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The Vicious Cycle of Anxiety: Why Anxiety Keeps Coming Back and How to Break the Pattern
By Danielle Carney, LMHC
You don’t need it to be Halloween to know what it feels like to be haunted by anxiety.
In honor of it being spooky season (or, if you’re finding this in March, humor me for a minute) I figured a horror-themed therapy blog post would be fitting.
Tell me if you relate to this – sitting at home, watching Netflix or scrolling on TikTok, knowing you have an anxiety-provoking task or project to complete. Maybe it’s a work project, an email you need to send, a phone call you’ve been avoiding, or a conversation you know you need to have. You assure yourself as you feel dread creeping up, “Oh, I’ll get around to it later.”
Later comes, later goes, now it’s bedtime and you tell yourself, “I’ll do it tomorrow…”
The tension builds. Now that thing you had to do feels terrifying. It’s become so big and scary when you think about it, that even though you know you should do it, the thought of getting started paralyzes you. You keep pushing it off, but it’s haunting you.
Then what happens? Sometimes the thing might get done, more out of urgency and it being pressing rather than actually wanting to. Usually there’s also more stress, anxiety, and general unpleasantness associated with it depending on how much you avoided it.
If this sounds eerily familiar, you’re in luck! Many of my clients also struggle with procrastination and other aspects of avoidance, and as a therapist who specializes in anxiety, I can help. This monster also has a name – you might be caught in the anxiety-avoidance cycle, and this is just one of the ways it can show up.
The Anxiety-Avoidance Cycle
To understand why the anxiety-avoidance cycle happens, it helps to first understand what anxiety actually is.
At its core, anxiety is our brain’s attempt to anticipate and prepare for a potential threat. It’s focused on the future—trying to protect us from something that might happen, even when that outcome isn’t guaranteed.
The tricky thing about anxiety is that it doesn’t always respond to actual danger. Sometimes it responds to uncertainty, discomfort, or the possibility of something difficult happening. And when we feel anxious, our natural instinct is often to do whatever we can to make that feeling go away.
This is where avoidance comes in.
When we start to feel anxious, our bodies might send us a message that sounds something like: “Uh oh, something is wrong here. Better stay away.”
And so we do.
Avoiding something that makes us anxious can actually feel like a pretty logical response in the moment. If sending that email, having that difficult conversation, or making that decision feels overwhelming, putting it off gives us immediate relief.
The problem is that relief doesn’t last forever. Over time, avoidance can teach our brains that the thing we avoided must have actually been dangerous. The more we avoid something, the bigger and scarier it can feel, and the less confident we become in our ability to handle it.
Eventually, the anxiety isn’t just about the original situation anymore. It can become about the fear of feeling anxious itself.
What If I Don’t Totally Avoid Things? How Do I Break The Cycle?
Good question! I’m a big believer in baby steps. If you can identify where avoidance has started to take over and begin making small changes, that can be a really powerful place to start.
Sometimes, these steps might look like using medication to help decrease anxiety during especially intense moments, asking a friend to support you while trying something new, allowing yourself some comfort while you work through anxiety, or creating an exit plan for situations that feel overwhelming.
These tools can be incredibly helpful, especially when you’re first working on expanding your ability to tolerate discomfort. They can provide a sense of safety while you practice doing things that feel difficult.
The tricky part? Anxiety can be a sneaky b*tch.
If we’re not mindful, the same strategies that help us cope can sometimes become another way of avoiding the very discomfort we’re trying to learn we can handle. For example, if you start believing you can only get through a situation if you have a specific safety behavior available, your anxiety may continue to convince you that you aren’t capable of facing it on your own.
When you rely too heavily on safety behaviors, you miss out on the opportunity to learn something really important: anxiety itself is uncomfortable, but it is not dangerous.
You don’t get the chance to discover that difficult emotions rise and fall, that discomfort is temporary, and that you are more capable than anxiety wants you to believe.
Avoiding emotions often seems like it will make them go away, but it usually has the opposite effect. The more we fight against anxiety, the more power it can start to have over us.
So ask yourself: What am I learning in the safety of my living room?
And perhaps more importantly: What is this pattern keeping me from doing, experiencing, or becoming?
Because the goal isn’t to never feel anxious. The goal is to build the confidence that you can feel anxiety—and still move toward the life you want.
When Anxiety Wears a Perfectionism Disguise
Avoidance isn’t always obvious.
Sometimes it looks like procrastinating. Sometimes it looks like canceling plans or putting off difficult conversations.
And sometimes…it looks like trying to do everything perfectly.
You tell yourself you’re just being thorough. Responsible. Prepared.
So you spend another hour researching before making a decision. You reread the email five more times before hitting send. You wait until you feel 100% confident before speaking up, applying for the job, setting the boundary, or trying something new.
It doesn’t necessarily feel like avoidance because you’re technically doing something.
But if all of that preparing, planning, researching, and perfecting is helping you avoid uncertainty, the possibility of making a mistake, or feeling uncomfortable, anxiety is still calling the shots.
One of the hardest (and most freeing) lessons I see clients learn is that confidence doesn’t come from finally feeling certain.
It comes from giving yourself permission to be a beginner.
Permission to be messy and human.
Permission to get it wrong sometimes.
Permission to feel anxious and do it anyway.
Ironically, that’s how self-trust is built. Not by eliminating uncertainty, but by allowing yourself to experience it and discovering that you can handle more than anxiety has led you to believe.
Because healing isn’t about becoming fearless. It’s about no longer needing everything to feel entirely, perfectly safe before you allow yourself to fully participate in your own life.
How Do I Break The Vicious Cycle?
The good news is it’s totally possible to break the vicious cycle of anxiety with willingness, consistency, and a commitment to change. Here are some steps to consider:
1. Recognize that it's so normal if your body and mind respond to feared or unfamiliar situations.
When we can take a step back, we can intuitively see that of course new things are going to be weird and potentially fear-provoking, right? So we work with that. First, name your anxiety. Let it be there. Tell yourself anxiety can be a helpful cue that you’re uncomfortable and maybe there’s some work to do here.
2. Start with baby steps! Figure out what actions you need to take to face the anxiety.
So many things could apply here, so I’ll give an example of how this could work. For a socially anxious person who struggles to go places on their own, we might work up to having them go to the store or run errands on their own. Maybe we’d start with some distress tolerance and emotional regulation skills to build awareness of what’s coming up and regulate anxiety in the moment. We could also consider asking a friend to go with them for a short amount of time as they get used to being out. Your journey to reducing the anxiety-avoidance cycle will be individual and personal, and it could be useful to work with a therapist to map out what it might look like for you.
3. Shift your self-talk.
You are capable of doing so much more than you think. I mean that literally. The things that can feel really difficult and impossible are often just out of reach. The way we talk to ourselves and the thoughts we allow ourselves to buy into matter. We have a choice in what we allow to grab a hold of us. Believe in yourself, use positive language when you speak to yourself, and learn to coach yourself through hard moments. This can be as simple as telling yourself something like, “You are safe, you can do this. This is hard, and you can still get through it.”
4. Build and strengthen your coping skills.
Like I mentioned already, finding ways to cope with anxiety in the moment is so, so helpful. We cannot expect the anxiety to go away – we can only learn to work with it, and not let it impact our decisions to do or not do something. Deep breathing, grounding techniques, and distraction (in moderation) can really help to move through anxiety when it feels overwhelming.
5. Keep pushing yourself.
The goal is to allow anxiety to have the least impact on your actions as possible. It can be there, and you can cope with it. From the first couple baby steps you decide on, identify a few more to keep pushing past the limits of what feels comfortable. Growth happens at the edge of your comfort zone, so keep challenging yourself. You’ll be surprised at what you can accomplish.
6. It’s the journey, not the destination.
Don’t forget to give yourself credit where you’re making strides in reducing avoidance and coping with your anxiety differently. We need to reinforce the changes you’re making for them to feel fulfilling and to maintain them. There’s bound to be parts of the process when you might revert to old behaviors, but we can welcome that, too. Try to learn from any regressions and apply it to the next time you’re in that situation. Progress, not perfection.
Ready to break the anxiety-avoidance cycle?
If you’re tired of feeling like anxiety is running the show – whether that looks like overthinking, procrastinating, avoiding difficult conversations, or constantly second-guessing yourself – therapy can help you understand these patterns and begin responding to anxiety differently.
I specialize in helping women navigate anxiety, perfectionism, and the pressure of always holding it all together. Together, we can work toward building more self-trust, confidence, and the ability to face life’s uncertainties without anxiety making every decision for you.
If you’re looking for an online therapist in Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, or Delaware, I’d love to connect. You can reach out here to schedule a complimentary consultation here.