The concentric circles of avoidance.
How avoidance works so well, it shrinks your world.
Avoidance is one of the most common forms of resistance we face along our path towards what we supposedly want for ourselves. It is very effective at reducing uncomfortable feelings in the here and now. So effective, in fact, that the brain will learn quickly that avoiding things that make us uncomfortable, anxious, fearful, or paralysed with terror, will work almost every time.
Fearful of rejection? Avoid asking her out, making sales calls, and applying for jobs that may push you. Its fool proof, you can avoid the horrid knot in your stomach before the event, the dreadful surge of courage needed during its doing, and the pain, worthlessness, and self contempt that muddies your internal weather for days after. Avoidance works. Therein lies the problem, though, because what we claim to want for ourselves is often on the other side of the actions we are avoiding.
This is put beautifully in the book “Why we break” by Vincent Deary:
“…What we are avoiding as we skirt around our no go zones is the way they make us feel. This is what we are going out of our way for. And it really is out of our way, because we are willing to forego the things we really value in life just to avoid these difficult feelings”.
In our above example, a person may want a meaningful relationship, a successful business, or a rewarding career. Avoidance of the uncomfortable feelings that many of the actions necessary for these things to appear in a life will work, all too well.
Our issue with avoidance does not end there. Our brains are very intelligent organs, and they learn all too quickly that avoidance is highly effective at reducing the amount of difficult and unpleasant feelings we must endure throughout our days. What begins to happen is that the avoid strategy is deployed with lower and lower thresholds. This gradually shrinks our world. It starts with things that are overtly triggering and uncomfortable. It creeps inwards, applying itself to things we associate with the main trigger. Insidiously it claims more of our world, reducing our safe spaces to ever smaller niches.
Avoiding cold calling grows to include cold email and LinkedIn messages. Then warm outreach, then asking for referrals. You develop a hatred of sales in general, preferring to play with the product until its perfect. You really want to work for yourself and run a successful business, if only the sales thing wasn’t necessary. You find yourself, as per the quote above ‘going out of your way’, deviating from your path, playing small, and procrastinating.
There is a way through this downward spiral of avoidance, but you’re not going to like it.
The actual path is multi faceted. But the headline is ‘courage’. We as humans can reclaim our path, our goals, those things we want in life that we value, but happen to be on the other side of things we dread. The way to do this is through action, which is consistent with what we claim to want for ourselves, in the face of uncomfortable feelings. This takes courage, it feels awful, and its completely necessary. If you are courageous enough to show up multiple times per day and take actions that align with the life you want, even (especially) when doing so feels simply dreadful, you will not only progress towards your goals, but something else incredible will happen.
That amazingly clever brain that learns quickly that avoidance works, is the same brain that will learn that the things you feared were mostly stories in your own mind, not objective reality. Your brain makes up these stories to try and protect you from potential dragons, its not self sabotage, its self preservation taken to the extreme and aimed at benign things. The problem is that there could be dragons everywhere. In our narrative of the world we inhabit, we the narrator can place dragons in all manner of corners and shadows. The faces of others, the rooms, conversations and WhatsApp groups we’re not in, the meetings we must attend, the uncertainties we face each day. All of these are places dragons could live. Many of our brains have learned that they just might (or even, probably do). So we are wise to avoid them. So we do.
Thankfully, in our modern world, those dragons are most often either fictional, or of the bearded dragon harmless small scurrying type. When we notice those feelings of imminent immolation at the hands of a lurking beast, and yet show up, act, and wait to see what happens, we more often than not find there was no dragon in that particular room. Or if there was, the nip on the finger from the pet sized beast was not the existential fire we dreaded. And our brain learns. Gradually, our threat system will recalibrate to a new narrative of our reality. We will experience not only the fruit of our action in the real world, but also less anxiety and fear of it. Our world expands again.
One final not here, lets just touch on comfort zone. I nearly found my fingers finishing that last paragraph with something along the lines of ‘our comfort zone grows larger’. But I stopped myself short, because I both didn’t want to sound trite, and I didn’t want to give the false impression that comfort was somehow the end goal of all this. Comfort is not your objective. In fact, aiming for it might well be destructive, as many great thinkers far superior to me have written about since the ancient past. No, Comfort is not the objective, courage is. The point of all of this is not to expand your comfort zone. It is more like realising that discomfort, uncertainty, work, and risk are a part of a good life. They require courage to face. The world requires courage to face. So maybe our goal is not to expand our comfort zones or become comfortable with being uncomfortable etc. Maybe its just to find courage, and build that like a muscles endurance to the requisite levels for life.
