5 emotional avoidance strategies to let go of

Feeling as if the same conflicts keep recurring? Then you may want to know about these 5 emotional avoidance strategies …

Do you feel kind of stuck in your personal development recently?

Perhaps you find yourself in the same conflicts over and over again: You have the same arguments with a colleague, ask yourself why you “always attract these types of people” in your dating life or have the same doubts, fears or negative feelings?

One typical reason that we don’t get to the root cause of a problem and therefore find these nerve-racking situations repeating is that we avoid difficult emotions.

In our new?YouTube video, our Head of Content Eva shares 5 emotional avoidance strategies that you may not have on your radar yet:

1. Toxic positivity

There’s a difference between being optimistic and being toxically positive. When people aren’t able to bear up against the pain, frantically trying to only see the positive becomes an emotional avoidance strategy. Rather than trying to always be happy, we should learn to acknowledge the negative and grow from it, to use our strengths to overcome hurdles and endure challenging phases.

It might be a tough pill to swallow, but if you think about it: Are you in denial and shut your eyes to any problems or negative emotions? Or do you use positivity to accept these emotions as an indispensable part of life and ideally grow from them?

2. Social Media

Let’s be real, how often do you check your phone while working? And could it be that you are stressed about a difficult task or maybe bored and feel the urge to procrastinate? With never ending feeds and endless entertainment options, we can delve into any other reality in no time.

It’s not about banning social media for good or forbidding yourself to enjoy an episode of your series in the evening. It’s about a healthy balance. And if the time in front of the screen becomes a necessary element of your daily life because you struggle to cope with whatever you are feeling otherwise, you may want to question this avoidance strategy and think about other, more sustainable coping strategies.

For example, instead of surfing the internet, you can learn to “surf the urge”: Rather than impulsively reacting to the emotion by, in this case, escaping into a virtual world, you practice to explore it mindfully and observe how the urge fades away at some point by itself. You’ll see that this intense feeling, this intense urge gets weaker again so you’ll have the time to reflect on its origin in peace.

3. Emotional eating

Did you also have to discuss any problem topic at the dinner table when you were younger - a bad grade, the spot on the couch or the houseparty you stole away for? Many people fall back to emotional eating when dealing with uncomfortable states.

Eva shares:

If I think about my own experiences […], one aspect could be these arguments at the dinner table: Food was both comfort and a strategy to buy time to think of an appropriate answer. Over time, this function of providing comfort generalized to other contexts too so that, whenever I felt down, exhausted, bored or sad, food temporarily helped me to “fill the void”.

If you notice that your consumption behavior changes with your emotional state, you may ask yourself which function this behavior has. Which emotion are you trying to cope with - is it sadness, loneliness, boredom? Do you use it to reward yourself after a long, stressful day? Which other behavior could you go after to cope with the emotion without numbing yourself?

4. Daydreaming

Daydreaming can be great sometimes, perhaps to explore certain emotions in a safe setting without the fear of rejection, to spark our creativity and perhaps to become aware of certain goals and desires.

But it’s a thin line where it turns into an avoidance strategy. Because these illusions can become so comforting that we prefer to indulge ourselves even further in these fantasies rather than running the risk of abandoning them. We may fear rejection, failure or negative emotions and therefore avoid them.

So if you have a dreamer’s mind, whenever you catch yourself drifting into a fantasy world, you can ask yourself: How am I feeling right now? Which need am I trying to satisfy? Does this daydream help me to change my real life for the better or do I use it to escape my real life?

5. Rationalizing

This final strategy is a tricky one. It seems as if we explored the emotion, yet we don’t actually feel it, but rather stay in our head and rationalize it.

It’s hard to identify as an emotional avoidance strategy because there are certainly extremely effective mental tools to cope with difficult emotions (e.g., cognitive reappraisal where we try to look at a situation from a different perspective). And these tools can help to avoid getting stuck in a difficult emotion, to act less impulsively, to get a healthy distance first, …

But if we use rationalizing only to overshadow the emotion and don’t circle back to look at it in peace again, we can miss the chance to change something about the situation.

If you're brutally honest with yourself: Are you simply coping right now - rationalizing the situation so you get a healthy distance to the conflict and look at it with a clear head again? Or are you pushing the emotion away and avoiding the conflict because you don’t want to deal with it anymore? Does rationalizing help you to somehow improve your situation and become active or does it make you stagnate because you keep ruminating about the problem in your mind rather than actually processing it with all the emotions that come with it?

Learn more in our YouTube video here.

Which of these emotional avoidance strategies do you know from yourself?