TIME TO AVOID AVOIDANCE
IN MY experience, avoidant coping strategies are common in many psychological problems. Whether someone is depressed, anxious, has an addiction or relationship problems, you can bet there is an element of avoidance in there, helping to keep the problem going.
Let’s face it, we all have tendencies to avoid sometimes. I can think of several examples myself just from today. The mounting pile of paperwork on my desk, apologising to my friend for missing her birthday, writing this column .... these are all things I avoided at some point today.
When faced with potentially difficult or uncomfortable situations, avoidance can seem like the easiest option. The problem is that in the long run, avoidant coping strategies tend to make our problems worse.
Think about your own tendencies to avoid. What happens when you over rely on avoidance instead of tackling your problems head on?
Unfortunately, avoiding our problems doesn’t make them go away. Often problems get bigger, leading to more stress and anxiety and even feelings of hopelessness and despair.
Avoidance also gets in the way of achieving our goals, acting in line with our values and generally living the lives we want.
The antithesis to avoidant coping is active coping. This involves approaching issues when they arise and dealing with them directly. Active coping strategies that I could have used today include making a start on my paperwork, ringing my friend to apologise and sitting down to write this column several hours earlier.
The first step to challenging avoidance is to recognise when you’re doing it. Spend time reflecting on your own avoidant coping strategies.
Do you procrastinate? Are you frequently putting things off? Do you avoid going out or raising issues in your relationships?
Next, consider the pros and cons of your avoidance. This can help you to figure out how much of a problem it is. Think of a recent situation when you avoided addressing something directly and make a list of all the pros and cons of this coping strategy.
Then go back through your list and note whether each consequence was short-term or long-term. If the majority of pros were short-term while most cons were long-term, it’s definitely time to change things up.
Once you identify a problematic use of avoidance, consider what active coping strategies you could use instead. What do you need to do in order to resolve this situation?
If a problem feels overwhelming, break your solution down into small steps and focus on one step at a time.
Finally, it’s important to accept that stress and anxiety will arise when being proactive. However, the difficult feelings triggered by approaching our problems are usually not as bad as we imagine.
Learning to tolerate this distress gives us the opportunity to see that we can cope and builds selfconfidence in our ability to deal with situations effectively.