The Cycle of Anxiety
How avoidance is making your anxiety worse
How do you understand anxiety?
For some, it’s the catastrophic and intrusive thoughts, rumination, and worry. For others, it’s the tightness in the chest, feeling hot and sweaty, and increased heart rate.
Anxiety is worry about a threat that may happen. It is an important survival mechanism that can get out of hand as we anticipate future events.
Often people notice their anxious symptoms, and interpret them as an inability to cope, which further exacerbates anxiety, and so a vicious cycle begins to form.
Anxiety involves a series of changes in your body that prepare you to act in order to regain a sense of safety. An effective way to do this, is to escape or avoid whatever might have triggered you.
While avoidance helps to reduce anxiety in the short term, it tends to increase in the long term as you eventually have to face the trigger again.
An example is when you avoid going to social events because that’s where you experience some social anxiety. By not going, you avoid the distress of socialising, and the intrusive thoughts telling you you’re being awkward or weird. However in the long term, you become even more unwilling to socialise, and your anxiety becomes worse. You continue to use the emotion as an example that things are unsafe.
However, you never provide yourself with the opportunity to show yourself that catastrophic thinking can be disproven.
In the meantime, people are likely to develop what are called safety behaviours. These are subtle forms of avoidance to help cope with anxiety. It might look like drinking alcohol to ‘relax’ in social situations, using medication to get through stressful situations, having your phone on you at all times, or relying on others to be with you.
Safety behaviours often assist in avoidance, because they prevent us from learning that we can cope with distressing emotions which will ease with time. Imagine if someone took your safety behaviour away? What would that be like?
Instead, we need to confront our feared thing. And this is called exposure. Exposure work involves engaging with whatever it is you fear, experiencing a natural increase in anxiety, providing yourself an opportunity to practice skills like deep breathing or grounding exercises to cope and reduce anxiety. The outcome is often an increase in confidence over one’s capability to cope. This exposure work continues until you notice a significant decrease in anxious symptoms.
If you relate to this cycle, you’re not alone! Everyone has something they’re avoiding. If you feel ready to tackle your cycle, or to learn more about what skills and strategies you can organise a free consult call with Aleks to discuss how therapy may help.
REFERENCES: ‘The Vicious Cycle of Anxiety’ info sheet by The Centre for Clinical Interventions.
