Step 4: Proactively Engage

The final way that anxiety maintains and exacerbates itself is through avoidance. [2] This makes sense, because getting rid of the thing making you feel anxious is a pretty effective way to reduce your anxiety! Unfortunately, avoidance is a short-term fix. Sure, it helps us feel better in the moment, but we can’t avoid things forever without severely reducing our quality of life. Additionally, because avoidance neither fixes the problem nor gives us the chance to ever learn how to manage it, our anxiety actually gets worse over time.

There are two main ways that we avoid:

1. Behavioral avoidance is when we simply avoid engaging with the thing causing anxiety. For example, you might avoid code reviews by quietly pretending you didn’t see a teammate’s pull request, or procrastinate on asking for a review by working on other tasks or unnecessarily fiddling around with your code.

2. Experiential avoidance is when you seemingly engage with the thing causing anxiety, but mentally check out to reduce your exposure to it. For example, you might skim feedback or rubber stamp pull requests instead of asking questions or trying to learn.

To counteract avoidance, we’ll learn two skills for actively engaging with code reviews: DEAR and GIVE. You’ll also find a Mini Code Review Anxiety Toolkit in Part 3 of this workbook to take with you to your next code review, so that you can reduce your physiological arousal, challenge your negatively biased thoughts, and actively engage with your next code review.

Figure 5. Cognitive-behavioral model highlighting the behavioral symptoms of anxiety.