Scared to Face Your Feelings? Why Avoidance Makes Anxiety Worse (And What Actually Helps)

What if the very thing you're doing to protect yourself is actually making things worse?

You sit down to write about how you feel. The blank page stares back. And then it hits—a wave of dread so strong you put the paper away. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never.

You tell yourself it's safer this way. If you don't look at the feelings, they'll stay manageable. Maybe they'll even go away.

But here's what keeps happening: You still worry constantly. About your dog getting sick. About your husband having a heart attack. About something terrible happening to your son. The worries don't fade. They keep coming back. And sometimes you need someone else to even tell you when you're spiraling—because you can't see it yourself.

So let me ask you something: If pushing feelings away is supposed to make them smaller... why aren't they shrinking?

The Strange Reason Trying Not to Think Makes You Think More

I want you to try something. For the next thirty seconds, whatever you do, do NOT think about a blue kangaroo.

Don't picture it. Don't imagine what shade of blue it might be. Don't think about it hopping. Just don't let it enter your mind.

Go.

...

So. How'd that go?

If you're like most people, you immediately pictured a blue kangaroo. And the harder you tried to push it away, the more it kept bouncing back into your awareness.

This isn't a failure of willpower. It's how your brain is wired.

A psychologist named Daniel Wegner ran this exact experiment (he used a white bear instead of a kangaroo). Here's what the research showed:

People who were told NOT to think about the white bear thought about it more than once per minute.

But here's the really interesting part. After they stopped actively trying to suppress the thought? They thought about it even more frequently than people who were never told to suppress it in the first place.

Researchers call this the "rebound effect." The harder you try to push something out of your mind, the more it floods back in—and the flooding continues even after you stop actively fighting it.

What's Really Happening Inside Your Brain When You Suppress a Thought

There's an invisible process running behind the scenes whenever you try to suppress a thought.

One part of your mind works to avoid the forbidden thought. But another part has to constantly check: "Is the thought coming up? Is it there? What about now?"

That checking process—the one scanning for the very thing you're trying to avoid—ironically keeps bringing the thought to mind.

It's like hiring a security guard to watch for intruders, but the guard keeps yelling "INTRUDER CHECK!" every few seconds. The house stays noisy with the very thing you were trying to eliminate.

Why Your 'Don't Think About It' Strategy Is Keeping Anxiety Alive

Now apply this to your worries.

You've been trying NOT to think about terrible things happening to the people you love. You've been pushing away the fear, ignoring the dread, trying to make it disappear.

And yet—when your dog has a slight cold, you become absolutely convinced she's going to die. When your husband seems tired, your mind leaps to heart attack. When your son is late, accident.

Does that sound like a strategy that's working?

Research on emotional avoidance shows something uncomfortable but important: Trying to avoid negative experiences through thought suppression and emotional repression is linked to the development AND perpetuation of anxiety. Not just starting it. Keeping it going.

In other words, avoidance isn't protection. It's maintenance. It keeps the problem alive.

As one person who finally saw this pattern put it: "I've been feeding the worry by trying to starve it."

What If Moving Toward Feelings Doesn't Mean Drowning in Them?

So if pushing feelings away makes them stronger... what happens when you move toward them instead?

This feels like dangerous advice. Your instinct screams that facing emotions will unleash something you can't control—that once you start feeling, you won't be able to stop. The feeling will grow infinitely. You'll drown.

But consider this:

When someone who cares about you notices you're upset and says, "You seem worried right now"—what happens?

For most people, something surprising: the feeling becomes more manageable, not less. You can step back from it slightly. See it more clearly.

The emotion didn't grow when it was acknowledged. It settled.

Here's what research on emotion processing reveals: The anticipation of facing something—the dread of it—is often harder to bear than the actual experience.

It's like standing at the edge of a cold swimming pool. The standing and dreading is usually worse than actually being in the water.

The fear of the feeling is worse than the feeling itself.

This Isn't Weakness - It's an Untrained Skill (And You Can Build It)

If facing emotions is so important, why does it feel so hard?

Think about weight training at a gym. You don't walk in on day one and try to lift the heaviest weight in the room. That would be overwhelming—maybe even harmful.

You start with something manageable. You build capacity. You gradually increase the weight as you get stronger.

Emotional capacity works the same way.

You're not weak for finding this difficult. You simply haven't trained that muscle yet. And you've been doing the equivalent of running away from the gym every time you drive past it—then wondering why you're not getting stronger.

How to Face Difficult Feelings Without Getting Overwhelmed

The key isn't to dive into the deepest emotional waters and hope you don't drown. It's to wade in at a manageable depth, again and again, building your capacity with each repetition.

Research on written exposure shows that brief, repeated engagement with difficult experiences produces genuine improvement. Studies find that when people write about traumatic or difficult experiences in short, structured doses:

The first time is the hardest
The second time is easier
By the third time, most people notice it feels significantly more manageable

This is the opposite of what most people expect. They assume that focusing on something painful will make it hurt more each time. But the research shows the opposite: distress decreases with structured repetition.

Your capacity grows. The emotional "weight" becomes something you can handle.

The 5-Step Method to Build Your Emotional Capacity

Here's a concrete way to start building your emotional capacity:

Step 1: Choose something moderately difficult. Not the hardest thing in your life. Something that brings up feelings, but isn't your deepest wound.

Step 2: Write 4-8 short bullet points about it. Not a journal entry. Not pages of processing. Just brief sentences. Short points. Contained exposure.

Step 3: Use a sensory anchor. If you have something calming—a particular scent, for instance—use it before and during the writing. There's research showing that smell has direct pathways to the emotional centers of your brain, bypassing the usual relay stations. Calming scents like lavender can help regulate your nervous system during the process. Think of it as training wheels while you build the muscle.

Step 4: Notice what actually happens. Does the emotion grow infinitely, the way you feared? Or does it rise, peak, and then settle—like the positive feelings you have after a good phone call with someone you love?

Step 5: Repeat. Not once. Multiple times. Notice how it changes from the first round to the third.

The Real Lesson: You Can Handle More Than You Think

This isn't about making feelings disappear. It never was.

You're learning something more important: You can handle them when they come.

Every time you avoid an emotion, you're sending yourself a message: "I can't handle this." That message accumulates. The belief grows. And the fear intensifies.

But every time you briefly face an emotion and survive it—every time you notice it peaked and then settled rather than drowning you—you're collecting evidence. Evidence that you're more capable than you thought.

Avoidance maintains the fear by preventing you from ever discovering what you're actually capable of.

Structured exposure builds the evidence file for a different conclusion.

Why Your Brain Keeps Jumping to Worst-Case Scenarios

There's something else worth knowing.

Those catastrophic thoughts—the dog dying, the heart attack, the accident—they follow a pattern. It's not random. There's a recognizable structure to how the mind leaps to worst-case scenarios, and once you can see that pattern, you can start to catch it earlier.

Rather than needing someone else to point out when you're spiraling, you can learn to recognize the signature moves your anxious mind makes.

That recognition is a skill. And like emotional capacity, it can be trained.

But first, you have to stop running from the feelings themselves. Because as long as you're convinced that emotions are the enemy, you can't get curious about the patterns within them.

The first step is discovering that you can handle more than you thought.

The next step is understanding why your brain keeps jumping to catastrophe in the first place—and what to do about it.

What to do now: