The Thing You're Not Doing Is Doing a Number on You
You know that thing you've been meaning to deal with? The email sitting unread, the phone call you keep putting off, the doctor's appointment never made from 2024, the budget you could tackle in your sleep but somehow haven't even opened? Yeah. That thing. It's not going anywhere. And neither, it turns out, is the anxiety attached to it.
Here's what's happening under your hood when you avoid: the moment you decide not to deal with something, your brain interprets that decision as a signal. And the signal it sends is: this is dangerous.
Maybe not dangerous like a bear. But dangerous like something important, threatening, and very much still unresolved, which your nervous system helpfully keeps reminding you about at 2am.
The official term is the avoidance-anxiety loop. The less official term is: the more you dodge it, the louder it gets. Every time you skip the hard thing, anxiety briefly drops, and your brain claps. Then, reliably, the anxiety climbs back up. This time, a little higher than before. Avoidance doesn't make the problem smaller. It makes the story about the problem much, much bigger. This is not a character flaw, this is literally just how the brain works.
You're in excellent company
Before we go any further, you are not weak or uniquely bad at adulting. Avoidance is one of the most universally human coping mechanisms in existence. It shows up everywhere:
The teenager: "I'll start the essay tomorrow." (It's due in 11 hours.)
The 20-something: "I just need one more week before I send that application."
The parent: "The budget spreadsheet is open. I'll look at it after this episode."
The CEO: "I'll have that difficult personnel conversation after Q3.
Avoidance doesn't discriminate. It finds the executive and the teenager alike. It especially loves smart, capable people, because smart, capable people are very good at building elaborate, reasonable-sounding cases for why now is not quite the right time.
Why your brain is on the wrong team
Your brain's primary job is to protect you from perceived threat. In evolutionary terms, avoidance was brilliant: if something felt scary, you stayed away, and you lived to eat berries another day. The problem is your brain hasn't fully updated its software to distinguish between "big brown bear" and "replying to your landlord." The threat response is the same.
When you avoid something, the prefrontal cortex, the rational, future-thinking part of your brain, partially checks out. The amygdala takes over, flooding you with a low-grade sense of dread. You're not being dramatic. You're being neurological. Until you take back the control.
The cruel irony? The energy it takes to not do the thing, the mental load of carrying it, the ambient worry, the rationalizations, is often far greater than the energy it would take to actually do it. The conversation you've been dreading for three weeks probably takes eleven minutes. The email you haven’t been reading probably needs seven. In other words, we are very efficient at inefficiency.
What to do instead
This isn't a "just do it" lecture. If that worked, you would have done it. Here are moves that actually address the avoidance loop:
Name the avoidance out loud. Acknowledge what you're doing without judgment. "I'm avoiding the medical appointment because I'm afraid of what I might hear." Naming it moves it from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex, literally shifting brain activity.
Shrink the first action to something tiny. Don't "deal with my finances." Open the app. Don't "have the hard conversation." Write one sentence of what you want to say. Don't "apply for jobs." Search one company. The brain resists big things. It doesn't really notice tiny ones. Start tiny on purpose.
Separate the fear from the facts. Ask yourself: what am I actually afraid will happen? Then ask: what is the most likely outcome, really? We're remarkably bad at forecasting events accurately. We almost always overestimate the pain and underestimate our capacity to handle it.
Notice the relief, and remember it. When you do the thing you were avoiding, pay attention to what happens. There's usually a disproportionate sense of calm and self-respect. That's your nervous system learning: "Oh. We handled that. We're fine." You're building evidence against the case for avoidance.
Stop calling yourself an avoider. Identity is sticky. When you call yourself an avoider, you make avoidance a personality trait instead of a behavior you're actively changing. You're not someone who avoids; be someone learning to do the things.
Here’s the bigger picture
Avoidance doesn't just pile up tasks. It erodes your relationship with yourself. Every time you don't do what you said you'd do, even internally, even privately, you lose a small amount of self-trust. And low self-trust quietly feeds anxiety, which makes the next thing feel even harder to face. It's a compound interest problem, just not the lucrative kind.
The reverse is also true. Each small act of facing something, however imperfect the execution, deposits something into your confidence account. You become someone who handles things. Perhaps not always perfectly. Perhaps not without discomfort. But someone who handles them.
That's the person you actually want to be. And the good news is that you get to practice becoming that person today, with something small, with something that's probably been sitting in your mental inbox for longer than you'd like to admit.
Need a little encouragement to get started? Check out what our President & Founder, Gaby Jordan has to say about her 16 Year Avoidance!
Casey Seidenberg
is a Human Better EDU Program Leader and Executive Life Coach. She leads our popular Take Charge of Your Life course for Middle Schoolers and High Schoolers. She also works with graduate-level educators to Kindergarten teachers and everything in between. Email Casey at casey@humanbetteredu.org.
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