Introduction:the clinical relevance of experience avoidance after pulmonary thromboembolism remains unknown, despite its importance in other respiratory diseases.

Objective:this study aimed to identify those factors related to experience avoidance during the inpatient stay, and its relationship with disability and physical activity levels at hospital stay after suffering a pulmonary thromboembolism.

Methods:we studied the experience avoidance of 72 participants who suffer pulmonary thromboembolism. The experience avoidance was measured by psychological flexibility with the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (AAQ-II). Punctuation higher than 24 indicates present psychological inflexibility. The self-perceived disability was measured with the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule (WHODAS 2.0), and the physical activity levels were assessed with the International Physical Activity Questionnaire Short Form (IPAQ-SF).

Results:of the 73 participants, 26 presented psychological inflexibility and 46 patients presented good psychological flexibility at hospital stay. The mean of Mets was 1941.42±3120.25 and 176.15±439.67 (p<0.001) for the psychological flexibility and psychological inflexibility groups, respectively. The WHODAS scores presented significant differences between groups in cognition(p<0.001), mobility(p=0.03), self-care(p<0.001), relations(p<0.001), participation(p=0.08), and the total score(p=0.001), with lower results for the group that presented a good psychological flexibility.

Conclusions:experience avoidance may be a risk factor for presenting high disability levels and poor physical activity levels after suffering pulmonary thromboembolism.