How to break the anxiety-fear-avoidance cycle

Hey y'all! Dan here. I have another post from you from Casey Rosengren who recently wrote How to Do Hard Things for us. This one takes a simple tool from the psychology literature, the ACT Matrix, and shows us how to use it to work through avoidance. It's something I've turned to frequently—and it works extremely well, despite being simple and easy to learn. I hope you enjoy the piece!

When I started my first company, I remember waking up each morning excited by the possibility of what we were creating. However, over time, much of my work came to be driven by avoidance.

This shift happened gradually. What started as a side project became a company with customers and employees—and suddenly fears around failure and letting people down started to play a larger role in how I related to the business. 2-3 years in, I felt trapped; everything I was doing felt like it was about obligation to others and simply trying to keep the business alive. 

That macro-level anxiety trickled down into much of my day-to-day work: when I’d look at my to-do list, I’d feel the anxiety around being trapped, and I’d end up procrastinating… until a looming deadline felt larger and more anxiety-inducing than my existential crisis around the business. At this point I’d scramble to get something done.

In retrospect, I was so driven by avoidance during this time that I lost touch with what I wanted to move toward. Loss avoidance had become such a strong motivator that it crowded out my original motivation for starting the business, and I became like a pinball, bouncing back and forth from one source of anxiety to another. 

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Perhaps you can relate to my cycle of avoidance above, or perhaps yours looks different. Regardless, avoidance almost always has a cost, because when humans are focused on moving away from something painful, we often take our eye off of what it is we truly desire.

In this piece, we’ll look at a little-known tool called the ACT Matrix that you can use to become aware of avoidance and to drastically reduce it. 

The ACT Matrix comes from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which I explored in a previous post for Every. One of the most compelling parts of ACT is its robust evidence base, and the ACT Matrix distills ACT into a simple tool that you can use on your own whenever avoidance shows up in your life.