Have you ever tried to make yourself stop thinking about something uncomfortable?
Or suddenly found yourself cleaning the bathroom instead of starting the work task you’re stressed out about?
If you answered yes to these questions, you’re like most of us. Humans are hard-wired to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, so it makes sense that our first instinct would be to avoid negative or uncomfortable experiences, emotions included.
Unfortunately, that approach to dealing with our emotions and the situations that provoke them tends to backfire.
The Paradox of Avoidance: See for Yourself
Let me illustrate this for you with an exercise. Bring to mind an embarrassing or cringe memory that you’d prefer not to think about. For me, this would be the time I walked around my college campus with staticky underwear (clean, at least) clinging to the back of my pants (my face is getting hot just typing this). Once you’ve got the memory locked in, set a timer for 60 seconds and don’t let yourself think about it until the timer goes off.
How’d it go? If you’re like me, you probably haven’t thought of your embarrassing memory in years, but for those 60 seconds when you were supposed to not think about it, the memory came up repeatedly.
Here’s why this happens: when you tell yourself something is bad enough to avoid, your brain wants to check in to make sure you’re succeeding with this task you’ve deemed very important. Unfortunately, by checking in, you inevitably bring to mind the thoughts you were trying to push away.
Avoidance Wears Many Hats
The same thing happens when we use our behavior to avoid emotions. Let me illustrate this process by telling you about my client, David. He described himself as constantly on edge, waking up with a racing heart, already forecasting everything that might go wrong in his day. If a client emailed to set up a brief chat, he’d spend several hours leading up to the meeting imagining worst-case scenarios—sometimes even convincing himself that he’d be fired or publicly criticized.
To avoid these feelings, David often procrastinated on projects and avoided difficult conversations, telling himself he’d get to them when he was in the “right” headspace. But that avoidance only made him more anxious as deadlines piled up and feedback became more critical.
The harder he worked to dodge discomfort, the more his discomfort seemed to grow. He wasn’t just experiencing negative emotions – he was stuck in a pattern that kept reinforcing them. By procrastinating, David was confirming to himself that he wasn’t up to the task and that the client meeting was going to go poorly – why else would he be avoiding?
Then, when he actually sat down to work on the project, he felt even more anxious because his behavior had reinforced his fear of being incompetent and he had less time to finish before the deadline.
Procrastinating is just one of countless ways people avoid their emotions. For you, it might look like asking for reassurance before making a decision, scrolling on your phone to tune out your thoughts, pouring a drink to take the edge off, or checking your emails 5 times to make sure there are no typos.
All of these behaviors subtly communicate that you can’t handle strong feelings. And, because no one can outrun their emotions forever, they seem even bigger and more disruptive when they do break through.
Get Cool with Feeling
Since avoidance is what’s keeping the cycle of negative emotions going, the goal isn’t to push them away. It’s to change how you respond when they pop up.
Instead of trying to escape your emotions or wait until you feel “ready,” start by paying attention to when you feel the urge to avoid.
From there, experiment with doing the opposite of your usual pattern. If you tend to procrastinate, commit to working on the task for just five minutes (give yourself permission to quit if it really is that bad). If you seek reassurance, sit with the uncertainty a little longer. If you distract yourself, stay present with the feeling instead of escaping it.
Each time you face a feeling instead of avoiding it, you gather new evidence: I can handle this. And over time, that evidence begins to weaken the belief that your emotions are something you need to escape.
A Research-Backed Next Step
If you see yourself in these patterns, you don’t have to keep repeating them. The Personality Edit translates more than a decade of my research and clinical experience into a structured process for shifting how you respond to your emotions — so they stop running the show.
Learn more about The Personality Edit here.
