Avoidant Coping: Is Putting Off the Problem Protection or Risk?

Avoidant coping: looking away, at least for now

Avoidant coping describes the tendency to put off or look away from a stressful situation, at least at first. It’s one of the most misunderstood coping strategies: it isn’t simply “doing nothing” for no reason, but a way, sometimes useful, sometimes costly, of protecting yourself from distress that feels too big to face right away.

Disclaimer: This article draws on the stress-coping literature started by Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman, which identifies avoidance as a third major category alongside problem-focused and emotion-focused coping, and is intended purely for informational purposes.

Where it comes from: protecting, even if only temporarily

Avoiding isn’t always pure denial: it’s often a way of buying time while gathering the emotional resources needed to face something head-on. The problem isn’t the pause itself, but that, unlike other strategies, avoidance doesn’t act on the cause of the stress: while it lasts, the problem usually stays right where it was, and in many cases grows.

Common ways of avoiding without calling it that

• Systematic procrastination: putting off tasks or conversations that cause distress, even when they’re urgent.
• Active distraction: filling your time with other things so you don’t have to think about what’s worrying you.
• Minimizing: downplaying a problem as a way of not having to deal with it yet.
• Evasive delegation: asking someone else to handle something not so much because they’ll do it better, but to avoid facing it yourself.
• Short-term relief, long-term cost: the sense of immediate calm tends to come with more accumulated tension down the road.

Picture a bill or a letter from the bank that arrives and sits unopened on the table for several days. Every time the person glances at it they feel a pang of discomfort, and every time they decide “I’ll look at it later, when I’m calmer.” The problem is that the actual amount, whatever it is, doesn’t change just because the letter stays closed: what changes is how long the underlying anxiety lasts in the meantime, and sometimes the window to react without extra cost.

The price that rises over time

The cost of avoidance is almost never fixed: in many cases it grows the longer it’s put off. An uncomfortable conversation with a coworker tends to get harder the longer it goes unhad, because the accumulated discomfort piles on top of the original issue. A minor health problem left unchecked can get more complicated. A small unpaid debt can rack up interest. None of this makes avoidance an automatic mistake (sometimes the situation really does improve on its own, or the right moment to really face it hasn’t arrived yet), but it is the reason this style, more than the other three, deserves checking in on fairly often: asking whether what’s being avoided is still as manageable as it was at first, or whether the room to act without extra cost is shrinking.

Your growth challenge

The key isn’t eliminating this style entirely (a brief pause before facing something big can be perfectly adaptive), but noticing when it’s become the only strategy in play while the problem stays intact or keeps growing. Breaking down whatever is triggering avoidance into one very small, very concrete first step, something that can be done in a few minutes, tends to reduce the initial resistance far more effectively than trying to face the whole problem at once.

What Tolle calls the “pain-body”

Eckhart Tolle, in The Power of Now (1997), describes a concept that helps explain why some avoidance sticks around for so long: what he calls the “pain-body,” a buildup of unprocessed emotional distress that gets stored away and resurfaces, almost with a life of its own, whenever something triggers it. Avoiding, in many cases, isn’t just putting off a specific task: it’s avoiding contact with that accumulated discomfort the task threatens to stir up. Tolle suggests the first step isn’t forcing yourself to confront it head-on, but simply and consciously acknowledging that the discomfort is there, instead of continuing to act from it without realizing it. Naming what you’re avoiding, and why it creates so much resistance, tends to loosen part of that weight even before the problem itself gets addressed.