How Avoidance Keeps Us Stuck

Today's episode is all about my favorite fear trap: avoidance. It feels like coping, but isn't actually helping us the way we think it is. In this episode I walk through six ways avoidance can be keeping you stuck (often without your realizing it). Enjoy! 

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Transcript

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Welcome back to the 18 Minutes Podcast. I'm Amanda, and this is the show where we take everything that is confusing, isolating, and scary about fear and anxiety, and we turn it into something that you can actually work with. I want to talk about something today that I think is the biggest trap that keeps a lot of us stuck in life: avoidance. We talk a lot on this show about facing fears and doing hard things. I want to talk more about what patterns of avoidance are actually doing to us. If fear has been a theme in your life for a long time, I can almost guarantee you that you have built up maybe a subtle but robust system of avoidance in your own life. And it might be the single biggest thing keeping you stuck. Today I'm gonna walk through what avoidance can look like, what it's costing you, and why it might be one of the most important things you can start to change to change your life. Before we dive in, I am not a therapist or a medical professional. Everything I share on this show is based on my own experience with fear and anxiety, my journey in overcoming it, and the research I do for the show. This is not a replacement for therapy or medical care. So please only take what's helpful to you, leave what isn't, and listen to your medical and mental health professionals first. If you're new here, welcome. Go hit follow or subscribe wherever you're listening because a new episode comes out every Friday. I would hate for you to miss the next one. And if you're a regular listener, welcome back. If you haven't yet, head to the18minutes.com and get your free copy of the Fear to Freedom Guide. Getting that guide also subscribes you to my weekly newsletter. I send one email out a week, every Monday morning with some encouragement for the week, sometimes a preview of the podcast episode. You'll also be the first to know about any upcoming reclaim uh coaching cohorts if you are a subscriber to the newsletter. So go grab that if you haven't already. Okay, let's talk about how avoidance keeps us stuck. I want to start with something that I think is important about avoidance, um, which is that it's been really normalized lately. It's been kind of set up in a way that lets you live with it without ever needing to confront it. And here's what I mean. After years of listening to your fear and doing what it's telling you, those things can start to look like preferences. I just don't like driving on the highway. I'm not really a crowd person, I just prefer to be home. I don't really enjoy traveling, I'm just not into eating out at a restaurant, I'm an introvert, I don't do parties. And I'm not saying that every preference is actually avoidance. Some people actually just don't like crowds, some people actually like being at home and being an introvert is a real thing. But for those of us who have lived with chronic fear, the line between I just don't like that thing and I'm afraid of that can get blurry in a way that absolutely keeps us stuck. Because if it's a preference, there's a lot less to work on. If it's a personality trait, there's nothing that can really change. It's just who we are. The first move in working with avoidance is being willing to look at the things you've decided are just preferences and honestly ask yourself, is this actually a preference or is this fear? The first cost of avoidance that I want to talk about is what it does to how you see yourself. When you avoid something, even when it feels protective in the moment, you are also confirming in a very real and practical way that you weren't capable of handling that thing. Every time you take the long way around, you're telling yourself that you needed to. Every time you cancel a plan out of fear, you are telling yourself that you couldn't have gone anyway. These small moments stack up, and over time they become your story about yourself. I can't handle confrontation, I can't drive far from home, I can't be alone in big places, I can't deal with X, Y, and Z. All of these can feel true, and then you live as if they are. The only way to find out what you're actually capable of is to start saying yes to things that you've been saying no to. Once the actions start to change, your self-image changes too. The second cost of avoidance is the experiences themselves, the trips you didn't take, the relationships you didn't pursue, the job you didn't apply for, um, the night out with people who maybe would become some of your closest friends, the class you wanted to sign up for, the concert, the vacation, the career move, the hard conversation that maybe would have actually changed things. These are not small things. These are experiences that really could have been your life. Avoidance doesn't just keep you from one situation in one moment. It adds up over a year, five years, 10 years. There is a version of your life you would have lived if avoidance wasn't in charge of making your decisions. And I'm not trying to scare you or shame you or make you feel bad about things that you've missed. I've missed plenty of things too. I was anxious, anxious, and avoidant for 27 years of my life, and I don't want to spend any more time than is necessary grieving those things, and I don't want you to either. But I do want you to count them honestly because this is part of continuing, it's part of the cost of continuing this avoidance pattern. The longer you do what you've always done, the longer this continues and things stay the way they are. And that is a really good reason to try something new. The good news, of course, is the vast amount of these experiences that are still ahead of you. You haven't missed the only ones you'll ever get. There will be more trips, more conversations, more chances, but you have to be willing to start saying yes to them as they come up, or at least taking baby steps to get to a point where you feel confident enough to say yes. Another reason that avoidant behaviors keep us stuck is what it actually does to our brains. I'm gonna go over the mechanism that I've learned from studying this stuff, and I've talked a lot about this, so I'm gonna go over it pretty quickly. Every time you avoid a situation, you feel a little burst of relief. You think, okay, I'm safe now. But what you've just taught your brain is that that moment, that situation, um, was avoided. It needed to be avoided because that situation was actually dangerous, and the avoidance kept you safe from something. Because you went from stress and high alert to calm, and the avoidance was the tool that got you there. And unfortunately, for a lot of us, that kind of behavior doesn't keep us the same. Over time, our brains get more convinced that more situations are actually dangerous because the only thing that ever works is leaving. So next time the fear comes up faster and louder, and the relief from avoiding it becomes even more important. The loop gets reinforced each round, the fear gets louder, and the world that feels safe and comfortable gets smaller. This is why I believe that avoidance is not just a neutral not doing something, it's actively training your brain to be more afraid of whatever the triggers are for you every single time they come up. Every avoidance is feeding your fear, not your sense of safety and well-being. The more you do it, the louder the fear gets the next time you're in the same situation. I have a whole episode on some of the science that I looked into on this. Um, it's called What to Do When Anxiety Comes Back, and I talk about exposure and the fear memory mechanism in more detail. The short version is your brain only learns I'm safe by moving into a situation and finding out that you're okay. Avoidance doesn't teach you that lesson, it teaches the opposite. And here's where this leads over time. Your world actually gets smaller. If avoidance was just neutral, if it were just I don't do these few things, but the rest of my life is fine, that would be one thing. But that's not what happens a lot of the time. Every avoidance reinforces our perspective of fear, and the feelings we have of fear get bigger and bigger around new things. So things you used to be okay with start to feel like a bigger deal and more work to get through. And things you enjoy might start to feel like obligations or responsibilities. This is a really common pattern, and it's not something that we get taught about when we're young. It doesn't start with I can't leave the house all of a sudden. It usually starts with one or two avoidances that feel small, and then the avoidances multiply. Then the world that your nervous system allows you to feel safe and comfortable, comfortable within gets smaller and smaller, and probably without you even really noticing that it's happening until one day you wake up and realize you haven't done anything new in a year and you don't really go anywhere except maybe a couple familiar places. I've been there and many of you listening have been there. And part of the reason I'm sharing this with you is so that you can notice it in yourself. Because the only thing worse than a shrinking comfort zone is a shrinking comfort zone that you can't see. Once you see it, you can start to grow it back. And the last thing that I want to touch on is how avoidance hides what you actually want. When you have been avoiding in general for long enough, you can lose track of what you would do or what you would pursue if fear were not in the way. You stop daydreaming about trips, for example, because you've decided that trips are off the table, and even thinking about traveling terrifies you. You stop thinking about a job opportunity that might really excite you because you've decided that you can't handle change. You stop letting yourself imagine relationships, opportunities, lifestyles that your fear has told you are not for you. You shrink your own desires to fit the size of the world that your oversensitized nervous system has built for you. This for me was one of the hardest losses and something I honestly had to grieve a little bit. And I didn't really recognize it in myself until I was on the other side of it. I had spent so many years shaping my wants to fit my fear that I had really forgotten there were wants under there at all. Then, once I started living in a way where fear wasn't running the show, things started to come up that really surprised me. I wanted to travel. I wanted to do work that pushed me, I wanted to go to school, I wanted to be in crowded places, I wanted things that I had told myself for so long that I didn't want. If you have been running on this general pattern of avoiding things for a while, just know that your real wants might be under there weighting. You could have a whole identity to discover. You might not actually be the person that just doesn't like those things. This is one of my absolute favorite things to talk about because moving from fear to freedom is not just about doing more things, it's about getting your authenticity back. And how exciting is that? So a few things I hope you take with you today. One, a lot of avoidance does not look like avoidance. It looks like preference, like personality, like opinion. Be willing to ask yourself, is this really my preference or is this coming from a place of fear? Two, everything you avoid out of fear teaches your brain that that thing, that situation, that feeling was dangerous, and the thing that saved you from it was the avoidance. So avoidance is not neutral, it is actively keeping your fear in place. And three, avoidance can shrink your world over time, not just in that one moment. And it starts to hide what you actually want out of life. The good news is everything I just said works in reverse too. Every time you stay in a situation or a feeling that you would normally avoid, you teach your brain that you are safe, that you can handle it. Then you grow your world back and you start to discover who you actually are underneath. That is what this work actually looks like in practice. So that is all for today's episode on avoidance. Quick update on the active reclaim coaching cohort. Things are moving. People are doing real work. We are having honest conversations. We are moving from fear to freedom together, and it has been absolutely incredible. I knew this was gonna be an incredible experience, and honestly, my expectations have been one out of the work. Going through this work together with a group of people who um have such similar experiences and are going through similar things, and working towards it together and encouraging each other and holding each other up has been absolutely amazing to me. The next cohort is gonna be announced soon. So if you're not already subscribed to the newsletter, that is the best place to hear about things like upcoming events, like everything coaching cohort. So that's the18minutes.com, sign up for the newsletter, and that's where that will be announced first, and also the early access for signups will be as well. If you have questions about today's episode or you have a topic you want me to dive into on the show, you can send me an email at amanda at the18minutes.com or message me on TikTok or Instagram at the18minutes. As a reminder, I go live on TikTok every Thursday at 3 p.m. Central Time. So if you want to pop in there, chat about what you're going through or asking questions, I'm definitely. If today's episode resonated with you, um, please follow and subscribe if you don't miss the next one. And if you haven't second, please consider leaving a rating or a review. Those are genuinely the most helpful um ways that other people find the show. Thank you so much for being here, and we'll see you next time.