The Avoidance Industrial Complex
Happy New Year!
As the beginning of the year is traditionally a time we focus on habits we want to change and reflecting on how we feel about our lives and choices generally, I thought it would be a good time to talk about avoidance. We live in a world where avoiding discomfort is almost a default. For people in the geo-politically privileged parts of the world who are sufficiently financially privileged themselves it is relatively easy to avoid the myriad discomforts that used to be part and parcel of everyday life. This includes diverse discomforts such as physical exertion, learning new skills, eating less palatable tastes, uncomfortable conversations etc.. However the type of avoidance I am most interested in as a counsellor is emotional avoidance.
What I mean by emotional avoidance is avoiding uncomfortable feelings. Things like, worry, annoyance, frustration, sadness, loneliness, grief, nervousness, dread,boredom etc.. It seems pretty logical to not want to feel things that are perceived as negative, who wants to voluntarily experience suffering? Therefore as soon as we have an uncomfortable emotion, we perceive the emotion itself as a problem to be solved and do something so that we don’t have to experience that discomfort any more. Right now that action frequently takes the form of using our phones to scroll social media as a distraction, but sometimes it also involves actions such buying something, consuming a substance, eating something or making use of some other form of entertainment.
This might seem innocuous but it can cause significant problems. Firstly if we never let ourselves truly experience our difficult emotions we become less skilled at tolerating them generally. I think this is easiest to explain with the example of anxiety. If a situation makes us anxious and we treat the feeling of anxiety as the problem, we want to avoid feeling anxious and therefore avoid the situation that makes us anxious, perhaps going to a concert, however if we keep doing this, our ability to tolerate feelings of anxiety and do things that are important to us diminishes, and generally people start to find more and more things make them anxious, so going to a concert no longer is difficult but becomes impossible, and then, traveling on public transport can start to become challenging, and then going to parties where strangers might be present and so on and so forth.
A slightly different but related affect happens when we feel an uncomfortable feeling and automatically do something to distract ourselves. If every time I feel frustrated I reach for my phone and scroll instagram, it is likely that more things will begin to frustrate me, and also my ability to tolerate the feeling of frustration will diminish, so I will need to reach for a distraction more often in order to manage it. The other problem that happens if use pleasurable instant gratification activities to distract ourselves from uncomfortable emotions (including boredom!) is that it affects the dopamine system in our brain and we start to find less pleasure in things we enjoy generally, which can create a vicious cycle of uncomfortable emotion - distraction malaise - distraction - and so on into infinity. This podcast is really great overview of this effect:
https://drchatterjee.com/finding-balance-in-a-dopamine-overloaded-world-with-dr-anna-lembke/
I think it is also important to recognise that our inability to tolerate our own emotions also makes some people very rich. Social media companies such as Meta, Youtube, and Tiktok are worth billions of dollars, as are the alcohol and adult entertainment industries. Therefore many of these distractions that we use are designed to be addictive, because either our time and attention on platforms, or our consumption of products is highly valuable. This really compounds the problem and makes it all the more insidious, and it is this ecosystem that I have labled the ‘avoidance-industrial-complex’. There are entire industries being breathed into life and sustained by our inability tolerate our uncomfortable emotions.
So what can we do instead? We can start to develop the skills and competence to both fully feel our feelings and interpret the information they are giving us. This means instead of treating the uncomfortable feeling as a problem, we recognise that a feeling is giving us information about what the problem is. Making use of the anxiety example again, this would require me to first recognise that I am feeling anxious about attending a concert, this might present as my stomach churning and my heart-rate rising everytime I think about the concert. Then, instead of deciding that this is the problem, i interrogate further, what is it about the concert that makes me feel this way? As I interrogate I realise that it is being in a situation where there are so many people I don’t know and the unpredictability of the environment that is making me nervous. From here I might decide that going to the concert is not worth the distresss for me, or I might think about the ways I can make it less stressful for myself, or I might decide to go to a smaller gig instead as this will be more fun for me. The outcome might still be the same - I might still decide not to go to the concert, but what is different is that I am actively engaging with the feeling instead of just automatically avoiding it and making a decision based on the information that the feeling is giving me - alongside other factors.
This post is getting pretty long so I am going to end here! Let me know if these ideas interest you or if there are specific topics you would like more information on.