Lesson 5 of 6 · What feeds it, and what to stop adding
Two. The list that grows
Every time you do not go, the not going gets easier and the going gets harder. Then something adjacent gets added. The road becomes the roads near it. The one meeting becomes meetings. The masjid becomes anywhere you might be spoken to.
Nobody decides this. It happens one reasonable decision at a time, and each individual decision looks fine.
You can usually see it best by looking backwards. Compare what your week looked like a year ago with what it looks like now.
What the research says
Avoidance spreads because every act of avoiding is rewarded and the thing avoided is never available to be relearned. Nobody has to decide for the list to get longer, which is why it grows quietly.
Avoidance persists and spreads because each act of avoiding is rewarded by relief, and because what is avoided is never available to be re-learned. Nobody has to decide for the list to grow.
Krypotos AM, Effting M, Kindt M, Beckers T (2015). Avoidance learning: a review of theoretical models and recent developments. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 9, 189 doi