Our society has done much in the way of eliminating our stressors. Too hot? Turn on your AC! Need a snack? Microwave some popcorn in minutes! Don’t feel like shopping for your sister’s baby shower? Amazon will deliver cute onesies to your door by tomorrow morning! We’re often button-clicks away from ease and comfort.
I’m not trying to knock these modern conveniences—I’m always down for a fresh, steaming bag of buttery popcorn—but I wonder if we’re losing our ability to tolerate discomfort. We’re experiencing more anxiety and we’re unsure how to deal with it. When we’re afraid of conflict with someone, we ghost them. When a homework assignment is too hard, we get AI to write it for us. It’s one thing to try to escape from first world problems like low phone battery. It’s another to be so anxious that we can’t socialize, make decisions, or get ourselves to appointments.
So why are we one of the most stressed-out, anxious generations in history?
I propose that it is, at least in part, because we are extremely avoidant.
Anxiety and Avoidance
Avoidance is a common coping mechanism in mental health disorders with anxious features, which can include, but is not limited to, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
When someone feels fear, a neighboring emotion to anxiety, the fight-or-flight response gets triggered. This response protects us in the face of danger. For example, we may run away from a bear we encounter in the woods. Very helpful if we don’t want to become a grizzly’s dinner. But when we aren’t facing life-threatening encounters, the fear is more adequately described as anxiety. For example, we may feel very afraid while giving a speech, though this isn’t a dangerous or life-threatening event.
Avoidance is almost like the flight response on steroids. Instead of running away from a threat right in front of us, we try to make sure that we will never ever encounter the threat in the first place. Once again, this threat is often not truly dangerous, though our brain may perceive it as such.
However, this strategy of avoiding our fears often has the reverse effect of intensifying them rather than providing the peace we so desperately want.
The Problem of Avoidance
In anxiety disorders, avoidance is a negative feedback loop. In their book Exposure Therapy for Anxiety: Principles and Practices, the authors explain it in this way:
By minimizing exposure to stimuli associated with…anxiety…the person never has the opportunity to learn that such stimuli really are objectively safe… the person cannot correct his or her misperception of the fear trigger, and he or she goes on believing (erroneously) that it is dangerous (Abrahamowitz, 2019, p. 7).
In other words, the more you avoid an anxiety-inducing situation, say driving, the more you keep believing that driving indeed terrifying. And because you don’t have any encounters with driving, you never have the opportunity to prove otherwise through a possible positive experience. You will never know if you actually enjoy the thrill of zooming down an open road.
People will also engage in cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias, that reinforce this negative cycle. For instance, they’ll hear of a car accident on the highway and think, “See, I knew it was dangerous!” all the while ignoring the countless times that people have driven and never experienced any damage. The news seems to confirm what they already believed to be true.
Paradoxically, the more we avoid, the worse the anxiety gets.
The Need for Resilience
In his book, The Anxious Generation, author Jonathan Haidt (2024) describes an experimental facility at the University of Arizona in which researchers created a several enclosed biomes, including a rainforest, in the middle of the desert. After some time, they noted a curious phenomenon: the rainforest trees grew rapidly, then started randomly falling over. They realized that these trees lacked stress wood.
Stress wood is formed when saplings are exposed to strong wind, which breaks down cell walls, leading to the tree to increase its production of cellulose. This creates stress wood, which is responsible for giving the tree the structure it needs to hold itself up. The aforementioned trees, which had plenty of access to water, sunlight and nutrient-rich soil, were sheltered from wind by the greenhouse walls. Without experiencing the bending and battering from wind, they lacked a certain strength (p. 72).
Strangely, avoiding storms weakens and exposure strengthens. The tree is resilient because of what it has endured, not what it has evaded.
In the same way, humans can become stronger by enduring storms. In no way do I want to minimize the damage that trauma can cause someone. What I am saying is that we can build resilience and overcome our anxiety by facing our fears in a safe, controlled way. We can learn to tolerate even little inconveniences to build up our resilience for even larger stressors.
Breaking the Cycle Through Exposure
Exposure therapy is a type of clinical intervention that can serve as the “wind” to build our resilience.
In this type of therapy, a counselor will first assess a client for three things: 1) when the anxiety is triggered, 2) the feared outcomes of encountering these triggers, and 3) the avoidance and escape strategies used to reduce anxiety and harm. (Abrahamowitz, 2019, p. 12)
Once a list of triggers is established, the client will then systematically expose themselves to these situations, starting with less stressful situations. Take for example, someone fearful of shots at the doctor’s office. Perhaps she’ll start with simply picturing a needle in her mind, then move on to watching videos of others getting shots, and so on before actually taking a trip to the doctor for a shot of her own.
During these exposures, the person may not use any coping mechanisms that might reduce their anxiety. This could include a compulsive ritual, as in the case of OCD. It could include having an emotional support human or water bottle. It could even be the use of substances, such as alcohol, which numb the emotional experience. (Abrahamowitz, 2019, p. 12) Anything that could help the person escape mentally, emotionally or physically from the situation is prohibited. The point of an exposure is to feel the anxiety.
Rewiring the Brain
You might be thinking that exposure therapy sounds like a very mean way of doing treatment. Why subject a person to their worst fears and make them feel it?
Exposing yourself to the stimulus will create fear and this is actually a critical to healing. The emotional activation that occurs opens to the brain up to rewrite previously associated information in way that simply talking cannot. Think about it: telling yourself that something won’t hurt you often has very little effect, no matter how many times you say it. We need proof.
For example, an exposure involving a quick trip to the doctor for a shot may prove less stressful than anticipated. When that happens, our brain creates a new pathway. Instead of shots = scary, we now have shots = manageable. There’s a fork in the road, two possible routes for our brain to choose. At the beginning of exposure therapy, our brain may choose shots = scary more often. But after repeated positive or even neutral experiences at the doctor, our brain will start to default to shots = manageable.
More than that, we learn that we ourselves can actually tolerate the anxiety! Instead of assuming that we can’t handle the distress of encountering our fears, we may find a reserve of strength and courage that we wouldn’t have thought possible.
Through the lived experience of an exposure, our brains generate more helpful and more accurate thoughts.
Can’t We Just Talk About Our Feelings Instead?
Listen, I love talking about family dynamics and verbally processing the trauma as much as the next therapist. My clients frequently hear me ask that stereotypical therapist question, “And how does that make you feel?” It’s good to process the origins of your anxiety, to talk through your emotions, and to receive validation and understanding.
Validation is needed. Change occurs more easily when we feel safe and supported. But we often we have a greater need for a therapist that’s a coach rather than a cheerleader. A coach will push you to be better, even if it hurts a bit. A cheerleader simply stands on the side approving what you’ve done well, and staying silent when you make a mistake.
If you’re looking to get something out of therapy besides validation, you have to be willing to confront hard things. Talking about our fears can only do so much. We need challenge. We need to be bent by the wind. We need to get out into the world and face our fears.
Resources:
Abramowitz, J. S., Deacon, B. J., & Whiteside, S. P. (2019). Exposure therapy for anxiety: Principles and practice. Guilford Publications.
Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin Press.