Avoidance
Avoidance behaviours are things we do to escape upsetting feelings or situations. If you feel socially anxious, or anticipate feeling socially anxious it is understandable you may feel tempted to avoid or escape the situation.
Situations we may try to avoid include:
• asking for help in a shop • making a complaint • attending appointments • eating or drinking while being observed • giving opinions • going into a room or shop alone • lunch or coffee breaks • meeting new people • talking to people in authority • people we are attracted to • public places • queues • small talk • talking in meetings or in groups • telephone calls
The reason for avoidance is important, for instance, there is a big difference between avoiding a social event because you are tired from work and want to rest, versus avoiding because you feel too anxious to go.
The problem with avoidance
Although in the short-term avoidance may help us to feel safer and less anxious, in the longer-term avoidance keeps us anxious for a number of reasons:
- We never get to test our negative thoughts. If we did, we might discover that our socially anxious thoughts are often inaccurate. We might learn that our fears rarely occur and instead that things often turn out better than expected.
- Less opportunity for positive life experiences. As long as we avoid social situations, we have no chance of growing as people and positive social experiences that would motivate us to engage more socially over time.
- Anxiety and avoidance can spread to even more situations and areas of our life (e.g. relationships with family or people at work)
- Avoidance can also result in loss of self-esteem and self-confidence, perhaps leading to other mental health issues such as depression.
Ways to reduce avoidance
To reduce avoidance, you will need to gradually face the situations that make you anxious with new ways of thinking and behaving. Jumping in at the deep end, or simply repeating what we have always done, won’t usually work with social anxiety. Using behavioural experiments to approach feared situations in a more structured way, with new strategies, can help us both test our fears and push through to other challenges. See our pages on Making Progress, challenging negative thoughts and beliefs, Exposure therapy and hierarchies.
Please see this article www.cci.health.wa.gov – Overcoming Avoidance
Safety behaviours
Safety behaviours are typically used as a subtle form of avoidance behaviour. They may give short term relief but are generally unhelpful in terms of overcoming anxiety in the long term.
When people with social anxiety can’t avoid a social situation, they sometimes use safety behaviours to feel more comfortable and to prevent feared outcomes and predictions from coming true.
Safety behaviours may be very different for different people. It is not what you do, but why you are doing it that determines whether something is considered a safety behaviour.
Examples may include:
• avoiding giving opinions • avoiding talking about yourself • avoiding eye contact. • being monotone or unanimated when speaking • asking constant questions (to avoid having to speak about yourself), • finding a task to look busy • going out at the quietest times of day/night • hiding visible signs of anxiety (a jacket to cover sweating, make-up to hide blushing, sunglasses to avoid eye contact) • doing anything to bring attention to yourself • people pleasing • rehearsing each sentence before you speak in case you get tongue-tied and reveal yourself as nervous or socially unskilled. • staying on the edges of a group • staying close to someone you know • playing with your phone • keeping quiet • sticking to safe subjects (like work) • talking too much or too fast • talking too quietly • using alcohol or recreational drugs
Safety behaviours and avoidance are usually counter-productive:
• they end up reinforcing the idea that social situations are dangerous
• they may backfire because avoiding eye contact or being overly quiet etc may actually draw the attention we are trying to avoid
• they stop us from directly testing our fears, and learning new ways to think
• if our fears don’t come true we mistakenly ‘thank’ the safety behaviour.
• they increase our self-focused attention rather than focus on the situation itself
CBT therapists encourage their clients to face their feared situations and drop safety behaviours gradually so that over time their anxiety decreases, and they can behave more naturally and comfortably.
Please also this article www.cci.health.wa.gov – Stepping-out-of-Social-Anxiety Safety Behaviours
See our page on how to gradually reduce safety behaviours and boundaries via exposure therapy and hierarchies
Please also see these links to international websites:
www.aboutsocialanxiety.com – Safety-behaviors
www.nationalsocialanxietycenter.com – The-silken-trap-of-safety-behaviors
