Relationship anxiety is a serious condition and it needs to be taken that way. It is something that influences your emotional and mental health as well as your love life. Like all anxiety, it is making your life more difficult and it is preventing you from being happy.
Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that there doesn’t exist a way out from it. A path of healing is not an easy one but a full recovery can be achieved, with the help of these 5 steps.
1. Be honest about your fears
First and foremost, you need to be completely honest about your relationship anxiety to yourself and to your partner. Accept that you have a problem which can’t be resolved overnight and that it is nothing to be ashamed of.
Repressing your emotions or hiding them from your significant other won’t get you anywhere. That is exactly why both of you need to be brave enough to face this anxiety and to have the courage to chase it away.
I know you’re convinced that you’d chase away any potential boyfriend if you told them about your condition right away. This doesn’t mean that you are obligated to go around spilling your guts to everyone you encounter but when you do find someone you can imagine yourself next to, he deserves to know what you’re fighting against because that is the only way he can help you and the only way to avoid unnecessary drama in your relationship.
2. Work on your overthinking
The main source of your relationship anxiety is overthinking. You constantly analyze your partner’s behavior, you are always imagining worst case scenarios and you think about what the future might bring you. Instead of enjoying the moment, you’re overwhelmed with everything that might go wrong and all the bad things that might happen.
Of course, this is something you can’t control and it would be foolish for someone to tell you to stop with your overthinking. You probably try hard to chase these negative thoughts away but without any success.
However, all of this doesn’t mean that you’re sentenced to spend the rest of your life as an overthinker. There are some proven techniques which can help you with your problem, such as deep breathing or meditation, and this is what you should focus on.
3. Choose a partner who is worthy of your trust
Even though relationship anxiety usually comes from your mind, the truth is that there are situations in which it is completely reasonable and justifiable. It is completely natural for you to feel stressed out and anxious next to someone who has already violated your trust and it is normal for you to live in fear of losing a guy who is known as a serial cheater or a fuckboy.
This is exactly why you should try hard to find a partner who is worthy of your trust. Of course, nobody can guarantee you that a certain type of man will never break your heart but it is one thing if you’re dealing with a nice guy who doesn’t have a history of breaking other girls’ hearts and it is something completely different if you’re still involved with a guy who screwed you over more than once in the past.
4. Get rid of emotional baggage
Most of our relationship fears are greatly connected to our past and to abandonment traumas we carry. If one guy from your past treated you poorly, if you’ve been cheated on or abused, you probably expect the same things to keep happening in all of your relationships.
Well, this is where you have to take control over yourself and do your best to chase the past away. No matter what you might think, I assure you that not everyone is like your ex and it’s about time you stop allowing him to still have an impact on you.
Everything that went on before now is in the past and you can’t change that. However, what you can do is finally get rid of all the emotional baggage that’s been weighing you down and causing your anxiety.
5. Accept that you can’t be in control all the time
It sounds absurd to tell an anxious girl to calm down and go with the flow but this is exactly what you need to force yourself to do from time to time. If you want to get over your relationship anxiety, you need to understand that you can’t be in control all the time.
You can’t control life’s circumstances and you can’t control everyone around you. The only one you can have control over is yourself and it’s about time you retake it.