“Stay away from the things that scare you.” Seems like sensible advice, right? Avoid the things you’re afraid of, and you’ll never be afraid. Easy!

If you’re living with a phobia, or any other kind of anxiety disorder, this might seem like a great way to manage your symptoms. Afraid of heights? Just don’t look out of the window when you’re flying and stay off the top floor of tall buildings and you’ll be fine. Afraid of snakes? Stay clear of anywhere you’re likely to encounter one and it won’t be an issue.

For some people with rare or highly specific phobias, this technique of just avoiding the source of the fear might work well enough for you to live an uninterrupted life. Someone with a crippling fear of clowns, for example, can probably get on with their day just fine as long as they never take a trip to the circus. But for most people with anxiety disorders, it isn’t quite that simple.

Some fears are undeniably harder to avoid than others. Fear of driving, fear of open spaces, and fear of social situations are prime examples of situations people have to face every day, phobia or no phobia. Phobias of wild animals, weather and other natural events are equally hard to avoid as you never know when you’ll encounter them. Even fear of heights is a tough one if you work in an office block, or have to drive across a suspension bridge every morning on your commute. Some people with these phobias do still try to avoid their fears- going to extreme lengths to cut scary situations out of their lives- for example taking the long way to work every day or changing job so they can work on the bottom floor. If they stick to this principle of avoidance, people with intense phobias can often end up living highly restricted, unfulfilling lives.

Simply trying to avoid your fears rarely works in the long term, and can be a big roadblock to living the life you want. But from a psychological perspective there’s another big reason avoidance isn’t the answer.

Feeding the Lie

Phobias are irrational. That’s the point, right? A phobia is defined as an excessive or unrealistic fear response to a particular object or situation. If you have a phobia, avoiding the things you fear therefore means acting as though they are dangerous, when in reality they aren’t. Take the fear of heights example. Were a person with acrophobia to face their fears and step out onto the balcony of their friend’s apartment of the fiftieth floor, what do you think would happen?

That’s right- absolutely nothing! No harm would come to the person, and they would quickly realise that their fears about heights were unrealistic. Anxiety is meant to serve the function of alerting us to danger. But for people living with a phobia of heights, avoiding high balconies doesn’t serve any purpose- it doesn’t keep them safe or improve their life in any way. If anything, it just makes things harder.

When you break them down, most forms of phobia-driven avoidance don’t actually make you any safer. They might make you feel safer, and that’s the danger- by continuing to avoid your fears, you continue to feel safe, so you continue to believe that avoidance is serving a useful purpose. Research shows that the more you avoid something, the more you come to fear it over time. You may believe that avoiding your fears is keeping you safe from harm, but in reality, by avoiding the situations you fear you are feeding the lie that they are dangerous.

Breaking the Cycle

Avoidance is a trap that can keep you in stasis- never letting you get close enough to your fears to overcome them, and never really providing enough relief to help you live a normal life. And the more you avoid, the more you feel the need to keep avoiding. So what breaks this cycle?

You may have already guessed, but the best way out is to stop avoiding. Just like in the heights example above, facing the source of your fears can have immediate and powerful effects. By doing so, you prove to yourself that you’re capable of facing tough situations, and that you don’t need avoidance to be safe. You also get to re-evaluate a lot of the reasons behind your fears. Maybe you were afraid of heights because you thought if you ever got too close to a high ledge you’d panic, lose control and fall. One quick trip up to a high balcony proves this prediction false. The same holds true for all phobias- sine they are irrational by nature, your fearful predictions and assumptions rarely survive direct experience.

Of course, putting yourself in the very situations you fear isn’t easy. It requires courage, commitment, and often a fair bit of planning. But putting in the work really is the best way to purge unhelpful, irrational fears from your system, and once they’re gone, the need to rely on time-consuming avoidance disappears too.

Facing your fears is the backbone of Exposure Therapy, the most well-researched and widely used treatment for phobias. With the help of a psychologist, you can plan and implement a step-by-step journey of facing your fears in a way that’s not too overwhelming. Of course, for the brave or self-motivated out there you can also undertake Exposure Therapy on a self-help basis and get down to the business of putting fear and avoidance back in their place.