Obsessive avoidance

Despite the central role of avoidance in anxiety and other clinical states, the study of avoidance behaviour has not received constant attention in the history of psychological science. Whereas avoidance learning was a topic of great scientific interest during the heydays of behaviourism, interest in the topic waned considerably with the rise of cognitive psychology, and little theoretical development in the understanding of avoidance occurred for decades, despite an enduring appreciation of the importance of avoidance in clinical psychology. The renaissance of the interest in avoidance (including avoidance learning) in basic science is of a relatively recent date, with an exponential growth of empirical and theoretical work on avoidance in the past decade (see Krypotos et al., 2015, Figure 1). This renewed interest has been accompanied by increased sophistication in the theoretical analysis of avoidance and enhanced understanding of not only the behavioural but also the neurobiological substrates of the acquisition and expression of avoidance in normal and clinical situations.
Recently, Kool and colleagues9 provided the first direct evidence for the principle of mental effort minimization in a novel paradigm called the demand selection task (DST). In this task, participants freely choose between two options that demand differing levels of mental effort. The high-demand option requires increased mental effort in the form of frequent task switching12, whereas the low-demand option necessitates less frequent task switching. Across many replications of this task, participants tend to prefer the less demanding course of action9,13,14. This avoidance of cognitive demand is consistent with the law of least mental effort9,15.
Pathways through which avoidance might get amplified in the context of anxiety disorders:
increased threat appraisal;
enhanced threat avoidance tendencies;
impaired regulation of avoidance;
habitual avoidance;
attempts at increasing psychological distance.

Sources:

Beckers, T., G Graske, M. (2017). Avoidance and Decision Making in Anxiety: An Introduction to the Special Issue. National Library of medicine. Retrieved from: https://shorturl.at/Cl9Nq

Arnaudova, I. (2017). Pathways towards the proliferation of avoidance in anxiety and implications for treatment. ScienceDirect. Retrieved from: https://shorturl.at/1xlsZ

Patzelt, E. (2019). The transdiagnostic structure of mental effort avoidance. Scientific reports. Retrieved from: https://shorturl.at/GBFVG