How to Sit With Your Feelings When Avoidance Is Your Default

If you've searched for how to sit with your feelings, you've probably already tried the standard advice: just feel it, just be present, just let it come up. And you've probably found that none of it tells you what to actually do when you sit down and the discomfort feels unbearable within seconds.

This is one of the most common questions I hear in my Wilmslow practice, particularly from high achievers and workaholics who have spent years using productivity as a way to avoid their own internal life. As a BACP-registered psychotherapist specialising in workaholism and burnout, I want to offer something more useful than "just feel it": a practical answer to what sitting with your feelings actually requires, and how to begin if avoidance has always been your default.

Why Sitting With Your Feelings Feels Impossible

Think of the standard advice, just sit with it, feel it, as the emotional equivalent of being told to plunge into an ice bath when you're afraid of the cold. If discomfort is something you instinctively avoid, the idea of the task feels so unbearable that it pushes you further into avoidance rather than out of it.

Most advice about feeling your feelings assumes you already know how. It assumes the door to your emotional life is simply closed, not locked, barricaded, and hidden behind years of practiced distraction. If that's your experience, the issue was never a lack of willpower. It's that nobody explained the mechanics.

At the height of avoidance, the body often starts speaking what the mind refuses to hear. Skin conditions, persistent headaches, and unexplained pain are common, and the resulting distress tends to push people further into avoidance, not out of it.

Why High Achievers Use Work to Avoid Their Feelings

Avoidance has genuine short-term benefits. It lets you stay in your comfort zone, keep a safe distance from the mess, and convince yourself everything is fine. Work is a particularly convenient vehicle for this because overworking is culturally rewarded. Allocating unresolved feelings to "stress at work" feels acceptable, even admirable, and it gives you a socially sanctioned reason to distract yourself further by working longer hours to "manage" that stress.

The fear underneath this avoidance is usually a belief that you don't have the capacity, skill, or courage to face what you feel, and that if you let it in, it will destroy you. The problem is that avoidance strengthens this belief rather than testing it. Facing the feeling, however briefly or imperfectly, is the only way to discover that you can survive it. Over time, this changes your relationship with emotion entirely: instead of fearing feelings, you start to treat them as information and approach them with curiosity.

Three Ways to Actually Learn How to Sit With Your Feelings

1. Make It Smaller Than You Think It Should Be

Start with ten minutes. Not an hour of introspection, not a weekend retreat, just ten minutes where you commit to being with whatever arises without reaching for your phone, opening your laptop, or finding something to fix.

Your brain will resist this. It will generate urgent tasks and convince you that now isn't the right time. A clear, small boundary makes it harder to talk yourself out of. Telling someone close to you what you're doing also helps, not for their approval, but because naming the commitment out loud makes it harder to quietly abandon.

2. Give Yourself Permission for Parallel Activity

You don't have to sit in meditative stillness to process an emotion. For many people, especially natural avoiders, it feels safer to be doing something gentle while the mind is allowed to wander: journaling for ten minutes without letting the pen stop, going for a walk without headphones, folding laundry while noticing what surfaces, or sitting quietly on a train between obligations.

The key is that the activity should be automatic enough that your conscious mind can relax, but present enough that you're not escaping into entertainment. You're creating a container, a safe, defined space, where difficult feelings can emerge without becoming overwhelming.

3. Learn the Difference Between Processing and Spiralling

Not all emotional engagement moves you forward. Processing has texture and variation: you might cry, feel anger, or notice sadness shift into something else. There's a sense, however small, of working through something. Spiralling, by contrast, loops. The same thought repeats. The same worst-case scenario replays for the fifteenth time, and you feel stuck rather than in motion.

When you notice you're spiralling, don't try to sit with it alone. Instead, name the loop ("I'm stuck in the thought that I'm not good enough"), set a time limit on how long you'll engage with it today, and arrange to talk it through with a therapist or someone who can offer perspective. Recognising a spiral and setting a boundary around it isn't avoidance. It's wisdom.

What Changes When You Learn to Sit With Discomfort

The feelings themselves don't disappear. Grief, loneliness, anxiety, and self-doubt still show up. But with practice, they stop controlling you the way they once did, because you no longer need work, busyness, or constant distraction to outrun them.

In the space this creates, you learn something important: you are not your feelings. You can choose how you respond rather than react, and you can exist without constantly performing productivity or achievement to prove your worth. If work has become your refuge, your identity, or your numbing agent, learning to sit with what lies beneath it isn't about caring less about your career or your ambition. It's about allowing yourself to exist fully, not only in the structured safety of deadlines, but in the messier, unscheduled reality of being human.

Start with ten minutes. Start with parallel activity. Start by recognising when you're spiralling and asking for help. The discomfort won't disappear, but your relationship with it can change, and that changes everything.

If this resonated, I write about this kind of thing every week on Grounded, my Substack newsletter.

If this resonates and you'd like support working through it, I offer a free consultation to talk through what's going on and whether therapy could help.

About Rachel: Rachel is a BACP-registered psychotherapist based in Wilmslow, Cheshire, specialising in workaholism, burnout, and the psychology of high achievement. She works with clients online and in-person.