Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
Avoiding something makes today easier and tomorrow harder. Say that plainly, to yourself and to whoever is in it with you.
Without that sentence, asking someone to face a frightening thing looks like cruelty, and every conversation about it goes badly. With it, the choice comes into view: a hard hour now, or a fear that quietly grows while you wait. It helps to be specific about the price, so it becomes a real account of what these months of staying away have cost rather than a vague warning.
Qur’an and Sunnah
The death you run away from will come to meet you (Quran 62:8). Running is named here as something that does not remove what is being run from.
قُلۡ إِنَّ ٱلۡمَوۡتَ ٱلَّذِي تَفِرُّونَ مِنۡهُ فَإِنَّهُۥ مُلَٰقِيكُمۡۖ ثُمَّ تُرَدُّونَ إِلَىٰ عَٰلِمِ ٱلۡغَيۡبِ وَٱلشَّهَٰدَةِ فَيُنَبِّئُكُم بِمَا كُنتُمۡ تَعۡمَلُونَ
so say, ‘The death you run away from will come to meet you and you will be returned to the One who knows the unseen as well as the seen: He will tell you everything you have done.’
Qur’an 62:8read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised experiment, 30 people asked to carry out health related precautions for a week ended up more worried about their health than those who were not. It is a small study with volunteers rather than patients, so hold the size of the effect lightly. What it shows well is the shape of the thing: the protective behaviour did not settle the fear, it fed it.
Olatunji BO, Etzel EN, Tomarken AJ, Ciesielski BG, Deacon B. (2011). The effects of safety behaviors on health anxiety: an experimental investigation.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Each escape buys relief now and pays for it with a bigger fear later.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Some people are not scared of the day, they are flattened by it. Staying home lifts the weight for an hour, then removes the few good things the day still held.
When the schoolwork is finished early, what follows is chores and dull jobs until the school day would have ended. The good things wait for the hour they would have waited for anyway.
If a child can go to the school office whenever they like and stay as long as they like, that is an exit rather than a support. Agree a length, and a gap between visits.