Anxiety & Avoidance

topic

Anxiety and avoidance form the most consequential maintaining cycle in anxiety pathology — with the avoidance of feared situations providing immediate anxiety relief (negative reinforcement) that powerfully maintains the avoidance behavior, while simultaneously preventing the corrective learning experience that would reduce the anxiety through disconfirmation of feared outcomes. Each successful avoidance increases the probability of future avoidance while maintaining or increasing the subjective intensity of the feared situation.

Role

The anxiety-avoidance cycle is the mechanism that converts naturally acute anxiety (appropriate responses to genuine threats that resolve when the threat passes) into chronic anxiety (maintained by avoidance that prevents the resolution that approach would produce). Understanding this cycle is the psychoeducational foundation of all anxiety treatment — because it reframes the natural self-protective impulse of avoidance as the primary mechanism maintaining the anxiety the person wants to reduce, and establishes the counterintuitive therapeutic directive of approaching feared situations (exposure) as the route to freedom from them. Most people who have been chronically anxious for years have never received this fundamental explanation of why their anxiety has not resolved through the avoidance they have employed.

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