The exhausting art of avoidance

When we run from our inner experience, we spend enormous energy going nowhere. But there is a gentler path available.

Why avoidance wears us out

Avoiding is exhausting. Many of us spend much of our precious time and energy doing our very best to keep certain things at arm's length, including our anxious thoughts, our uncomfortable feelings, and at times, ourselves.

It makes a kind of sense, of course. If something feels painful or overwhelming, creating distance from it feels like the safest option. The mind is extraordinarily good at self-protection, and avoidance is one of its oldest tools. But the problem with avoidance is that it is rarely a one-time thing. It becomes a habit and a way of orienting ourselves to life, and it takes an enormous, ongoing amount of effort to maintain.

Think of it like holding a beach ball underwater. You can do it, but you have to keep pushing and working against it. The moment you relax your grip, up it comes. Our avoided feelings and thoughts are much the same. The energy required to keep them submerged is energy that can't go anywhere else - not into our relationships, our creativity, our joy, or our rest.

The many faces of avoidance

Avoidance rarely looks like sitting still and doing nothing. It tends to be active, even industrious. Two of its most common disguises are procrastination and excessive productivity: on the surface completely opposite, yet often driven by the same impulse: staying away from whatever is uncomfortable inside.

The person who cannot seem to start anything, and the person who never seems to stop - both may be using busyness (or the avoidance of it) as a way of not having to feel something. It is a surprisingly common experience, and not one that reflects any failure of character.

It is worth pausing here to name something important: not all procrastination is avoidance in the psychological sense. For many people - particularly those with ADHD - difficulty getting started is neurological, not emotional. It is not a sign of running away from something; it is the way their executive function works. If that resonates with you, it is worth considering the idea that your procrastination may need a different kind of understanding than this framework offers.

Often we reach for external distractions such as food, alcohol, shopping, online browsing, doomscrolling - anything that offers a quick hit of dopamine and briefly quiets the noise within. Social media, in particular, has become a masterclass in this. It is always there, always stimulating, and perfectly designed to keep our attention directed outward.

None of these coping strategies are signs of weakness, laziness or moral failure. They are entirely human responses to discomfort. Over time, though, they tend to compound the very anxiety they were meant to soothe, because while we are distracted, the underlying feeling goes unprocessed, and the sense that something must be managed or escaped grows quietly stronger.

"Avoidance keeps us busy. But busy and free from pain are not the same thing."

What are we actually avoiding?

This is worth sitting with gently. When we find ourselves reaching for the phone, the snack, the next task on the list, what is it we are moving away from?

Sometimes it is a specific thought: a worry about the future, a painful memory, a fear we have not yet voiced out loud. Sometimes it is more diffuse; a low-level sense of unease, an uncomfortable feeling in the body, an awareness that something is not quite right that we would rather not examine too closely.

Occasionally, what we are avoiding is simply stillness itself. In a world that rarely asks us to stop, the experience of having nothing to do - no task to complete, no screen to look at - can feel remarkably unsettling. Some people describe it as a kind of restlessness, or even mild dread. That feeling, too, is information worth paying attention to.

Often, what lies beneath avoidance is not a single overwhelming thing, but a collection of smaller feelings that have never quite been given space: trauma, low-grade grief, unexpressed anger, needs that have been quietly set aside for a long time. These do not tend to disappear on their own, they simply wait.

The cost of constant distraction

There is nothing inherently wrong with distraction. Rest and enjoyment are necessary, and not every quiet moment needs to become an exercise in introspection. But when distraction becomes the primary way we relate to our inner world - when we cannot tolerate sitting with ourselves for more than a moment - something important is being lost.

We lose access to ourselves. Our sense of what we actually want, feel, and need becomes muffled. Decisions become harder because we are not in good contact with our own responses. Relationships can feel less satisfying, because genuine intimacy requires a degree of self-knowledge and self-disclosure that avoidance makes difficult.

There is also the matter of the body. Our emotions don't only exist in our minds, they live in our bodies too. Tension in the chest, a knot in the stomach, shallow breathing, a persistent fatigue that rest doesn't seem to touch. These are often the body's way of carrying what the mind has been unwilling to process. Over time, the physical cost of emotional avoidance can become considerable.

That said, it is important to acknowledge that not everyone experiences emotions through the body in the same way. For autistic people and others who experience alexithymia (a reduced ability to identify and describe feelings) the body may not offer clear or reliable signals. Emotions might arrive as a vague sense of wrongness, physical discomfort, a sudden change in energy, or a strong urge to withdraw, without any obvious label attached. This is not avoidance. It is simply a different relationship to emotional experience, and it deserves its own kind of attention.

What happens if you check in with yourself?

Here is an honest question worth sitting with: what might it be like to check in with yourself - with your body, your feelings, your moment-to-moment experience as it actually unfolds?

Not to fix anything, not to analyse or judge. Simply to notice.

Many people who begin this practice (perhaps through therapy or counselling, mindfulness, or even simply through a deliberate pause in the middle of a busy day) are surprised to discover that their inner world, though unfamiliar, is not quite the threat they imagined. The dread of looking inward is often worse than what is actually found there. Feelings that were expected to be unbearable turn out to be bearable, if uncomfortable. The anxiety that seemed to lurk everywhere becomes, on closer inspection, something smaller and more manageable.

Is it possible that your experience might be less unpleasant, less daunting, than you currently believe? That the story your mind tells you about what is inside - that it is too much, too painful, best left alone - might not be entirely accurate?

This is not to minimise genuine pain or difficulty. Some feelings are hard, and sitting with them asks something real of us. But there is often a meaningful difference between what we fear we will find and what is actually present when we look with curiosity and compassion rather than bracing for catastrophe.

"The dread of looking inward is often larger than what is actually found there."

Small ways to begin

Turning towards yourself does not have to be dramatic or time-consuming, it can start very small.

For some people, it might look like pausing before reaching for your phone in the morning and asking yourself, simply: how am I? Not as a rhetorical question, but as a genuine one. What is here right now, in my body, in my mood, in the quality of my attention?

For others (particularly those who find body-based or emotion-based check-ins confusing or unreliable) it might be more useful to notice behaviour instead. Are you more irritable than usual? Have you been unusually drawn to distraction? Are you eating or sleeping differently? Behaviour can be a back-door into emotional awareness when the front door doesn't open easily.

It might also look like noticing, when you find yourself suddenly craving a distraction, what prompted the impulse. What were you doing or thinking in the moment before the urge arose? That small gap between trigger and response is where a great deal of useful information lives.

It might look like placing a hand on your chest or your belly for a moment when something feels off, and simply acknowledging: something is happening here. I am not going to fix it right now. I am just going to notice it.

These are not cures, they are beginnings. Small acts of turning towards yourself rather than away, which over time can shift something in the relationship you have with your own inner life. Remember that different minds work differently, and what feels grounding for one person may feel frustrating or inaccessible for another. Take what feels useful and leave what doesn't.

When turning inward feels impossible

If the idea of checking in with yourself feels impossible or too frightening, that is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. It is a signal, not a flaw. For many people, the habit of avoidance runs deep, and it developed for good reasons: perhaps turning inward was not safe at some earlier point in life, or perhaps no one ever modelled what it looked like to sit with difficulty rather than flee from it.

For some people, particularly those who are neurodivergent, it is not necessarily fear that makes turning inward difficult. If you have spent years being told to "just notice how you feel" and found that instruction baffling rather than helpful, you are not doing it wrong. You may simply need a different entry point, and a therapist who understands that.

In those cases, trying to simply 'be' with your feelings can feel less like a gentle suggestion and more like being asked to swim without ever having learned how. The instruction is technically accurate, but missing something essential.

This is where therapy can be genuinely transformative. The therapeutic relationship offers a particular kind of safety; a space in which to begin to know yourself more fully, with someone present who is neither alarmed by your experience nor eager to move past it quickly. A good therapist is not there to tell you what you feel, but to be with you as you find out - and to help you find a way in that actually works for you.

Within that kind of held, supported environment, many people find that they can begin to approach their inner experience in ways they never could alone, not because the feelings themselves are different, but because the conditions for meeting them are.

You do not have to have it figured out first

One of the most common reasons people delay seeking support is the belief that they should be able to manage this on their own, that their difficulties are not serious enough to warrant help, or that they need to understand the problem clearly before they can explain it to someone else.

None of these things are true. You do not need to arrive at therapy with a diagnosis, a clear narrative, or a well-articulated sense of what is wrong. You only need to arrive. The process of understanding tends to unfold from there, at whatever pace feels right for you.

Avoidance keeps us busy. Therapy, over time, can help us become free - not from difficulty, but from the exhausting work of running from it.

Ready to explore this together?

If any of this resonates with you, reaching out is a gentle first step. You do not have to have it all figured out, that is precisely what the counselling process is for. Constance Counselling offers a safe, warm space to begin exploring your inner experience at your own pace.

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