Your Brain Learns Fear Every Time You Avoid It

Avoidance works remarkably well in the short term: it lowers discomfort almost immediately. The problem is that every escape teaches the brain that the thing you avoided was dangerous, making the next encounter harder. Dr. Luana Marques has spent two decades at Harvard Medical School studying how evidence-based psychological skills can help people approach discomfort instead and how those same skills can be taken beyond the therapy room to communities that rarely get access to high-quality mental health care.