Anxiety: Behaviors and Avoidance

To continue our discussion of how to manage anxiety during the pandemic or a crisis through behavior, we must talk about avoidance. It is a common response to want to avoid things that cause us anxiety, or avoid things that don't necessarily cause us anxiety, but we don't have the desire to do because we are anxious. Avoidance can be comforting, but it's important to remember this comfort is only temporary. We can call this a safety behavior. Avoiding the situation or activity does not make the root of the problem go away, and often because of this, the bad aspects of anxiety fester and may get worse. Avoiding gives you no chance to confront the issue at hand and find a solution or compromise to get through it, and it can often enable you to avoid more situations in the future when you feel anxious. When you turn to avoidance, it may lead to you feeling negative about activities you used to enjoy before, such as the positive activities we thought about in the previous step. 

If we shouldn't turn to avoidance, what can we do? We can work on our Approach Behavior. When you are anxious and realize that you are avoiding, think about what you're avoiding. What tasks and activities are your consciously or unconsciously not facing due to the anxiety? Now we have to make a plan to do them, to approach these tasks and activities. 

Understand that when we say facing the situation that gives you anxiety, we know this can be limited. For example, if you are facing anxiety due to the threat of getting sick or your loved ones getting sick, we understand there is nothing you can single-handedly do to erradicate COVID and stop the pandemic. This is when it's important to think about the things you CAN control instead of the situation you cannot control. You can approach this anxiety by brainstorming ways you can prevent yourself and others from being exposed to COVID. For this example, you may plan to research information on how you can protect yourself from contracting the virus and spreading this information to the people you can about. Instead of avoiding the situation and constantly feeling anxious, in this scenario, you approached your anxiety and found ways you are able to boost your mood. Focus on your progress with this appraoch behaviors and think of the things that are within your power to do.