The Cost of Aoidance

I have needed to paint a bathroom in my home for the past six month. The actual task will probably in total take three hours. It’s easy to say I’m too busy to do it but that’s really not true, I have the time, I’m avoiding it. If I really think about it, I think it’s a task that is a bit out of my comfort zone so I keep putting it off. This is a small example of the many ways we avoid, sometimes it’s the smaller things with small impact but sometimes the scope is much larger and the impact could be holding us back in living our fullest life. Why do we do avoid?

Avoidance is rooted in survival. Our brains are wired to protect us from pain. If your mind equates emotional or physical discomfort with danger, it will try to shut it down fast. Avoidance operates as coping mechanism and works in the short term. Although in the long run, tends to hold us back. Avoidance can keep our worlds small and make us feel like we cannot handle challenges. Avoidance lets us get comfortable with second guessing ourselves vs believing we can accomplish anything.

In therapy we work on exploring where avoidance comes from and slowly work on challenging our own avoidances.  We work on building emotional resilience to face the discomfort in our worlds.  Courage is not the absence of fear—it’s the willingness to feel fear and keep going anyway.

For now, I’m going to put on an old shirt, get uncomfortable, and paint that room.