[quikacct]

I just wanted to chime in to say that #1 can be a very counterproductive strategy in the long run. The most important idea I can convey about anxiety is this: if you aren’t willing to face your fears, your anxiety will probably escalate over time. (Fortunately, the inverse is true as well!)

Reasoning one’s way out of anxiety is an attempt to avoid fear. Fear asks: “what if X happens to me?” Avoidance is an attempt to short-circuit the fear: “Oh, don’t worry! X can’t happen because of Y.” This may provide quick relief, but your anxiety is just as motivated as you are. It’s only a matter of time before the anxiety undermines Y with another doubt. So next, you need to prove Z, so that Y will definitely be true, so that you don’t have to be afraid of X. At each step of the way, you’re training your brain to believe that X is truly so dangerous that you must do everything in your power to get it off your mind. This causes the fear and the anxiety to get worse, not better. This is not the path that gets you where you want to be.

Avoidance can take many forms - rationalizing is just one of them. Even very healthy behaviors can be avoidant if you’re using them to run away from your anxiety.

If you’re struggling with anxiety, I can’t recommend psychotherapy strongly enough. Preferably, from a practitioner of evidence-based treatments such as CBT. Anxiety is so treatable! It’s amazing how manageable our worst fears can seem once we’ve learned how to approach them.

[em-bee]

is reasoning out of anxiety always avoidance and hoping that what makes you anxious won't happen?

for me reasoning about something that made me anxious means to find the positive things that i can do if that thing does happen.

if i miss the deadline, then the pressure is off. it's only money, i'll need to reduce spending but i'll survive. the customer might cancel their contract? well, at least i don't have to deal with that jerk anymore. actually, why don't cancel the contract?

in other words rationalizing is to realize that X is not as bad as i think it is because or Y. not that it can't happen, but that it will happen, and that i can deal with it.

now i got a plan how to deal with X and so now i no longer need to be anxious about it.

[quikacct]

(Disclaimer: I’m not a therapist, just someone who has dealt with a lot of anxiety and has been through treatment. Please do get professional advice if you’re struggling!)

That’s a great question, and the answer is: it depends! In the abstract, what you’re describing sounds like the opposite of avoiding a feared consequence. With fears, you want to be able to look them right in the face and say: “Yeah. That might happen. I can’t predict the future and I can’t know for sure. But if the worst does happen, I will find a way to accept that reality and adapt to it as best I can.”

(This sounds simple, but if you’re in the habit of avoiding fears, it won’t be easy at first. Your brain will twist itself into a pretzel to work out some way of avoiding the feared thing. This is where therapy is so useful: a professional knows how to guide you through a process of learning better mental/behavioral habits, and they have helped many people before you).

The nuance is intent. It’s healthy coping to open yourself up to the scary uncertainty and possibility that something bad may happen, and to commit to finding a way forward if and when that happens. But it may be avoidance if you’re trying to PROVE to yourself that there’s nothing to fear. It can also be avoidance to identify every possible scenario that might unfold and how you would deal with it - in that case, you’re trying to avoid the uncertainty by mapping it all out. (You can tell that this may be happening because your thinking becomes pretty baroque, and it always seems like there’s just one more scenario that needs to be mapped out and “fixed”.)

Generally, we humans have a hard time tolerating uncertainty. But the truth is, almost everything in life is uncertain to some degree.

There is a difference also between taking a realistic assessment of the facts of a situation for the purpose of making a realistic, fact-based assessment, versus “lawyering” the facts to get to a preferred conclusion. The former is healthy and appropriate: anxiety does skew our perception of facts, and it’s good to ground ourselves in objective evidence, whatever that evidence might say. The latter is an attempt to reassure the fear away, and the relief it offers just doesn’t “stick.” The anxiety tends to come back with a new what-if: “Oh yeah? You can handle losing that customer? Well what if you you lose several customers all at once? Then you won’t make your mortgage payment!” If you notice that happening, you want to slap a big, sticky label on that thought: that’s anxiety! And the answer is: “I don’t know. Yeah, I might lose every customer at the same time, lose my house, and end up on the street. But how likely is this? Is it an appropriate use of my time to plan for this contingency right now?”

[agent008t]

There is another way to approach this: just don't engage with the anxiety-causing thoughts. Thoughts are just thoughts and people get all kinds of weird thoughts all the time. Most times they just come and go, never to return. But when you have an emotional response to a thought (e.g. anxiety), the thought can appear important, and will keep coming back. Engaging with it just gives it more weight.

As an example, trying to come up with reasons why the thought does not apply or is stupid is engaging with it. Trying to reason with the thought is engaging with it. Asking "how likely is this really?" is also engaging with it. Your anxious mind will always tend to fire new arguments at you, new doubts, and you'll just be giving the pointless thought more weight by ruminating on it. Just let the thought come and go, and then sit with the feeling of anxiety until it goes.

The book "Overcoming unwanted intrusive thoughts" by Seif and Winston is a very nice book about this approach to dealing with anxiety.

[quikacct]

This is an EXCELLENT comment. Learning not to engage with the anxiety is a really important skill. To get there, you've got to get in the habit of labeling those thoughts as anxiety so that you can recognize them easily.

And you're right -- trying to evaluate how likely the feared event is can be a form of engaging with the anxiety. You can even start cultivating satellite fears about whether you've got the right read on the situation and so forth.

Nevertheless, I would caution against a blanket rule that says "never touch an anxious thought." Sometimes, you need to make a decision. Let's say you're feeling feverish, and you think: "maybe I have COVID-19!" It is appropriate to fetch the thermometer from the medicine cabinet and check your temperature -- once. If the reading is normal, and you have the impulse to check again 30 minutes later, that would a good time to simply label the anxious thought and refrain from responding to it.