The Cycle of Anxiety refers to patterns of avoidance we engage in, that ultimately intensify our anxiety.
They Cycle of Anxiety starts off with anxiety itself. This looks different in everyone but can include: racing thoughts, increased heart rate, restlessness, and decision paralysis. Because anxiety symptoms are uncomfortable, naturally we look for relief and that is when Avoidance enters the picture. When we think about avoidance we generally think of behaviors that are almost in direct opposition of the thing that we are anxious about. An example would be:
Cindy is anxious about her finances so she avoids creating a budget, perhaps even goes shopping instead.
This kind of avoidance is known as Physical Avoidance because we are directly removing ourselves from the anxiety trigger.
The type of avoidance that we don’t tend to think about is Emotional Avoidance. This type of avoidance often seems as though we are facing our fears through direct engagement with the anxiety trigger, but while we might be engaging the anxiety trigger we are actually avoiding the emotional experience of anxiety. This leads to problematic behaviors. Using the previous example this type of avoidance might look like:
Cindy is feeling anxious about her finances and decides to create a budget. She stops everything she is doing in order to create her budget ASAP. She combs through financial statements spanning 20 years. She even creates a complex system of tracking her finances that involves daily record keeping and financial goals that rely on her tracking system going well.
While the plan that Cindy created isn’t terrible, the behaviors she engaged in while creating it are problematic. Cindy gave into the sense of urgency created by her anxiety by dropping everything she was doing. She allowed her anxiety to let her engage in irrational behaviors such as combing through way too many years of financial statements and creating a financial tracking system that she will likely not be able to maintain. In this scenario, while Cindy directly engaged her anxiety trigger, she was focused on avoiding the feeling of anxiety by allowing the anxiety to dictate how she problem solved. In moments like this, taking time to sit, reflect, and emotionally regulate can help us create awareness about our anxiety symptoms and behaviors that it might lead us to. Some reflection questions that can help include:
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- How am I currently experiencing anxiety?
- What can I do to lessen some of my physical and mental symptoms of anxiety?
- Are there any anxiety-driven behaviors I tend to engage in and should look out for right now?
- Do I really need to do that or is my anxiety convincing me that I should?
Once we’ve engaged in some kind of avoidance there tends to be a misleading feeling of relief. It’s misleading because while we feel better its only brief. The avoidance of anxiety reinforces the idea that anxiety is so terrible we need to runaway from it ultimately, leading to more anxiety.
