The Avoidance Trap

Every time you cancel plans, you’re teaching yourself the wrong lesson

Four months postpartum, I flew to Los Angeles alone to see Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. I didn’t have anyone to go with. I’d already failed to get tickets closer to home, my friends couldn’t make it work, my husband stayed home with our daughter. I had a dozen reasonable excuses to skip it. My chest felt tight just thinking about getting through the airport, stadium, and crowd alone.

But years ago, I made myself a promise: I wasn’t going to let anxiety decide what I did. I’d spent too much of my twenties shrinking my life — saying no to concerts because I didn’t have someone to go with, skipping trips because they felt too overwhelming, and staying home because it was easier than going out.

So I bought a plane ticket. And I spent the entire flight breathing deeply.

Here’s what I want you to understand about avoidance: it works. That’s the problem. When you cancel plans because the anxiety feels like too much, the relief is immediate. Your shoulders drop, your chest loosens, and you think, Thank god I don’t have to do that. In the short term, you feel better. Your brain learns that the solution to your anxiety is to not go.

But anxiety doesn’t stay elevated forever. If you go ahead and put yourself in the uncomfortable situation — the party, the flight, the awkward conversation — and stay in it, your nervous system will eventually calm down on its own. Psychologists call this “habituation.” Your brain adjusts to a stimulus once it learns the stimulus isn’t actually dangerous. The anxiety peaks, and then it falls.

When you avoid, you shortcut the discomfort before the peak comes down. You never get to experience how your anxiety falls on its own. You don’t learn to ride the wave. So your brain keeps treating the situation as genuinely threatening, something you must escape. The next time you are faced with that situation, your anxiety is higher because you raised the stakes by running.

This is how avoidance becomes a trap. You cancel once because you’re not feeling up to it. Then you cancel again. Each cancellation brings relief, and each relief reinforces the pattern. Soon you’ve built an identity around it: I’m just not a party person. I don’t like big groups. I can’t do things alone. I’ve watched people slowly prune their lives down to almost nothing, all while believing they were being realistic about their limits.

We don’t always see it because it doesn’t always look like canceling plans. Sometimes it looks like staying so busy you never have to feel anything. Sometimes it’s your phone in your hand before the silence even gets uncomfortable. It can even look like staying in a relationship that stopped working years ago because the breakup conversation feels unsurvivable. But these all do the same thing: pull you out of the discomfort before your brain can learn you’ll survive it.

The only way to break this pattern is to stay in the discomfort long enough to experience what happens next. To feel your anxiety rise and fall on its own. Then your brain learns: I felt afraid, I stayed, and I was okay.

As a therapist, I have people ask me all the time: “How do I know if it’s avoidance or self-care?” And my answer is always, “How do you feel after?” If you go and you’re so glad you went, that was avoidance talking. If you go and feel genuinely drained and worse than before, it probably would have been self-care to stay home.

But you can’t predict how you’ll feel from your couch. You have to experiment and see for yourself. We’re so quick to let the inconvenience stop us — the setup, the time, the energy it takes to do things. We can get so comfortable alone and in our homes that we convince ourselves almost nothing is worth it. And the world will applaud our boundaries the whole way down.

Sitting in SoFi Stadium, I felt the anxiety drain from my chest. For three hours, nothing else mattered. It was just me and 70,000 strangers, singing songs I’d loved for 15 years. It reminded me I was still a person underneath this big transition into motherhood. I couldn’t believe I almost stayed home.

You probably have your own version of this in your life. What if the only reason you believe you can’t handle it is that you keep canceling before you find out?