What Are You Avoiding? - How to Face What Overwhelms You, Scares You & Brings Pain

Avoiding only increases the anxiety & pain related to what you're putting off. It also limits your life & prevents growth. Come learn 5 tips to stop avoiding & starting dealing with discomfort.

Show Notes:
As we all know, we can only avoid things/people for so long. I mean, SOMETIMES we can avoid certain people forever, but it’s not ideal since there are emotions & experiences tied to that interaction that could help us grow & understand ourselves better.

Avoidance behavior is when someone escapes from having to deal with difficult feelings, experiences, people, conversations, basically, anything that you aren’t ready to handle in the moment or maybe not any time soon. A lot of this is rooted in fear & not knowing how it’s going to turn out or if it will work out the way you hope or need it to. And while sometimes it’s ok to put something off, this can become a real problem if we are doing it all the time. Its also considered a negative coping mechanism.

Avoiding will really limit what you can do in life because you keep creating boundaries that you won’t cross. And while it will feel nice for a while to not have to do the thing, anxiety could actually become a problem for you because of impending doom. And yes, it can be helpful in the moment for those that struggle with anxiety or panic to avoid certain things, but if you continue to put it off, the symptoms just become worse.

One of the biggest things we are missing out on with avoidant behavior is the ability to tolerate discomfort. The more we have to do things we don’t want to do, the easier it becomes to get those things done when we make the effort to face those things. We are always going to experience discomfort in our lives, so learning to tolerate it is better than avoiding it until it blows up on us.

We are also missing out on learning to problem-solve better or just learn new skills sooner than being forced to. Problem-solving is an underrated skill. If you are able to problem solve most things in your life, you move forward quicker with more ease & less anxiety. It’s because when you problem solve something & come to a solution, you feel confident because you figured it out. And continuing to do this builds confidence & dampens the fear & worry that whatever it is won’t work out.

If you aren’t sure whether you struggle with avoidance behavior, consider if there are situations, experiences, people, tasks or emotions in your life you put off dealing with on the regular. If you continually avoid certain things, the same things, you might be struggling with avoidance behavior.

Today I am going to share with 5 tips on How to Stop Using Avoidance as a Coping Mechanism:

1. Make Your Task Smaller (if possible)
2. Identify the Fear & Worse Case Scenario
3. Get Support/Accountability to Share Your Avoidance Behavior With
4. Don’t Assume, Assemble the Research
5. Accept that Growth is Uncomfortable & Something to Be Proud of

Thank you again for listening & I hope this episode was helpful.

Come visit me on my Instagram page @sabrinajoyperozzo.

Have any questions, comments or feedback?  Send me an email at [email protected] or check out my website, www.sabrinajoy.com where you can listen to all my episodes, send me messages & sign up for my weekly newsletter!

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