Avoidance Makes It Worse (And How To Stop It)

You know the conversation you've been putting off for three weeks. You've rehearsed it. You've run it in your head. And then you just don't do it. That's not weakness. That's avoidance — and it's costing you more than you realize. In this episode, I break down the psychology behind why we avoid the things that matter most, what it's actually doing to your brain and your life, and four research-backed tools to start breaking the pattern.

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IN THIS EPISODE: → Why 1 in 3 people meet the clinical threshold for avoidance-driven anxiety → The Little Albert experiment — how fear is learned (and spreads)→ Seligman's learned helplessness research and what it means for you → The difference between discomfort and actual danger → Why "I'll deal with it eventually" is a trap → 4 tools that actually work 

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 🔔 PART 2 IS COMING — Subscribe so you don't miss it. Next episode: What happens when avoidance becomes an identity. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 

REFERENCES - Watson & Rayner (1920) — Journal of Experimental Psychology - Seligman & Maier (1967) — Journal of Experimental Psychology  - Pittelkow et al. (2020) — PLOS ONE (7-country social anxiety study) - Levin et al. (2022) — Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science - Gollwitzer (1999) — American Psychologist - Hofmann & Smits (2008) — Journal of Clinical Psychiatry ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 

Jim Cunningham is a Licensed Professional Counselor based in Monument, Colorado. This podcast explores real psychology, real research, and real talk — without the fluff. 

The Unscripted Mind — real therapy, real talk, no fluff. Hosted by Jim Cunningham, Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC). Each episode delivers practical tools and honest mental health insight to help you gain self-awareness, make better choices, and feel more in control.

Transcript

The Conversation You Keep Avoiding

Speaker 0:00

Have you ever had a conversation you've been putting off for three weeks? We all have. Maybe it's with your boss, your partner, uh, maybe it's your own bank account. Uh, you know the one I'm talking about. You've rehearsed it in the shower, you've run it through your head a hundred times and then you just don't do it. And here's the thing, the longer you wait, the bigger the thing Montserrat gets. That conversation that was maybe a seven on the discomfort scale is now a nine. After three weeks of avoiding it, you've added interest to the emotional debt. See, avoidance doesn't make problems disappear, it puts 'em on layaway. And the bill always comes due usually with late fees. So if you've been dodging something. A person, a decision, a feeling, a truth. You already know this episode's for you. I'm Jim Cunningham. I'm a licensed professional counselor, and this is the UnScripted Mind. So let me jump into this and start with a few numbers because I think this puts things in perspective. Lifetime rates for anxiety disorders, which are almost always fueled by avoidance, affect somewhere between 10 and 29% of the population. The Harvard National Comorbidity Study put it near the high end of that. That's roughly 30% of the people. And that's just the clinical threshold. That's not the everyday stuff, the stuff we're all doing, dodging the hard conversations, putting off the doctor, not applying for the job, sidestepping grief. That's essentially everybody. That's all of us. And here's kind of one of the numbers that stopped me when I first read it. Uh, a 2020 international study surveyed young adults across seven countries and found that more than one in three 36% met the clinical threshold for social anxiety disorder. Not shyness, not introversion. A clinically significant pattern of fear and avoidance. Around relationships, conflict and connection. We've been calling it personality for years. It turns out a significant chunk of it has a name and more importantly, a treatment. And then there's what researchers call experiential avoidance. It's the broader pattern, of not just avoiding situations, but avoiding your own uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. A comprehensive meta-analysis found large significant associations between this pattern and depression, anxiety, PTSD and stress. These are not small correlations. These were big ones across almost every mental health condition they studied. In other words, if there's a common thread running through most of the pain people bring into my office, avoidance is a big part of that thread. So where does it all come from and why do smart, capable, otherwise functioning adults avoid things they know they need to face? Here's what I want you to know first, avoidance is not a weakness. It's not laziness. It's actually your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do. Let me explain. When your brain, uh, perceives a threat, whether it's a tiger or a difficult email from your boss, it activates the same fear response. Your heart rate goes up, stress hormones, flood the system, and you get the urge to get away from that thing, whatever that might be. We've understood this since the 1920s when a psychologist named John Watson ran one of the most famous and honestly most ethically troubling experiments in all of psychology. So Watson worked with a nine month old infant known in the literature as Little Albert or the little Albert experiment. Albert had no fear of a white rat He was curious actually, and he'd reached for it. Uh, Watson then began to pair the rat with a sudden metallic clang like symbols loud enough to startle the kid scared enough to make him cry. Within weeks, little Albert had developed a full fear response of the rat alone. No clanging needed just the rat. But here's the part that matters. The fear began to spread. It grew legs. Little Albert began showing fear responses to other white, furry things like a rabbit, a fur coat, even a Santa Claus mask, things that merely resembled the original source. Your nervous system doesn't always distinguish between the thing that actually hurt you and the thing that just kinda looks like it. I've seen this with people who have panic attacks. Sometimes they'll ride a train for the first time and for some reason outta nowhere, they have a panic attack. Don't know why. So the brain tells 'em, well, trains are bad. We might have another panic attack. And then the brain starts thinking, well, you know, planes feel a lot like trains and maybe buses and maybe cars. And so once that circuit is wired. The fastest way to feel better from all of that is just to get away from the triggers. And that works. It works for all of us. The anxiety immediately drops, your brain logs it as a win. So it does it again and again. Each successful dodge feels like a narrow escape. The threat feels more real though, not less. That's a problem. And your willingness to engage in the world. Gradually gets smaller. That's a bad thing. Now, I wanna tell you about a second experiment, and this one's from Martin Seligman in the 1960s, and I warn you it involves some animals and it's not a, a comfortable story to hear, but I'm gonna tell you about it because it explains something I see in my office every single week, if not every single day. Seligman was studying dogs. Uh, he divided them into two groups and the first group received a mild electric shock, uncomfortable but escapable, they could press a lever and make it stop. The second group, however, received the same shocks, but nothing they did made any difference. Their lever didn't work. There was no escape. After a while, Seligman changed the conditions of his experiment, and he put both groups into a new situation. It was a box with a low barrier on one side. They would get shocked on the other side. It was safe. All they had to do was jump over the barrier. The first group, the ones who had learned that they could control the environment by pushing the lever, they figured it out almost immediately. They jumped, they got safe, and their problem was solved. The second group, well, they just laid down. Even when the door was open, even when escape was possible, even when the situation had completely changed, they had been conditioned to believe that nothing they did mattered. So they simply stopped trying. Seligman called this learned helplessness, and this is why it matters for our conversation today. Avoidance teaches the same lesson. Every time you avoid something, the anxiety temporarily drops. Your brain writes a note that says The only way to feel better is to get away, and eventually you stop believing you can handle the thing at all, even when you can, even when the door is wide open. As somebody once said, you just keep decorating your cage. Early life stress, trauma, a home where emotions weren't safe to express all these wire the brain toward avoidance as a default. It's not fate, it's not context, and it explains why face your fears is the worst advice in the world for someone whose nervous system has been learning the opposite lesson for 20 years. So let's talk about what avoidance actually looks like in real life, because it's sneaky, a little insidious. It doesn't announce itself. It shows up wearing a disguise. One of the most obvious disguises is situational avoidance, and that looks like not going to the doctor because you're afraid of what he's gonna tell you or what he might find. Not applying for the promotion because you might get turned down not having a hard conversation because it might turn into a fight. And then there's cognitive avoidance. Uh, that's where we stop thinking about the thing. We call it doom scrolling. Mostly these days we stay busy. We binge shows, we scroll. Not because we're lazy, but because sitting with the uncertainty feels genuinely intolerable, the mind turns away before we consciously even decide to do that. There are also what researchers call safety behaviors. And these are subtle moves people make to stay in a situation while actually avoiding the situation while they're in it. For example, a person with social anxiety, uh, might go to a party, but they spend the whole night scrolling on their phone. The person who has a conversation but only over text, never in person. They're technically not avoiding, but they're also not getting the information their brain needs to update their threat response. So the anxiety stays exactly where it was. And then one of our favorites is procrastination avoidance, wearing a productivity costume. Research out of Carleton University is pretty clear. Procrastination is an emotional regulation problem. It is not a time management problem. That's a big distinction. It's the fear of failure. The fear of success, judgment, or discomfort being managed by delay. I'll do it when I feel more ready, but you won't. That's not how it works. But here's the pattern I wanna come back to on our next episode, and I'm telling you now, so you can sit with this for a minute. There's a version of avoidance that's so sophisticated, so well disguised that people spend years inside it without ever recognizing it for what it is. It's the use of victimhood as a way to avoid accountability. The story where everything went wrong is somebody else's doing, which means nothing is in your power to change. We're gonna dig in deeply into that next time, including some research that I think will genuinely surprise you. For now, I just wanna leave you with this image. You know that movie Pet Cemetery, the old Stephen King one? I prefer the original version. If you haven't seen it, it's the one where the family cat dies and there's an old burial ground out behind their house. Um, and so they bury the cat. So the cat comes back to life, but not well. He comes back. He's a little meaner. He is a little more feral. that image sticks with me because it's true about something deeper than horror. Just because you bury a thing doesn't mean it stays buried and when it comes back, it comes back changed. That's avoidance. The problem you bury doesn't disappear. It sits underground. It festers, and when it finally surfaces, because it always does, it comes back bigger, more urgent and harder to manage than it ever would've been if you would've just dealt with it in the first place. The conversation that would've taken 10 minutes of discomfort in February becomes a full relational rupture by June. The health concern that could have been caught early now is a crisis. The anxiety that could have been treated in its early stages now has been reinforced for years. Avoidance doesn't eliminate the struggle. It defers it, and it charges interest while it waits. But here's some good news, and I do mean this. Uh, people do get better from this even if they've been doing it for decades. The research on this is genuinely encouraging, and I want you to sit with it for a second. If you recognize yourself in any of what I just described before. So here's some treatment modalities that seem to work pretty well. Cognitive behavioral therapy, I think everybody's pretty much heard of that, but it directly targets avoidance through gradual exposure. It has response rates in the 60 to 80% range in meta-analysis. The majority of people who engage seriously with treatment see meaningful and lasting change. Using that exposure therapy also works by doing, very similar things. And actually it's kind of the opposite of what avoidance prevents. It gives your nervous system the chance to learn that the feared thing is actually survivable. That the conversation didn't end the relationship, that the appointment didn't guarantee. Bad news. The brain updates its threat model. The avoidance becomes less necessary. Of course the prognosis is best when people do the work in real world settings, not just in the therapist's office, and when they start earlier rather than later. But even entrenched, longstanding avoidance patterns respond and they tend to respond pretty well. The brain is very adaptable and the world you live in can start expanding again, not just decrease. So here are four tools that are research informed. And I'll keep these tight and short for you, but some things you can try. Number one is name the avoidance. Specifically not I've been stressed, but be specific. I have been avoiding the conversation about money with my sister for six weeks. Naming a behavior disrupts the automatic pattern. You can't address what you haven't defined, so name it. The second one would be to build a fear ladder and know the difference between discomfort and danger. That's a big piece of this. So building a fear ladder looks like listing what you've been avoiding from mildly uncomfortable up to things that are genuinely daunting. Rate each from zero to 10 and start at the bottom. And here's the piece most people miss. When you start climbing the ladder, your brain is gonna start sending you those signals. It's gonna trigger those stress hormones. Your heart rate's gonna go up, your stomach's gonna get tight, you're gonna breathe shallow. Your brain is going to interpret all of that as danger. Stop, get away. And here's what I want you to practice asking yourself in that moment, is this discomfort or is this actual danger? Discomfort is real, and I'm not minimizing that. It feels awful, but discomfort is not the same thing as a real threat. A hard conversation might make your heart pound. That's your nervous system doing its job. It's not evidence that the conversation will actually destroy you, though. Reality testing, that distinction, specifically asking what the realistic probability of actual catastrophe is if you take this next step. It's one of the most effective tools we have for shrinking avoidance driven anxiety. The goal isn't to feel calm before you act. The goal is to act while feeling uncomfortable and let the nervous system update its threat file from experience. The third one I might suggest is kill the open-ended timeline. I'll deal with it eventually is an invitation for avoidance to compound commit to a specific time. Research from New York University psychologist Peter Gitz shows that if then planning that is, I will call before noon on Thursday, dramatically outperforms vague intentions. Specifically, it's accountability. Pick the time, put it on your calendar, and if you really want to kick it up a notch. Tell somebody else that you're doing this. Telling somebody else always helps. And finally I would say count what you're giving up. And what I mean by that is write down what chronic avoidance is actually costing you now, what it's protecting you from what you're actually losing. That could be a relationship you haven't fought for. The version of yourself, you haven't become the life that's waiting for you on the other side of the thing that you've been not doing. Sometimes the cleanest anecdote to avoidance is an honest accounting of the life being quietly surrendered to. Lemme say that again. Sometimes the clearest anecdote to avoidance is an honest accounting of the life being quietly surrendered to. The question isn't just what am I afraid of? It's what is this fear costing me? And what am I losing by avoiding these things? So here's where I want to land for today anyway. Avoidance is not a character flaw. It's a learned pattern that made sense at some point, maybe it was when you were younger and the situation genuinely wasn't safe, but it tends to outlive its usefulness. When it does, it becomes the thing standing between you and the life you actually want to be living. Your homework, just one thing. Think of something you've been circling. Write it down. Rate the discomfort from zero to 10. Identify the smallest possible first step, not the whole thing, just the first move. If you want to go to the gym, maybe the first move is just getting dressed as if you were gonna go to the gym. Ask yourself this, is this discomfort or is this actual danger? Because how you answer that question will change what you do next. One step. That's all you have to do. As James Clear would say, we're trying to get 1% better. That's it. That's how patterns break. Not all at once. One intentional move at a time. So next time we're gonna go somewhere a lot harder. we're gonna talk about what happens when avoidance becomes an identity, when the story we tell about being wronged becomes the reason we never have to risk being wrong. The research on this is some of the most clinically significant I've seen in years, and I think it's gonna land for a lot of people. Until then, if this episode is hit something for you, share it. It might help somebody else subscribe, follow, maybe even leave a review. It's how more people get to find the show. And remember, this life doesn't come with a script. It's why we talk about these things. So embrace the unexpected, cherish the unplanned, stay curious, and just have an amazing day. We'll see you next time on the unscripted Mind.