Anxiety manifests throughout the body in many ways: you may experience tightness in your shoulders or jaw, shallowing breathing, a feeling of dread and restlessness, the inability to stop circulating thought patterns, and so on. Many of us have not been taught how to cope with the intense feelings of anxiety, so we pull out our best stop: avoidance. Although avoidance works wonders at alleviating anxiety in the immediate, short-term, it ends up causing further damage down the road. Thus, the road to anxiety alleviation is not avoidance, but rather facing our fears.
To illustrate this cycle, I’ll use the example of a fictional case: we will look at Sarah, who deals with social anxiety. Although Sarah longs for connection and close friendships, she finds herself feeling dread, self-doubt, and a negative internal dialogue whenever she tries to meet up with new people. One week, she works up the courage to text a friend to hang out. However, in the days and hours leading up to the hangout, she feels immense anxiety. Eventually, she decides to text her friend that she is feeling under the weather and cancels. Sarah is instantly relieved to have avoided this anxiety-provoking situation. However, she is still left without the level of friendships she desires, as well as an increased anxiety about social interactions in general.
This experience highlights something called the Cycle of Anxiety. In this cycle, you first feel anxiety, which then leads to avoidance– a temporary alleviation of that anxiety. However, this avoidance strategy communicates to your brain that the original stimuli was indeed to be feared. In the long-term, your brain reinforces the anxiety, causing anxiety to grow rather than decrease.
Avoidance in essence is a maladaptive coping strategy resulting in the cycle: anxiety, avoidance, relief from avoidance, and then increased anxiety. One way to disrupt this cycle is to intentionally expose yourself to your anxiety. Using the previous scenario, if your anxiety is around social settings, you could expose yourself to your fear through avenues such as inviting a friend to coffee, talking to a barista, and working your way up to more stress-inducing situations.
By choosing to face your fears, you will feel an increase in anxiety at first, but overtime, you will learn to implement new coping skills and to trust that you truly are capable of dealing with your fears. The goal in this exercise is to face rather than avoid your fear, thereby helping your brain to stop reinforcing the anxiety response. The goal in this exercise is to face rather than avoid your fear, thereby helping your brain to stop reinforcing the anxiety response. This technique is often used in anxiety-related disorders such as OCD, phobias, and social anxiety disorder, but can be expanded to many other anxiety-producing situations.
