Nobody decides one morning to start giving things up. It begins with cancelling one particular plan, for a perfectly reasonable reason, with an immediate wash of relief the moment you hang up. The trouble is that the relief is the part that hooks.
That is what this is about: why avoiding works so well over hours and so badly over months, and how people get out of it without attempting some impossible leap.
Why avoiding works
When something frightens you and you avoid it, the anxiety drops away. That isn’t imagination. It drops for real, and fast. Your brain registers two things at once, and both of them are false:
That there was danger there. If there hadn’t been, why would you have stepped back?
That stepping back is what saved you. The discomfort fell away immediately afterwards, so the two get filed together.
Neither is true, but no evidence is required — the relief has already confirmed them. And because this is a learned response, the more it repeats the more automatic it becomes. That is why one avoidance doesn’t matter and a repeated one does.
The bill, which comes later
Next time round, the situation is slightly more frightening, not less. And because it is more frightening, you are more likely to avoid it again. That is the loop.
Over time three things happen:
The ground narrows. First it is one specific thing. Then anything similar. Then anything that might end up being similar. Someone who started by avoiding one motorway ends up not driving; someone who skipped one work dinner ends up going to none of them.
Invisible work appears. All the energy that goes into planning ahead: which route, what excuse, who with, how to get out if you need to. It is exhausting and none of it shows from the outside.
And then comes the self-reproach. Because you know perfectly well that what you are avoiding isn’t dangerous. So on top of the anxiety sits the sense of failing at something simple, which is the part that hurts most.
Avoidances that don’t look like avoidance
The obvious ones are easy to see: not going, not taking it, not saying it. These other ones are harder to recognise and they do exactly the same job.
Safety behaviours. Going, but with someone. Going, but sitting near the door. Going, but with the tablets in your pocket even though you never take one. Only leaving the house with your phone at a hundred per cent. They look like solutions and they work like avoidance: your brain concludes that it went well because of that, so without it you couldn’t.
Checking. Taking your pulse, testing your breathing, looking symptoms up online, asking your family whether you seem odd. Each check settles you for a while and leaves the alarm a little more sensitive.
Putting it off. It isn’t that you won’t go to that meeting — it just isn’t the right moment yet. Book the appointment in January. Have the conversation once this month is over. Postponement is avoidance with better manners.
Rehearsing. Going over a conversation for half an hour beforehand is an attempt to control it. It counts too, and it feeds the same thing.
How people get out
Not in one go. Throwing yourself in at the deep end works in films; in real life it usually goes badly, because if the step overwhelms you the only thing you learn is that you were right to be afraid.
You get out through steps you can actually take today. Ordered smallest to largest, starting with one that gives you some pause but that you are reasonably confident you can hold. And each step gets repeated until it is boring — that is the word, boring — before you move up.
Three things matter more than they look:
Stay until it comes down. Leave at the peak and you reinforce the avoidance. Stay, and you find out from experience that it falls on its own. That is the whole mechanism.
Let go of the crutches. First you do the thing. Then you do it without the person, or without the seat by the door, or without checking first. If the safety behaviour stays, the learning only half happens.
Count the attempts, not the results. Some days will be worse. A bad day doesn’t erase what came before it; it only feels as though it does.
What happens when you can’t avoid
Sometimes life removes the option: the flight has to be taken, the funeral has to be attended, the talk has to be given. A lot of people discover at that point that they could. And it surprises them: it wasn’t pleasant, but it passed.
That doesn’t mean the answer is to force yourself every time. It means the prediction — “I won’t be able to” — is almost always worse than what actually happens.
If it is happening to someone you live with
This is the part hardly anyone talks about, and it is where you can help most, or get in the way most without meaning to.
When someone you love is struggling, the natural thing is to make it easier: go with them everywhere, run the errands, always choose the plan that costs them least, answer every time they ask whether they seem all right. It is done with enormous affection and it is precisely what keeps the problem alive: every rescue confirms that without it they couldn’t manage.
This isn’t about leaving anyone on their own. It is about being with someone rather than doing it for them: staying beside them while they do it. And about the two of you holding something genuinely uncomfortable, which is not stepping in at the peak.
If you are going to change how you help, talk about it first, with them, rather than switching overnight. Support withdrawn by surprise is lived as abandonment, however opposite the intention.
When to ask for help
When the list of things you no longer do has grown over the last few months. When the day gets organised around what you are avoiding. When you have spent a long time putting off something you know you want to do.
It doesn’t have to be severe. In fact ground is easier to recover while there is still some left than once the circle has closed completely.
And this is among the things that respond best: the mechanism is well understood, the work goes in steps, and the steps are ones you can feel.
Working on it in English
Fernando Ruiz Martínez is a psychologist and neuropsychologist in Granada (Col. M-39091), working in English or Spanish. There is no waiting room and no practice to travel to: sessions are online, or at your home in Granada — which is often useful when part of what you are avoiding is the journey itself.
The first conversation is free, by phone or video call, and there is no obligation to carry on afterwards.