Emotional avoidance is the tendency to suppress, minimize, distract from, or otherwise circumvent the experience of uncomfortable emotions. It includes obvious strategies, numbing with substances, screens, or food, and subtler ones, like staying constantly busy, intellectualizing feelings, or redirecting conversations away from emotional content.
Avoidance works in the short term. The discomfort is reduced. The emotion does not get felt. This is why it is self-reinforcing.
In the longer term, avoided emotions do not dissipate. They become stored. The anxiety that was not felt accumulates. The grief that was managed rather than experienced stays unprocessed. The anger that was suppressed resurfaces as something else.
Sustained emotional avoidance is associated with increased overall emotional reactivity, reduced capacity for positive emotion, and a gradual narrowing of life as more and more situations are avoided because of what they might bring up.
The alternative to avoidance is not drowning in emotion. It is developing the capacity to feel emotions without being controlled by them, which is the actual definition of emotional regulation.