Beyond Anxiety Avoidance and Wishful Thinking

A child hoped a camping trip would be canceled, reflecting a common pattern of wishing fears away. Adults similarly avoid uncomfortable situations such as meetings, questions, flights, or medical procedures by hoping for escape. This avoidance is fueled by an emotional “pin” that signals “Don’t,” leading to “I can’t” beliefs about what cannot be faced. To prevent anxiety, people become proactive in ways that preemptively dodge experiences, resulting in lost opportunities or distress endured with tension. Anxiety can be reframed as a first responder to unlikely emergencies, marking what is not yet known. Emotional navigation involves intentionally moving toward uncertainty to see what is actually present.

"We might think- Ah, kids! But substitute in our own fears: that meeting you're nervous about, the question you don't want your client to ask, the flight you really don't want to take, the medical procedure you have put off... and put off again-we understand exactly that teen 's game plan. It's ours too. We are fingers-crossed hoping against hope to be airlifted out of our discomfort. The emotional pin we drop essentially says: "Don't!" and we think: "I can't!""

"And that "I can't" describes our relationship with anxiety more broadly: We don't want to be in one. No, thank you. We wish we could block it or ghost it, but there it is. Understandably, we don't want to feel trapped in a discomfort corner. So we become proactive-or pre-emptive-and avoid things where anxiety might happen just in case. Before we know it, we're living our life based on "just in case" scenario thinking. We lose out on experiences or suffer through them with white knuckles; either way, this avoidance leads to distress."

"When something new or uncertain or stressful looms, like that teen, we do an about-face and avoid. But there is another way through that "just in case" avoidance walk through life that anxiety pushes us toward. Instead of seeing anxiety as the ultimate authority, we can understand anxiety as a first responder to an emergency that isn't likely to happen. That "I can't" pin dropped on our emotional map marks what we don't know yet. Instead of pivoting the other way, it's about going toward the unknown to see what's actually there."

Read at Psychology Today