The urge to either over-control or under-control your feelings under these conditions is very common. Many people have a combination of both. Over-control of emotion includes suppression, withdrawal, compulsions, and perfectionistic control behaviors of your thoughts, feelings, and body (examples: compulsive exercise or restrictive diets). Under-control of emotion includes anger outbursts, self-medicating with alcohol and drug use, and problematic interpersonal strategies like passive aggression. In general, anxiety disorders can be seen as disorders of over-control. It's common for people to have both problematic over-control emotion regulation strategies and problematic under-control emotion regulation strategies.

You might not be avoiding what you value altogether, but you might be experientially avoiding all the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that arise when you follow your values. Notice how many opportunities for happiness open up when you give yourself permission be present in your actual life rather than trying to figure out whether that is the right decision.

The nature of obsessive thoughts is that they are unwanted and intrusive. They arrive with a spike of anxiety or uncertainty and the urge to do something that makes them stop. Behavior that you feel compelled to perform, against your conscious wishes, with the sole intention of ending a thought, feeling or sensation is a compulsion.

When you are in your head trying to figure something out or distracting or numbing yourself out from what is happening in your body, you are engaging in somatic avoidance.

The opposite of emotional avoidance is staying with emotions. Don’t just do something, sit there! When you choose to bring attention to and stay with emotion, you can know that you are on the right track if you can feel the emotion pass within a minute or two.

Emotions are evolutionarily adaptive states that motivate behavior. Every emotion has or has had some utility in the evolutionary past. After the initial surge of emotion, you can choose whether you want to keep the thoughts associated with that feeling going. Your thoughts will retrigger the sensations to keep that emotion going.

Avoidance isn’t a moral failing, a willpower problem, or a failure of character. Most likely, you are getting tricked by anticipatory anxiety. You might also have very high anxiety sensitivity, making situational anxiety very challenging to tolerate. You probably also have critical post-event processing, which undermines that natural euphoria that usually comes after overcoming a challenge.

Avoidance not only reinforces anxiety, but it also undermines potential.