, if you’re looking to live life differently, without avoidance and without allowing anxiety to dictate your behavior, Suffolk DBT’s expert therapists can help you. Their comprehensive DBT programs help children, teens, and adults to cope with anxiety in constructive ways that Suffolk DBT, you’ll learn to use DBT skills that cover distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, mindfulness, and emotional regulation to cope with the symptoms of anxiety like avoidance, reducing their impact on your life and giving you a chance to embrace life and truly thrive.
Learn more about our comprehensive DBT program, DBT for adults, DBT for teens, and DBT for children. We proudly serve clients across Long Island, including Nassau County, Suffolk County, and NYC.
IF YOUR AVOIDANCE CAUSES PHOBIAS, PANIC, OR OCD WE OFFER EXPOSURE THERAPY AT SUFFOLK DBT
Another way our practice at Suffolk DBT can address anxiety, panic, and phobias that lead to avoidance is through Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) and other exposure-based approaches. We have clinicians trained in Exposure and Response Prevention Therapy and OCD assessment through the Center for Anxiety and Behavior Therapy. Our practice takes great pride in providing evidence-based treatment that helps people gradually approach the situations, thoughts, sensations, or experiences they have been avoiding. Rather than allowing anxiety to continue shrinking a person’s life, exposure-based therapy helps people build confidence in their ability to experience discomfort, respond differently to fear, and move toward the activities and relationships that matter to them.