Avoidance, Anxiety and Achievement
- Dr Jenni McArthur
- Mar 25
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 8
This week’s short "Note to Self" to keep your thinking on track…
Note to self: Avoidance is a short term answer to the experience of unhelpful anxiety.
For many reasons, individuals can be hampered in their goal pursuits because an obstacle along the way creates a sense of anxiety. An automatic, evolutionary way of coping when a threat is detected and anxiety ensues is to avoid that situation. It saved our ancestors and ensured our DNA survived. As a way of managing anxiety in the modern world, avoidance is extremely effective in the short term. We experience immediate relief from anxiety when we avoid a feared situation, but have you considered all that avoidance really offers?
In the long term, avoidance serves to increase our anxiousness as it helps us to generalise our fears across multiple contexts and can hold us back from achieving our potential, impede our confidence, restrict our lives, and guarantee that anxiety will not dissipate.
There are times when avoidance is absolutely the right choice to make, and understanding the difference is important and can be tricky. Do we avoid situations to remain anxiety-free in the short term, or is there a genuinely good reason for doing so? Reflecting on your avoidance habits in this way can be a starting point to changing them.
There is another way. If you are not avoiding, you are approaching. Facing your avoided situations in the pursuit of a goal will feel uncomfortable at first. Yet the long-term consequences of doing so are extremely positive. When you realise that you can cope with a situation that you thought, at some level, would be your undoing, you begin to broaden your horizons, grow your confidence, and your level of anxiety will decrease. While it might be uncomfortable in the short run, approaching feared situations is an attractive offer in the long term.
Discomfort is rarely a signal to retreat, but more likely an opportunity for growth. By approaching challenging situations deliberately and thoughtfully, we can transform our experience of anxiety from a limiting force into a catalyst for personal development.
Think about it...
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