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Avoidance Coping

6 years ago1,011 words

The best way to deal with anxiety is to just avoid any situations that cause it, right??

I had the exam I'd been preparing for a couple of days ago. I did it, I survived, but I don't think that I did very well on it. I doubt that I've failed or done atrociously, but my answers were fairly mediocre - B or C rather than A grade stuff - and I left an hour into the two hours that we had. I'd answered everything, but I could have spent the other hour refining things, improving my answers... Instead, I've just been regretting my decision to leave so soon, cringing constantly when little reminders come up triggering thoughts of what I should have done differently, especially since I understood quite well and enjoyed it too. It's such a shame that my performance on this assessment won't reflect that.

There are several recurring issues to dissect that make me do things like this, but they could all be summarised as essentially avoidance coping. That is, coping with anxiety by structuring my behaviour such that opportunities for it to arise don't come up. In the exam, I was already quite anxious, and leaving soon allowed that anxiety to fade, so my mind prioritised that over actually improving my answers on the exam. Favouring making the present slightly less unpleasant than bearing it for the sake of my future.

This avoidance coping is probably the biggest cause of my life being in such a sorry state right now. I seem to avoid anything if I expect it'll make me feel bad. I'm still avoiding reading comments on this blog, and I've yet to start an assignment due in on Monday, because it's so much easier to just mess around with VR and watch pointless YouTube videos and such.

It's frustrating, because by avoiding short-term anxiety, I cause myself deeper and more persistent shame about what I did or failed to do. And yet it's a mistake I make over and over, never seeming to learn, despite acute awareness of it and its consequences. I suppose this is how minds work. We're not rational creatures, at the heart of our animal minds, and much of our activity arises from unconscious processes. Did you know that intentions can arise in the brain up to 10 seconds before they enter conscious awareness? Makes you wonder how much of what we do is a choice at all. Probably very little! We're more like passengers than pilots in these bodies. (Notably though, there's a trait called 'self-efficacy', which is the degree to which you believe you're in control of your life; obviously it's higher in some people than others, and in those with low self-efficacy, there tends to be more hopelessness and less action towards pursuing goals... obviously. And yet since such people believe they're not in control, how could you even convince them that they should believe otherwise when the problem is that they don't feel capable of making changes?)

For a long time, I've been telling myself that my issues don't come from affective problems; that is, feeling bad is a result of my consequences rather than their cause. Surely anyone would feel scared and miserable if they were so alone, had a brain tumour, had no job or house, found it hard to connect with other people, etc? Drugs can't solve that, or magically make me have friends, I always thought. I also remembered my father's abuse of prescription medication, and these factors made me want to avoid using any kind of medication at all.

But I wonder whether it's time to at least give it a try. Antidepressions, anxiolytics... I have some understanding of how they function and what their limitations are from studying them in Psychology, and I don't expect them to be a magic cure at all. They might even make some things worse. But if I'm already ready to die, perhaps it'll be an interesting little experiment, just to see what the outcome might be. Perhaps I'd be more willing to engage with what the world offers if such engagement didn't result in deeply unpleasant physiological sensations.

I saw a doctor on Monday about all this, and I'll be seeing him again soon to discuss where to go from here. I just thought I'd write about this since I know people have suggested this course of action before, and it might be useful to chronicle how my experiences with it go.

Ideally, I'd embrace less symptom-oriented techniques, like mindfulness, in order to just be in the moment, accept the aversive feelings rather than wishing for them to be otherwise, that kind of thing... and to a degree, that's worked in the past. But I struggle with that these days because I lack the motivation to even try. I don't exactly want to feel better. It's not that I want to feel bad, to hold onto it; rather, there's nothing that I'd be feeling better for, no goal to aim for, nothing to keep me going or trying. Nobody to impress. Everything just feels empty and pointless. Even the thought of trying to come up with reasons feels pointless, which is the problem.

Actually, I noticed that that apathy was largely responsible for me leaving the exam so early. It wasn't that I was on the brink of a panic attack and just had to leave or anything (though there was anxiety there); rather, it was more like I was thinking "oh, what's the point anyway? It's good enough"; I ascribed so little value to it that it didn't seem worth staying and improving what I had. I've read that drugs for negative affect don't magically create positive affect; they just numb that negative affect, so you're left with a different kind of emptiness. I wonder if that'll create an even stronger sense of apathy, and what the consequences of that would be. Hmm.

I don't know. Perhaps I'll find out. I should really start on this assignment though, despite really not wanting to!