When Trying Harder Makes It Worse: Understanding Experiential Avoidance

There is a particular kind of effort that makes things worse the harder you apply it. You know it if you have ever tried to force yourself to sleep, or to stop thinking about something, or to not feel nervous before something important. The trying becomes the problem. In acceptance and commitment therapy, this pattern has a name: experiential avoidance, and once you can see it, you start noticing it everywhere in your life.

Experiential avoidance is the attempt to control, escape, or get rid of unwanted internal experiences: feelings, thoughts, memories, sensations. It is one of the most human things we do, and it is also one of the strongest predictors of psychological distress. Not the difficult feelings themselves, but the effort to avoid them.

How one of our instincts becomes a trap

Avoiding pain is sensible. If you touch a hot stove, you pull your hand back, and that instinct keeps you alive. The trouble starts when we apply the same logic to our inner world, where it does not work the same way.

In the outer world, avoidance often solves the problem. In the inner world, avoidance tends to amplify it. Try not to think of something and you think of it more. Suppress an emotion and it leaks out sideways or builds pressure. Avoid the situation that makes you anxious and the anxiety grows, because you never get to learn that you could have handled it.

The avoidance also has a way of expanding. It starts with one feeling you do not want to feel, and to avoid that feeling you start avoiding situations, then people, then parts of yourself. A person who cannot bear their own sadness organizes their life so they are never still long enough to feel it: always busy, always achieving, always moving. From the outside it looks like drive. From the inside it is a full-time job of running, and it is exhausting, and the sadness is still there, waiting, getting heavier for being unacknowledged.

The many faces of avoidance

Experiential avoidance is easy to miss because it so rarely looks like avoidance. It wears respectable clothes.

Overworking is avoidance when it is fueled by the need to outrun a feeling. So is perfectionism, which is often a strategy to avoid the shame of being judged. Numbing with substances, food, screens, or scrolling is avoidance in its more obvious form. But so are subtler moves: intellectualizing a painful experience so you can analyze it instead of feel it, staying constantly cheerful so no one sees the hard thing underneath, picking fights to avoid vulnerability, rushing to fix other people’s feelings so you do not have to sit with your own discomfort.

I see the intellectualizing one often, particularly in thoughtful, driven people. They can describe their pain with great precision and have never actually felt it. The description becomes one more way around the experience. None of these strategies are character flaws. They are the mind’s attempts to protect you from something that once felt unbearable. The problem is they keep working long after the threat is gone, and they cost you your aliveness.

What to do instead

The alternative to avoidance is not wallowing, and it is not forcing yourself to marinate in pain. It is willingness and acceptance: the choice to allow an internal experience to be present, without struggling against it, when doing so serves something you care about.

Willingness is not passive and it is not all-or-nothing. It is a posture you can practice in small doses. You let yourself feel the flicker of grief instead of immediately reaching for your phone. You stay in the conversation when it gets vulnerable instead of making a joke. You notice the urge to overwork and ask what feeling it is helping you outrun, and then you let that feeling be there for a moment.

What people find, again and again, is that the feeling they were avoiding is more tolerable than the avoiding was. The sadness, felt directly, moves through and doesn’t grow or get stuck. The anxiety, allowed to be present, loses its charge. The thing we spent so much energy running from turns out to be survivable, and on the other side of it is the energy we were spending on the run.

Approaching what you have been avoiding

If you recognize yourself here, in the busyness or the perfectionism or the constant management of your own inner life, the invitation is not to tear down your defenses overnight. Those strategies have been protecting you, and they deserve respect even as you outgrow them.

It is more that you can begin, gently, to turn toward what you have been turning away from, ideally with support. The feelings you have been avoiding are not as dangerous as the avoidance has led you to believe. They are often simply waiting, and ready to be felt so they can finally move. That turning toward is frequently where therapy does its most freeing work.

Dr. C. Julieta Aguilera Rice is a licensed psychologist at Coastal Therapy Group in Carlsbad, offering therapy in English, Spanish, and French. Book a free consultation.