The Comfortable Trap of Avoidance
Understanding why your brain runs from discomfort…and how to stop
Part of the Learning Library
There’s Nothing Wrong With You
I used to tell myself that tomorrow’s another day. Tomorrow turned into a week or more later. I used to get paralyzing anxiety at the thought of confrontation of any kind, afraid of rejection if I spoke my mind. So I never stood up for myself and I carried resentment like a heavy bag. Every time I stayed quiet, I was angry at myself. I couldn’t understand why everyone else seemed capable of speaking their minds without everything falling apart. I tried to drown my shame in alcohol, only to wake up with anxiety and intense feelings of dread. Rinse and repeat.
For most of my life, I thought procrastination meant I was lazy, but I told myself I just worked better under pressure. Avoiding confrontation convinced me I was weak, and I hated myself for that. The more I buried my shame with the temporary relief of cocktails, the stronger it became. I thought these were all separate problems.
I thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me.
I had no idea that they were all connected.
For years, I kept trying to figure out what other people possessed that I was missing. Confidence? Courage? Better social skills? Whatever it was, I couldn’t seem to find it within myself. Then I read about a concept that completely changed my self-perception.
Psychologists call this pattern avoidance, and it’s one of the most common ways humans cope with emotional discomfort. In the moment, it feels like relief from anxiety, guilt, embarrassment, grief, or uncertainty. Unfortunately, that relief is only temporary, and the real problem is still waiting for you.
Once I understood that, it became possible for me to let go of shame and stop hating myself. Not that my behavior magically changed overnight, but for the first time, I understood where it came from.
Then I realized that there was never anything wrong with me, and that gave me hope that change was possible.
Our Brains Are Wired for Survival
I realized none of those behaviors just appeared out of nowhere.
My brain had found different ways to solve the same problem. It was trying to protect me, and it had learned to treat emotional discomfort like danger. When I was a kid, my brain learned that avoiding certain situations felt safer than facing them, and this carried me through adulthood.
The interesting thing is that my brain was doing exactly what human brains evolved to do. Later in life, emotional discomfort was no longer dangerous, but my brain hadn’t learned that yet. I had to teach it.
Avoidance doesn’t always begin in childhood. It can develop when someone has been bullied, tolerated a toxic workplace or abusive relationship for a length of time, or any prolonged experience that teaches your brain that speaking up threatens your comfort. Whether you learned it in childhood or later in life, it may have become a tool used to escape the discomfort or anticipated consequences of difficult situations.
Our brains evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to constantly scan our environment for potential threats. Our ancestors survived long enough to get us to where we are today because their brains became incredibly skilled at recognizing threats and remembering how to avoid them.
Those early humans lived in tightly-knit communities where they relied on each other for food, protection, child care, and emotional support. Belonging wasn’t optional then. Being cast out of the group could seriously limit a person’s chances of survival.
Because of that, human brains became highly sensitive to social exclusion and rejection. In our modern world, we’re still wired to care deeply about approval, acceptance, social status, and conformity, thanks to that evolution.
I was fascinated to learn that this innate fear has been with us for eons. Then I became curious to find out how this works inside the brain itself. I found out that our brains treat physical and emotional pain in similar ways, activate some of the same neural networks, and both affect our well-being. This helps explain why rejection, humiliation, and social exclusion can feel so threatening even when we’re not in physical danger.
So imagine you’ve repeatedly experienced rejection when you engaged in conflict, or were consistently belittled when you spoke your mind. Your brain remembers those experiences. The next time you consider speaking up, it may anticipate the same painful outcome. Staying quiet feels safer because, based on what you’ve experienced before, it has been.
The more often we procrastinate, avoid tough conversations, and escape discomfort, the more we’re reinforcing the perceived danger in our brains. And we’re also training our brains to be even more sensitive in the future.
That’s why it feels so hard to break this pattern.
Your Brain Learns From Relief
Imagine having plans that you’ve already agreed to but want to cancel, so you put off sending the cancellation text until the last minute. You know your friends will be disappointed, maybe angry. Every time you think, “I’ll do it later,” you feel instant relief from the anxiety about how they might respond. That instant relief tells your brain that not sending the text worked to keep you safe.
The problem wasn’t solved, you still have to send that text eventually, but your anxiety went away, for the time being. And those neural pathways just got a little stronger. Over time, the avoidance feels better, but the emotional discomfort feels worse, and it gets harder to break that pattern.
Now we’re stuck in a loop.
The situation triggers anxiety. We avoid the situation. We feel relief. The brain learns. Rinse and repeat.
Situation —> Anxiety —> Avoidance —> Relief —> Brain learns —> Repeat
This is called negative reinforcement.
When Stepping Away Is Healthy
Not every decision to step away from discomfort is avoidance. Sometimes taking space is the healthiest thing you can do, especially when you’re exhausted, overwhelmed, or too emotionally intense to respond thoughtfully.
And sometimes stepping away means ending a toxic relationship, leaving an abusive environment, or distancing yourself from someone who repeatedly violates your boundaries. In those situations, leaving may be an act of self-preservation, not a failure to tolerate discomfort. In some relationships, staying becomes the avoidance because leaving requires facing grief, uncertainty, guilt, financial upheaval, loneliness, or the fear of starting over.
The difference is what you’re moving away from and why.
Are you escaping the temporary discomfort that could help you grow, or protecting yourself from a pattern that continues to harm you?
When the situation is safe enough to revisit, healthy space can become a bridge. You step away so you can regulate your emotions, understand what you’re feeling, and return to the situation with more clarity.
A healthy pause is intentional and temporary. You might say, “I need some time to think about this, but I want to continue the conversation tomorrow.” Then you actually continue it.
Avoidance is driven by the relief of escape. You postpone the conversation without deciding when you’ll return to it, distract yourself, hope the problem disappears, or wait until the other person stops bringing it up. The same avoidance loop begins again.
A pause can last an hour or up to several days, depending on how complicated the situation is. The length of the pause matters less than what you do with it. Are you preparing to return, or are you hoping you never have to?
Avoidance Doesn’t Always Look Like Avoidance
When most people hear the word avoidance, they picture someone who’s lazy or just refusing to do something. What they don’t know is that avoidance looks productive, responsible, independent, easygoing, busy, agreeable, distracted, or helpful.
For example:
Procrastination: “I’ll do it tomorrow.” For days or weeks.
Conflict avoidance: staying quiet instead of speaking up, changing the subject, ghosting, pretending everything is fine.
Emotional avoidance: numbing unbearable emotions with alcohol, food, isolation, deflecting with humor, or binge-watching until you’re too tired to think.
Relationship avoidance: staying in unhealthy or toxic relationships because leaving requires painful decisions, or avoiding intimacy because closeness feels risky.
People-pleasing: saying yes when you want to say no and then resenting it later, putting the needs and feelings of everyone else ahead of your own so they don’t reject you.
Perfectionism: endlessly preparing, researching, tweaking, or waiting until you’re “ready” because finishing means being judged. (Does it take you three hours to choose a font?)
Distraction: staying constantly busy or overworking to avoid quiet times when painful thoughts or emotions can creep in. It can also look like shopping, scrolling, or gaming.
Intellectualizing: analyzing the hell out of a feeling instead of actually feeling it.
We’re avoiding what we predict we’ll feel when we do it, and we’re avoiding what we predict others will feel toward us, like disappointment or anger.
What Are You Actually Avoiding?
Usually, we’re not really avoiding the appointment, the email, the conversation, project, breakup, or cancellation text.
We’re avoiding what we predict we’ll feel when we do it, and we’re avoiding what we predict others will feel toward us, like disappointment or anger.
Maybe I’m avoiding sending the cancellation text because I’m afraid my friends will be mad. What if they stop inviting me out, or don’t want to be friends anymore? I already know I can’t handle how that will feel.
So maybe I go out anyway, and hate it the whole time, resenting myself and my friends for “making” me go out. Maybe I put off sending the text until the very last minute while I think of a plausible excuse. If there was a reservation that I ruined, now I feel ashamed.
But the second I cancel, I feel relieved.
Later, I feel guilty for cancelling last minute, ashamed that I made up an excuse, and worried that my friends are pissed at me. So maybe I have a few cocktails because I don’t want to feel that, either.
I avoided the original discomfort, only to create more discomfort that I now want to avoid.
The emotions underneath avoidance are different for everyone, and you may not even know what they are yet. Sometimes you won’t discover what you’re avoiding until you stop asking yourself, “Why don’t I want to do this?” and start asking, “What am I afraid I’ll feel if I do that?”
Underneath avoidance, you may find fear of rejection, embarrassment, uncertainty, grief, shame, guilt, failure, loneliness, or something entirely different.
Shame Is the Quicksand
A common thread in a lot of avoidance is shame. It sits underneath other emotions that we’re avoiding, reinforcing the belief that something is wrong with us.
It may have convinced us that we’re not as qualified as our coworkers, as successful as our friends, or not good enough for our partners, so we shrink ourselves or pull away entirely, so they don’t see our flaws.
Shame makes simple mistakes and helpful feedback feel like personal attacks and threats to our self-worth. We become defensive, even angry, because it feels unbearable. Sometimes, we deflect blame onto someone else, or on unfortunate circumstances, but it’s never our fault.
The discomfort of shame is so strong that we welcome the instant relief and comfort of avoidance. And it’s also why numbing this pain seems like such an attractive option, maybe the only relief at the time. It reinforces the avoidance loop and feels like a roller coaster we can’t get off of.
The longer we’re on that ride, the more familiar the shame becomes. Eventually, I did something I’m ashamed of can turn into I am someone who should be ashamed. What began as an emotion starts becoming part of our identity.
The Hidden Costs of Shame and Avoidance
When we’re stuck in the avoidance loop for extended lengths of time, strapped into our seats by shame, our worlds shrink around us. Sometimes it gets to the point where we’re afraid to try new things and have new experiences. We may become so closed off from receiving healthy feedback that it prevents us from reaching our potential.
It’s also important to acknowledge that avoiding your emotions doesn’t resolve any problems. They linger in the background. And the longer you try to keep them buried, the harder they’re going to try to get your attention.
After a while, these suppressed emotions will come out, whether you want them to or not. It’s like shaking a bottle of soda and slowly unscrewing the cap. It might look like snapping at a friend for asking an otherwise harmless question, or passive aggression that says, “Must be nice,” in response to hearing about a coworker’s promotion.
Regardless of how they leak out, the feelings we’re trying so hard to hide become visible in our behavior anyway. If you think about it, it’s almost funny: we’re spending so much time and effort running from and hiding these feelings so people don’t see how flawed we are, but we unintentionally betray ourselves when the emotions seep (or explode) out of that soda bottle.
Long-term suppression is not only bad for social skills, but it’s really bad for your mental and physical health. I’ve experienced chronic stress and anxiety, headaches, gut issues, and depression, to name a few side effects. I’ve lost more friendships than I can count, and spent too many years of my life feeling alone and wondering why.
I was surprised by how much better I felt the minute I began to allow myself to feel my feelings and gradually learned how to process my emotions instead of running from them. That first step was a catalyst that gave me the strength to become who I am today.
Emotions Are Not the Enemy
If you’ve spent years avoiding uncomfortable emotions, the idea of intentionally feeling them might sound overwhelming.
You don’t have to face everything at once. Trying to unpack years of buried emotions all at the same time would probably make you want to avoid them even more. Start with one emotion at a time.
Maybe you’re irritated about something someone said earlier. Instead of distracting yourself or deciding what the feeling means, give yourself a minute to notice it. Where do you feel it in your body? What thoughts are coming up with it? What happened right before you felt it? You don’t have to fix it, justify it, or make it disappear. For now, you’re learning how to stay with it long enough to get curious and prove to yourself that you can do it.
As you become more comfortable doing this, emotions can start to feel less like something happening to you and more like information you can work with.
When we learn how to process our emotions, we understand what they’re trying to tell us. We realize that they shape the way we see and move through the world. They give meaning to our relationships and interactions. Through them, we choose how to communicate and make decisions. They affect our temperament and personality.
Anger can tell us that we believe a value, boundary, expectation, or need has been violated. Guilt can show up when we believe we’ve acted against our values or hurt someone. Fear warns us of genuine danger, but it can also react to uncertainty because our brains have learned to associate it with risk. Joy, happiness, and excitement can signal safety and give us energy. They trigger the reward pathways in the brain and reinforce the behavior that created those emotions.
You Can Teach Your Brain Something New
If you’ve recognized yourself throughout this guide, I hope understanding avoidance helps you look at yourself a little differently.
Maybe you’ve procrastinated until opportunities passed you by. Maybe you’ve stayed quiet and carried resentment instead of saying what you needed to say. Maybe you’ve distracted yourself, numbed your feelings, stayed too long, left too quickly, tried to keep everyone happy, or spent years believing everyone else had some kind of courage you were missing.
You learned to do those things for a reason. Understanding that reason doesn’t erase the consequences of avoidance, but it gives us a more useful starting point than shame.
Your brain learned that avoiding certain kinds of discomfort brought relief. With time and practice, you can teach it something different.
You can pause without escaping and ask yourself what you’re afraid to feel. You can learn to recognize when discomfort is asking you to grow and when something genuinely isn’t healthy for you. You can have the conversation, make the appointment, set the boundary, finish the thing, feel the feeling, or take one small step instead of waiting until you’re no longer afraid.
Sometimes you’ll still avoid things. I do. Just because you understand it doesn’t mean it’ll magically go away. Be patient with yourself and keep going.
But now you can start to recognize what’s happening without turning it into evidence that you’re lazy, weak, broken, or incapable.
There was never anything fundamentally wrong with me. My brain had learned a pattern that once helped me cope, and I’ve been teaching it something new.
So can you.
from my desk
You don’t have to face everything you’ve been avoiding today. Start with one thing that feels manageable. Get curious about what you’re afraid to feel, stay with the discomfort a little longer than you normally would, and give yourself the chance to learn that you can handle it.
— Jordan
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