How Anxiety Affects Relationships

If you experience chronic anxiety, it has likely impacted your life in significant ways. You may have felt its effects at your job or in your social life. Perhaps your hobbies and passions have taken a back seat because you’re so often consumed by anxious thoughts.

Anxiety can also take its toll on another important area of your life – your romantic relationships. Anxiety and relationships are a tricky combination, because when you already struggle to keep your emotions and fears in check, allowing yourself to be emotionally entangled with and vulnerable to another person can be confusing, overwhelming, and challenging.

Coping with Anxiety

Maintaining a romantic relationship requires serious work. Navigating the problems in a relationship become even more difficult when one of the people suffer from the effects of anxiety. Sometimes the problems can become so serious, the person suffering from anxiety will need anxiety treatment.

Having gone past the courtship stage, the challenge of keeping the bond between spouses strong necessitates continuously sharing mutually. Tested over time, the hurdles involved are challenging enough to strain any relationship. Surpassing the challenges requires growing together as a couple. When one partner has an anxiety disorder, the impact can be devastating.

Research into the effects of anxiety in relationships has made it clear that having an anxiety disorder impacts all parts of a person’s life. One of the most significant ways this plays out is in close relationships. The following is a synopsis of how anxiety can cause major disturbances in a relationship along with some suggestions on how to prevent problems from happening in the first place.

Suspiciousness and Anxiety

In relationships, anxiety can often lead to excessive suspiciousness. This typically manifests as worry about a partner being unfaithful, no longer being in love, wanting to leave the relationship, or not caring as much as you do.

Trusting your intuition is an important part of living, but for people with an anxiety disorder, this can become confused with anxiety. If you find yourself becoming suspicious about your relationship, consider that you might be paranoid and that you thoughts and feelings may be triggered by anxiety.

If you find yourself in this position, take a deep breath and ask yourself if you have any hard data that supports your worries. If you have a partner who is patient and understanding about your anxiety, asking for occasional reassurance can be helpful.

Neediness and Anxiety

One of the most annoying aspects of anxiety in relationships is neediness. People with anxiety disorders often worry that they act too needy in relationships because they need constant reassurance. Additionally, anxiety sometimes pressures people into become overly needy and it that can cause stress in the relationship.

If you think this may be the case for you, it is important to find ways to cope with your anxiety that involve relying on yourself more than your partner. Doing this can take a lot of the pressure off your partner and allows you to become more self-confident. A good practice in this area involves reassuring yourself when you feel anxiety as opposed to relying on your partner for comfort every time you feel anxious.

Impulsiveness and Anxiety

Anxiety can create states that are so intolerable that we are compelled to take actions that are impulsive and misguided. In relationships, this could mean some sort of acting out that is destructive, quickly jumping to conclusions, or making decisions that will not bring desired results. If you find that your anxiety makes you impulsive in relationships, it can be important to slow down, be still, and think through anything you are doing. If it is simply just to relieve anxiety, try and find a better solution that won’t result in increased problems and stress.

Relationship Counseling and Couples Therapy

One partner having significant anxiety or an anxiety disorder can impact the entire relationship. Relationship Counseling and Couples Therapy can help because the therapist understands that when one person has an issue it affects both partners.