Considering no one can truly be available 24/7, if you rely on your friends’ responses to manage your feelings of anxiety, you are both validating and perpetuating your irrational thoughts (“if my friends didn’t hate me, they’d respond immediately”) and also setting yourself up for inevitable failure and future emotional crisis (because eventually there will be a time they do not respond immediately). This also doesn’t help you grow and progress to a healthier place along the path to recovery, because at best you’re just maintaining the status quo by temporarily relieving symptoms, not learning or practicing techniques to handle those symptoms before they take over your entire mood.
There are of course several more productive ways to deal with anxiety instead of expecting your friends to constantly prove they don’t hate you. I’d always recommend a good therapist as the best idea (and have written at length before about how to find a great one) but barring that option, anxiety is a disorder particularly well-suited to self management.
Most major chain bookstores have a psychology section; I’d think books on cognitive behavioral therapy/CBT would be a great place to start, because CBT is all about identifying the negative thoughts in your mind (“if my friends don’t respond immediately they hate me”) and replacing them with more accurate, healthier statements (“just because my friends have their own lives, it doesn’t mean I’m not important to them”). Alternatively, everyone here probably knows I’m a huge fan of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy/DBT. It was created for (and by!) Borderline people, but seeing as how it’s essentially an upgraded form of CBT plus some other bells and whistles (self-management of suicidal thoughts, that sort of thing) it should work well too. And I know Barnes & Nobles stocks CBT and DBT workbooks specifically modified to be used by people with Anxiety.
Visiting the bookstore is also a good time to pick up some books about Anxiety Disorder. Obviously you know you have it, but understanding what sets it off, what it looks like, and how it works will be really useful for the next bit, and if nothing else is VERY important for any sort of self-advocacy on your own behalf toward doctors, teachers, employers, or parents.
But my FAVORITE trick? My go to technique I always seem to resort to in the moment to handle symptoms of any of my disorders but especially my anxiety? I psychoanalyze myself out of them.
I have researched anxiety as a disorder very thoroughly. I’m fortunate enough to have access to a good therapist (which, I won’t deny, helps a lot) with whom I’ve discussed what anxiety looks like. I’ve put a lot of work into identifying what MY anxiety looks like (for instance, I tend to worst-case-scenario and it sounds like you do too: “I don’t want to call my boss, what if there’s an issue I don’t know about, and by calling him I remind him, and he fires me, and I lose all my money and wind up homeless, and–”) and just as importantly, what the WARNING SIGNS of my anxiety looks like. Through experience and hard work I know exactly when I’m starting to pull my thoughts from the anxiety part of my brain, not the part that lives in the real world.
And I take a step back, and I go somewhere private, and I talk through the false logic to point out the flaw. Often, in front of the bathroom mirror; looking myself in the eye seems to distract me out of obsessive hysteria.
For example (note again, UNDERSTANDING ANXIETY DISORDER HELPS HERE):
“I texted Janet that I was upset, and she didn’t text me back, and it’s been like an hour, and I know she was using the phone earlier, she must be ignoring me!”
“Ok, so what specifically am I feeling right now, and why?” (I always start with this)
“Well, I’m upset! I thought we were friends and friends are supposed to care! So, I guess I’m mad at Janet too! But like, idk at the same time I’m mad at myself for being like this! No wonder she hates me!”
“Okay so I’m in a rough place and I reached out and she didn’t answer right away, and I’m feeling rejected, and I’m also frustrated with myself because I’m feeling hurt over it. Has Janet TOLD me she hates me?”
“Well, no, but maybe she doesn’t care enough, or she thinks I’m needy!”
“That doesn’t make sense, I know Janet well, we had a great time yesterday, and she’s a nice person. She’d tell me if I was doing something that annoyed her. Could there be other reasons she didn’t respond?”
“I mean…I guess…her phone could have died…or she forgot to unmute it….or maybe she was driving, or she saw it and meant to respond and got distracted….”
“Okay, so which is more likely: that my friend of 5 years secretly hates me and has been hiding it all this time even though that would be a really mean thing to do and she’s not mean? Or literally any one of those things, say, her battery died because she uses her phone so much?”
“I guess…the battery thing…”
“So it’s way more likely than not that she DOESN’T hate me. Now, I know a few facts. I know I have anxiety. I know that anxiety’s symptoms include going into panic mode over minor setbacks, and also having trouble understanding social relationships and feeling insecure in them. And I know when *I* get anxious I start secondguessing all my friendships and getting really selfcritical and thinking nobody likes me. Doesn’t that sound a lot like this? So really, if you think about it, thinking their friends hate them is exactly the sort of textbook symptom you’d expect to see in someone who has an anxiety disorder, right? And the whole thing about anxiety is it’s my brain misinterpreting things and jumping to irrational conclusions because anxiety likes to think everything is a catastrophe. So if this is almost definitely my brain being anxious, then it’s not based on my actual real relationship, and Janet doesn’t really hate me.”
Usually by then I’ve either A, convinced myself what I’m freaking out about is irrational, or B, so thoroughly distracted myself by my self-dialogue that the overemotional moment has passed and I can think more clearly. And at this point, it’s become so habitual and easy to recognize my anxiety through practice that it usually winds up being “ooh, Janet didn’t respond, she must hate–shut the fuck up anxiety no one likes you.”
What I find really helps wrap it up is by thinking of one productive step I can take to deal with the situation. Sometimes that’s making an immediate plan, like “I’m going to wash my face, pour an iced tea, and go watch that show I wanted to see.” Sometimes that’s “ok so tomorrow when I see Janet I’ll just tell her that I tend to really secondguess myself sometimes, and if I ever do something to genuinely piss her off, could she make sure to tell me? That way if I get like this in the future I can trust that Janet isn’t mad at me, because if she was, she’d have said so.”
I’ve been doing this for years and my anxiety, while still present, isn’t medicated and hasn’t severely fucked me up in ages, because I understand what it looks like and I make a conscious effort to strip it of its power over me. I promise you, that’s a way more productive use of time and emotion, and you’ll get way more benefit out of it than you’ll get out of checking your phone 18 times an hour in panic because nobody’s answered you yet. And as a bonus, it’s not forcing your friends to play caregiver to your negative symptoms, which is unfair to them.
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