Avoidance Behavior & Mental Health: Why Do We Avoid Things That Make Us Anxious?

Louise Hartnett
Published: 11/10/2026
Authored by: Louise Hartnett, BA
Edited by: Michael Fegan, BA

Avoiding things because of anxiety is common. However, it’s not always obvious. Many daily habits can be explained by anxiety avoidance, but we don’t notice them as much when they’re automatic.

Typically, an avoidance behavior helps us push away uncomfortable emotions, memories, and thoughts. While this can be effective in the short term, it may leave underlying issues unresolved. Different types of therapy approach this issue in various ways, both to help you manage the anxiety and work through the cause.

This article will explain why you avoid the things that make you anxious and the different ways therapy can help. We’ll explore:

  • What avoidance behaviors are and the common types.
  • How avoidance shows up in different mental health conditions.
  • How cognitive-behavioral, psychodynamic, and humanistic approaches explain and treat avoidance behavior.
  • Where to find effective treatment.
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Table of Contents

What Are Avoidance Behaviors?

Avoidance is an unhealthy coping mechanism that arises in response to fear and worry. When we’re scared of something, the brain’s automatic response can be to remove or evade it as much as possible.[1]

An avoidance behavior can be an everyday action that appears harmless. For example, choosing to take the bus rather than cycling to work, or labeling yourself as a “homebody” to explain missing social occasions. These actions can be driven by deeper fears of: 

  • Danger.
  • Humiliation.
  • Judgment. 

Typically, avoidance behaviors arise out of wanting to make uncomfortable emotions go away. Feelings of grief, fear, shame, and embarrassment can feel intolerable. Avoidance usually occurs when these emotions feel extremely threatening or dangerous.[2] 

Often, we become so used to our own avoidance behaviors that we don’t even notice we’re doing it until a friend or partner suggests doing something differently. Sometimes, avoidance can become such an ingrained coping mechanism that it gets in the way of a fulfilling life. This is often caused by mental health conditions like: 

  • Anxiety.
  • Depression.
  • Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Avoidance coping can be a self-destructive behavior because it maintains the mental health condition that’s driving it. When you’re never exposed to something scary or uncomfortable, it can reinforce the idea that it’s a threat you can’t cope with. That belief persists until it’s disproved, often making exposure and exploratory therapies important for recovery.[1] 

Types of Avoidance 

Avoidance behaviors tend to take the form of one of five “strategies”:[2] 

  1. Total avoidance: Completely avoiding situations or people that trigger an intolerable emotion. For example, avoiding crowds, public speaking, or a person from your past.
  2. Subtle avoidance: Though you’ll enter an uncomfortable situation (such as ordering food at a restaurant), you use coping strategies to limit your discomfort (avoiding eye contact with your server).
  3. Thought avoidance: To avoid distressing thoughts, you distract yourself with the TV, video games, or taking naps.
  4. Worrying: Worry is not actually anxiety itself, but a response to anxiety. Many worriers think that the behavior keeps them safe, but it’s usually a way to cope with distressing thoughts and emotions.
  5. Safety signals: This is when you bring your dog, a water bottle, or your phone to cope in feared situations.

What Mental Health Conditions Feature Avoidance?

Here, we’ll explore the three main examples of avoidance behavior in mental health conditions:

Anxiety Disorders

Avoidance behaviors are thought to be core features of many anxiety disorders.[1] Social anxiety, specific phobias, and agoraphobia, for example, typically involve at least one avoidance behavior. 

For instance, people with these types of anxiety may avoid social occasions or limit how often they leave the house. Similarly, those with specific phobias will avoid the things connected to what they’re scared of, such as avoiding touching certain surfaces to prevent illness. 

Depression

In the context of depression, avoidance may mean withdrawing from your work or social life because doing otherwise may bring about more feelings of shame or grief. 

Those with depression may also feel that they don’t have the energy or capability to exercise or socialize, which then causes them to avoid doing so. Sadly, even though these actions can offer short-term relief from depressive symptoms, avoidance can end up maintaining them.[3] 

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Avoidance can also be a response to trauma whereby it’s a deliberate effort to avoid distressing thoughts, feelings, and memories associated with a traumatic event.[4] 

In post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or complex PTSD, avoidance can be subtle or more obvious. Some common examples include:[4] 

  • Using substances to avoid memories.
  • Keeping constantly busy.
  • Avoiding locations or people that are reminiscent of the event. 

Feeling numb, emotionally distant, and unable to remember the details of the event also fall under the umbrella of avoidance.[4] 

Although avoidance provides short-term relief from PTSD symptoms, it can ultimately worsen them.[4] We’ll explain how this works in the next section.

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Different Therapeutic Approaches to Understanding and Treating Avoidance Behaviors

There are several types of therapy that provide support for avoidance behavior. Most approaches to counseling and therapy fall into one of three categories:
  1. Cognitive-behavioral.
  2. Psychodynamic.
  3. Humanistic.
Each has a different theoretical framework for understanding mental health difficulties and answering many people’s key question: “Why do I avoid things that make me anxious?”

A Cognitive-Behavioral Approach to Avoidance

The cognitive-behavioral framework for understanding avoidance covers a lot of ground. It combines what’s happening in your physical body with your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The following ideas explain the anxiety and avoidance cycle and are commonly used in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT):[1][4]
  • Physiological anxiety: When anxiety or PTSD is triggered by the thought of a distressing situation, the body produces a cascade of physical symptoms. Sweating, racing heart, and bodily tension arise and feel intolerable. This is temporarily relieved by avoiding the trigger.
  • Negative reinforcement: As the avoidance provides relief, you are more likely to repeat this avoidance in the future and not discover that the feared situation could be perfectly safe and tolerable. This is how avoidance makes anxiety worse.
  • Automatic avoidance: Eventually, this process is no longer conscious and can develop into chronic avoidance as it becomes an automatic behavioral habit.
  • Understanding the function: Avoidance isn’t always bad. There are lots of healthy ways we can use it, such as temporarily taking a break from an argument. CBT explains the function of avoidance, as well as how it can become out of control and inhibit you from living a full life.
  • Exposure: Key to the CBT approach, exposure is a common and evidence-based technique for combating avoidance. When you enter a feared scenario and experience your physical and mental anxiety decrease, your body learns that it can cope.
Behavioral healthcare is a related field to CBT that focuses more on your daily habits. Diet, exercise, substance use, and stress management are key to the behavioral approach. Behaviorists may diagnose behavioral health disorders, which frame mental health difficulties (including avoidance) as both emotional and behavioral.

A Psychodynamic Approach

The psychodynamic field also sees avoidance as a defensive process that protects you from intolerable thoughts and feelings. However, the psychodynamic approach differs in how it explains and challenges emotional avoidance. For instance, it explains avoidance through the concept of defense mechanisms:
  • If you avoid certain thoughts (such as by changing the topic), it could be seen as a defense mechanism like denial or repression. These push distressing thoughts out of your conscious awareness.
When the time’s right, a psychodynamic therapist may challenge you to tolerate that distress by being curious about what’s hidden under the defense.[5] When you explore the avoidance in psychodynamic therapy, it may lead you to look at your early relationships. For example:[5]
  • If you consistently avoided instances of emotional intimacy, it could indicate early experiences of humiliation or engulfment in close relationships.
  • Avoiding cycling to work could stem from having a highly anxious parent who constantly reminded you that the world was a dangerous place.
  • Keeping constantly busy could be traced back to having a turbulent home life in childhood that was only tolerable if you filled your time with other things.
A psychodynamic therapist might also help you understand how your avoidance has served a function but also identify the emotions that aren’t being expressed.

A Humanistic Approach

The humanistic approach offers a great deal of empathy and validation for your emotional difficulties and can help you overcome avoidance by being more authentic. It explains avoidance behavior and anxiety, as well as other mental health difficulties through the following ideas:[6]
  • Conditions of worth: The humanistic approach suggests that our sense of self-worth can come from other people. For example, believing “I’m only worthy if others approve of me.” This can create anxiety about socializing and lead someone to avoid occasions so that they don’t ever experience disapproval.
  • Locus of evaluation: People might avoid making decisions about their career even if they’re unhappy, leading to feelings of dissatisfaction or depression. In a humanistic view, decision-making can be difficult when we have an external locus of evaluation.
In other words, we care too much about what other people think. Humanistic therapists help you get in touch with your own preferences and ambitions. From there, you may feel less avoidant of these big decisions because you know what’s authentic to you.

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Get Treatment for Avoidance Behaviors With AMFM Mental Health Treatment

While an avoidance behavior can significantly limit you from living a fulfilling life, it will have previously served a real, necessary function. Through therapy at AMFM Mental Health Treatment (A Mission for Michael), our licensed therapists will help you identify and understand this function and the experiences that have led you to this point. 

We offer an intimate, focused mental health treatment experience for adults in home-like settings that are carefully maintained to be peaceful, comfortable spaces. In addition to residential treatment, AMFM Mental Health Treatment also offers multiple levels of outpatient treatment.

Our locations in California, Minnesota, Virginia, and Washington accept insurance and are in-network with many major providers. To check your insurance coverage for mental health care, simply complete our confidential online verification form.

Call us at 866-478-4383 if you would like to start the admissions process or learn more about how we can support your mental well-being. Our compassionate team is available 24/7 to answer your questions and provide guidance with no obligation.

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