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Excessive avoidance is a hallmark of social anxiety disorder (SAD).
But here’s what a lot of people miss:
Avoidance isn’t necessarily bad or wrong…
Why avoidance is normal and even helpful
It’s totally understandable to avoid things that seem dangerous or scary.
For example, if you might burn your hands by touching a hot object, it probably makes sense to avoid it until it cools down.
In fact, avoidance is an evolutionary advantage. It’s one big reason why we survive and thrive as a species. Here’s what researchers say:
“Avoidance is a natural and adaptive response to danger. Animals, including humans, cannot survive without the ability to avoid harm.”
— LeDoux et. al.
So when does avoidance become a problem?
When avoidance becomes unhelpful
Avoidance is unhelpful when it’s excessive as I mentioned, and much more importantly, when it consistently stops you from becoming the person you want or living the life you want.
While avoiding a scary social situation might feel relieving in the short term, it hurts your social confidence in the long term.
In the CBT For Anxiety course I took with her, Elizabeth DuPont Spencer, LCSW, explains the long-term costs of avoidance:
“Avoidance feels so good in the moment… [but over the long run] we feel worse: we feel incapable, our self- confidence goes down, we don’t learn anything new. And that is a real problem.”
By avoiding a person or social situation that triggers your social anxiety, you’re essentially training your brain — your amygdala, specifically — to mark the person/situation as a threat.
Rather than learning that social anxiety = not that bad through exposure, you learn that social anxiety = bad through avoidance (more on exposure later).
In his course, Russ Harris, an acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) trainer, goes as far as to say:
“…we shouldn’t call them “anxiety disorders” because that makes it sound like anxiety is the problem. We should call them “experiential avoidance” disorders – because the core of the disorder is that the client is letting experiential avoidance rule his life.“
If avoidance isn’t ideal, what can you do instead?
Spot the Avoidance Antelope
Antelopes run crazy fast. It’s how they’ve evolved to escape nasty predators like lions and leopards.
Your avoidance is just like an antelope: it’s trained to help you leap and sprint away from danger.
And if you have been avoiding situations or people who make you socially anxious for some time, your Avoidance Antelope will be pretty friggin’ muscular, which means it will ride roughshod over your decision-making.
The implication of that? You won’t be able to tell your Antelope who’s the real boss — you don’t have the strength just yet.
What you can do right away though, is to notice its movement like a good old rancher. Without awareness of when/how it shows up, it will always be the master of your mind.
Notice any discomfort or fear before, during, and after your social situation. When does your Antelope spring into action? When is it most likely to take control of your mind?
Here’s how to further harness your antelope-spotting skill:
Level up your antelope-spotting skill
When you’re present — when you’re mindfully responding vs. mindlessly reacting— you’re more likely to become the master of the Avoidance Antelope, instead of getting jerked around by it.
Here’s how to practice mindfulness when the Avoidance Antelope runs wild:
1. Notice it without judgment.
You could say something like, “Yep, the Avoidance Antelope is pretty frisky today…”
2. Notice your physical reactions as it drags you around.
Take a deep breath and notice what you’re feeling physically…
- Are your muscles tensing up?
- Are you shunning eye contact?
- Are you heading towards the exit?
(In my article below, I share more about what mindfulness is and isn’t, and what techniques are my favorites: Does mindfulness help social anxiety? Yes (here’s how)
Understand how your Avoidance Antelope hops around
Everyone’s Avoidance Antelope is different. Mine loves fleeing the social spotlight by asking tons of questions.
Understanding the movement patterns of your Avoidance Antelope can help you be more aware of moments when it hijacks your brain.
There are two kinds of avoidance:
- Obvious: Either you don’t show up at all, or you leave very soon after you arrive.
- Subtle: You avoid attracting attention in a conversation. For example, you might talk less, sit in a corner away from people, and so on.
Both kinds of avoidance are considered as safety behaviors.
👉 Recommended article: Safety behaviors in social anxiety: how they make anxiety worse – Deeper Conversations
What's your default mode of avoidance? Or is it a mix of both?
Pet your Antelope
As you start noticing the Antelope more, it can be easy to criticize and even beat it up. After all, its existence might remind you that you’re not as “strong” as you thought.
But why does the Avoidance Antelope show up in the first place?
It’s because you are experiencing emotional distress and it wants to help you escape the distress.
It’s not your enemy! It’s your friend and it means well (even if it isn’t the most helpful).
Tame it!
As you become more mindful, start taming your Avoidance Antelope with exposure therapy.
In exposure therapy, you retrain your Antelope to be less skittish — you learn how to face anxiety-provoking situations or people without avoiding them.
Each time you face your social fears, you’re teaching your Avoidance Antelope: “I did it! It’s not as scary as I thought. I can do it again!”
Here are some resources to get started:
- Check out this list of 31 social anxiety exposure challenges and see if any of the challenges might resonate. If not, come up with your own exposure challenge!
- Here are 9 ways to make exposure therapy fun, including turning it into a game.
Turn it into your ally
While you can’t get rid of your Avoidance Antelope completely, you could make it a guest star on your social confidence journey. Here’s how that works…
- Accept that it will take over a % of your conversations. There will still be some social situations you shy away from, and that’s cool. Focus on celebrating the little wins that you’ve notched, and really, how far you’ve come along since you started avoiding less!
- Understand that you can turn in-the-moment avoidance into acceptance and courage. If you notice yourself avoiding a conversation, allow for that to happen, then immediately or quickly start it.
Here’s what researchers suggested:
“Indeed, in a therapeutic setting, during an exposure exercise, briefly allowing patients to escape an exposure and then quickly re-enter it (i.e., retreat and reenter technique) may increase patients’ sense of control over the situation thus increasing their willingness and ability to approach the anxiety-provoking situation.”
In other words, what you want is a positive “net acceptance ratio” — more acceptance than avoidance on average.
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