When we’re feeling anxious about something, it’s natural to want to avoid it, but avoidance is one of the worse things we can do for anxiety, and the more we avoid something, the more anxious it tends to make us. The opposite of avoidance is exposure, and one of the keys to reducing anxiety is to exposure ourselves to the things that cause us anxiety, through a gradual and controlled process called Graded Exposure or Systematic Desensitization.
Watch the videos below to learn why avoidance increases our anxiety and how we can use graded exposure or systematic desensitization to lower our anxiety.