5 Quick Tips to Reduce Relationship Anxiety
Do you find yourself ruminating over your relationships? Are you anxious about abandonment or fearful of rejection? Relationship anxiety can be distressing, and can even lead you to withdraw from them all together.
If you find yourself anxious about relationships, or a specific relationship comes to mind when you think about relationship anxiety, we hope to provide some helpful tips to help you feel more secure, safe, and loved.
Each of the therapists at Havenly Counseling Collective provided a tip to help ease your relationship anxiety below.
1. Be curious.
Bobbi (Elder Emo Therapy) says,
The initial and essential step is to approach your anxiety with genuine curiosity, keenly observing where it resides within your body and what sensations it evokes.
Take a moment to identify the physical manifestations, such as tightness in the chest, shallow breathing, or a knot in the stomach. When describing these sensations, be open and expressive, using vivid language to convey your experience.
By cultivating curiosity, you empower yourself to delve deeper into your emotions, unravel triggers, and gain valuable insights that pave the way for understanding and managing anxiety more effectively.
2. Is this anxiety old or new?
Melinda (Inviterra Counseling) says,
Ask yourself if this anxiety feeling is familiar, or if you’ve ever felt it in the past with other relationships. Often, bad experiences or trauma from relationships in the past can crop up in the present when we least expect it. And don’t just consider your past romantic relationships; go back and consider whether you felt this way in the formative family relationships of your childhood.
Why dredge up the past? Because often the relationship anxiety that we feel in the present isn’t really related to the present at all, but is actually our brain saying, “hmmm, this situation feels similar to that really awful relationship situation that we had in the past…time to set off the warning alarm (aka anxiety)!”
So many people feel crazy when this anxiety crops up “(but there isn’t anything wrong with this relationship! Everything is ok, why am I so on edge?!”), but if your past relationships have been toxic or abusive, then your anxiety makes total sense, even if the relationship you’re in right now is actually a healthy one.
3. Other people’s opinion of me is none of my business.
Joanne (OliveMe Counseling) says,
Each person is an individual who has one’s own thoughts, opinions, experiences, and values. My opinion of others is not their business but mine. On the other hand, other people’s opinion of me is not my business but theirs.
One way of managing our relationship anxiety is by implementing boundaries to distinguish who we are from who others are. Let each of us be our own individual person and also in turn allow others to be their own person.
By the way, if others around you are so judgmental of people to begin with, perhaps they would be good people to have more boundaries with (not because you or they are BAD, but because there might be a need for more distinction.)
If you need some guidelines to distinguish between safe vs. unsafe people (namely who to draw closer to vs. to create more space from them), here’s a handy chart.
4. Face your grief and disappointment.
Morgan (Morgan Hancock Therapy) says,
Sometimes not wanting to feel grief and disappointment in the relationship can manifest itself as anxiety because we want the relationship or our partner to be a certain way. However, we can’t control how emotionally available our partner is and as the song goes, “I can’t make you love me if you don’t.”
How is your anxiety helping you to avoid processing grief or disappointment in the relationship? Accept your partner for who they are and what they can provide to the relationship, and work towards getting your needs met in another way.
5. Be kind to yourself.
Lorren (Lorren Siu Counseling) says,
When we experience relationship anxiety our immediate reaction is often to want the feeling to go away. We can get caught up doing all kinds of things in an effort to rid ourselves of anxious feelings, and many times even feel guilty about feeling anxious!
Making an effort to respond to ourselves with kindness can go a long way toward changing our experience of anxiety. You can do this by practicing some grounding exercises such as Vergence, 5,4,3,2,1 senses activity, or 4 square breathing.
Practice some self-soothing by rubbing something with a pleasing texture between your fingers, such as a soft fabric or smooth stone, listening to calming music, taking a warm bath, going on a walk, or repeating a positive mantra.
Take the time to do one act of kindness for yourself, something that helps you feel good inside.
Need help with anxiety regarding your relationships?
Learn more about all our therapists, or reach out directly below and get the care you need! Here are what each therapist specializes in:
Melinda Olsen (Inviterra Counseling)
Helping Millenials + Gen-Z’s learn to love themselves deeply using the Enneagram & Brainspotting
Joanne Kim (OliveMe Counseling)
Helping BIG Feelers create relationships where they matter, too using the Enneagram + Brainspotting
Lorren Siu
Helping Highly Sensitive Persons heal from attachment trauma and anxiety (Brainspotting)
Morgan Hancock
Helping High-achieving and People Pleasing Women & Athletes who are struggling with overwhelming anxiety, relationships, identity, and spiritual issues.
Bobbi Kyle Gutierrez (Elder Emo Therapy)
Helping young adults, couples, and teens make wiser decisions that actually move them closer to where they want to be, rather than being sucked into emotionally messy situations.