There is a specific quality to the things that stay on the to-do list for weeks without being done. The difficult performance conversation with a team member. The financial model that would establish how much runway remains. The pitch to the investor who has been waiting for a follow-up. Each of these generates enough anxiety to be avoided and enough importance to generate guilt about the avoidance. Each day it is not done, it becomes slightly harder to do, for reasons that are not always immediately obvious.

Orval Mowrer’s two-factor theory established the foundational mechanics in 1947. Avoidance is learned through classical conditioning: the feared situation is associated with aversive arousal, and the approach to it generates the arousal as an anticipatory signal. It is maintained through operant conditioning: each episode of avoidance temporarily reduces the anxiety, and that reduction is a negative reinforcement that strengthens the avoidance behaviour. The relief is real. The problem is what the relief prevents.

The extinction prevention mechanism

The only condition under which a fear association weakens naturally is exposure to the feared stimulus in the absence of the feared outcome: the person approaches what they fear, the catastrophe does not occur, and the brain updates the association accordingly. Edna Foa and Michael Kozak’s research on emotional processing established that this extinction learning requires the fear response to be activated during the approach — the person must experience the anxiety in the context of the feared situation for the association to update.

Avoidance prevents this. Each episode of avoidance successfully prevents the feared situation from being encountered — which means it also prevents the extinction learning that would permanently reduce the anxiety. The person who avoids the pitch does not have a neutral experience of pitching that updates the fear association. They have another week of the pitch existing only as an imagined threat, unchallenged by the actual experience of surviving it. The fear association remains intact, and it is available to activate with equal or greater intensity the next time the pitch approaches.

The sensitisation that avoidance produces compounds this further. Each successful avoidance adds a subtle signal: this situation was dangerous enough to avoid. The avoidance behaviour itself is evidence, read by the system that generated the fear, that the avoided situation is genuinely threatening. Six months of avoidance has produced six months of unchallenged sensitisation — each week adding incremental evidence, in the form of the avoidance itself, that the feared situation warrants avoidance.

The cognitive compounding mechanism

Daniel Wegner’s ironic process research predicts what happens to the avoided thing cognitively. The attempt to avoid thinking about the avoided situation installs a monitoring process that keeps the suppressed content at background activation. The avoided financial reality, the avoided conversation, the avoided decision persists in working memory precisely because the avoidance has created the monitoring function that would alert the person if the avoided content appeared. The monitoring function is the suppressed content at low activation. The attempted avoidance keeps the problem cognitively present.

Steven Hayes and colleagues’ experiential avoidance framework established the breadth of the forms that avoidance can take while producing the same reinforcement cycle. Busyness is avoidance when its function is to maintain distance from an aversive situation. Over-preparation is avoidance when it substitutes for action. Research is avoidance when the tenth hour spent understanding a problem is displacing the first hour spent addressing it. The reinforcement cycle accumulates regardless of the specific form: each behaviour that serves the avoidance function adds its negative reinforcement to the pattern.

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The commercial compounding consequence

The most consequential feature of avoidance in commercial contexts is that it typically creates the conditions it was designed to prevent. The performance conversation avoided in January, because it would be uncomfortable and the person might react badly, has become a formal documented meeting by March, because the performance has continued to deteriorate without the corrective signal the conversation would have provided. By June it requires HR involvement. The avoidance did not prevent the difficult conversation. It prevented the manageable conversation and created the crisis conversation in its place.

The financial reality avoided because looking at it would produce anxiety creates the cash crisis that demands emergency action — action taken under time pressure with far fewer options than the same action taken three months earlier. The avoidance removed the corrective action from the period when it could have been corrective. The reality continued to develop in the direction it was heading. The avoidance simply removed the person from any influence over its trajectory during the period they were not looking at it.

The reversal mechanism

Michelle Craske and colleagues’ inhibitory learning account of exposure therapy established the mechanics of avoidance reversal. The approach to an avoided situation creates a new non-feared association that does not erase the feared association but competes with it. The brain holds both: the old association and the new one. What determines which is activated in any given context depends on what has been most recently reinforced. Each successful completion of the avoided action at a manageable stakes level creates inhibitory learning that makes the next approach more accessible.

The practical implication is that the first approach to an avoided situation does not need to be the full version of the thing that has been avoided. The person who has avoided pitching for six months does not need to begin with the most important pitch available. They need to begin with the most accessible version of pitching that still activates the anxiety at a manageable level — because the anxiety activation in the context of survival is the condition for extinction learning to occur. The graduated approach is not a concession to weakness. It is the mechanism the learning requires.

The momentum that avoidance generates can reverse. The compounding that accumulates through months of sensitisation and reinforcement does not have to continue accumulating. The reversal works through the same mechanism as the compounding — successive approximations, each one building the inhibitory association that makes the next one more available — but in the direction of approach rather than avoidance. The first approach is the hardest not because the avoided thing is at its most threatening then, but because that is when the avoidance pattern has the most accumulated momentum to overcome.

If the dynamics described here are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US, UK, Canada, Ireland). International: internationaltherapistdirectory.com.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Mowrer, O.H. (1947), On the Dual Nature of Learning, Harvard Educational Review, 17, 102-148. Foa, E.B. & Kozak, M.J. (1986), Emotional Processing of Fear: Exposure to Corrective Information, Psychological Bulletin, 99(1), 20-35. Wegner, D.M. (1994), Ironic Processes of Mental Control, Psychological Review, 101(1), 34-52. Hayes, S.C., Wilson, K.G., Gifford, E.V., Follette, V.M. & Strosahl, K. (1996), Experiential Avoidance and Behavioural Disorders, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(6), 1152-1168. Craske, M.G., Kircanski, K., Zelikowsky, M., Mystkowski, J., Chowdhury, N. & Baker, A. (2008), Optimizing Inhibitory Learning During Exposure Therapy, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 46(1), 5-27. Boone, M., Gregg, J. & Coyne, L. (2020), Stop Avoiding Stuff, New Harbinger. Steel, P. (2010), The Procrastination Equation, Harper.