What is avoidance behavior?

Avoidance behavior is a concept in personal epistemology: The specific ways you avoid or procrastinate follow consistent patterns.

Example: You notice that every time you need to write a difficult email — a negotiation, a boundary, a hard truth — you suddenly remember you should reorganize your desk, check analytics, or research something tangentially related. The task itself takes twelve minutes. The avoidance ritual consumes ninety. And it's the same ritual every time: not random distraction, but a signature sequence of evasion behaviors that fires reliably under specific conditions.

This concept is part of Phase 6 (Pattern Recognition) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for pattern recognition.