I’ve been thinking about a client I worked with: brilliant, accomplished, fully capable of having the hard conversation she’d been putting off for four months.
She knew what to say. She just kept finding something else to do first. She wasn’t avoiding the conversation. She was avoiding what she’d have to feel inside it.
That’s experiential avoidance. And it’s the mechanism quietly running every playing-it-safe move you’ve ever made. The procrastination, the overthinking, the reassurance-seeking, the perfectionism.
It’s not laziness. It’s not weakness. It’s a very human loop. And episode 106 is about how to recognize it, name it, and take one step toward what you actually value with the feeling present, not after it disappears.
Table of Contents
Show notes with time-stamps
0:56 Naming the pattern: experiential avoidance (ACT)
1:52 Why avoidance looks reasonable from the outside
2:30 What experiential avoidance actually is
3:27 What the research shows: the effort to suppress feelings causes the damage
4:37 How avoidance behaviors get reinforced (the short-term relief trap)
6:00 The 10 different ways people play-it-safe
11:40 The “observer self” skill from ACT
13:47 How to use the observer self step-by-step
15:05 Example: the writer who was stuck on his book proposal for 3 years
17:13 What experiential avoidance is and why it matters
Listen Here
Resources mentioned
- Playing-it-safe questionnaire: https://www.thisisdoctorz.com/playing-it-safe-questionnaire/








