how anxiety ruins relationships?

Before diving into how anxiety can impact or ruin relationships, it is important to determine the anxiety symptoms to understand better how anxiety manifests inside the brain.  According to the DSM V, Generalized Anxiety Disorder occurs when someone experiences:

1) Excessive worry occurring more often than not for at least six months.

2) This excessive worry occurs in several settings (i.e., School, home, work).

3) It is hard to control this worry.

4) A person is also experiencing at least three (or more) of the following: restlessness, being easily fatigued or drained, having trouble concentrating or focusing, irritability, tense muscles, and issues related to sleep (insomnia, restless sleep, waking up in the middle of the night).

5) This excessive worry, and those other symptoms listed above, cause impairment/difficulty in different areas of life and functioning (American Psychological Association, 2013).

When discussing different areas of life that anxiety might impact, this diagnosis specifically lists “social” as one of the areas.  This means that anxiety does, in fact, have a bit of a habit of impacting relationships!  One of the features not outlined in the DSM but that a lot of folks with anxiety experience is cognitive distortions or distorted thinking.

Cognitive distortions refer to thought patterns that, oftentimes, skew reality and cause further issues in people’s lives.  Some of the more well-known distortions are things like “black and white thinking,” “jumping to conclusions,” “catastrophizing,” and “negative mental filtering” (ignoring positives to focus only on the negatives).  Still, there are so many others that one might experience when struggling with anxiety and anxiety-related symptoms.  A quick internet search can yield some pretty comprehensive lists of all the different ways that mental health symptoms can distort thinking.

So, how does this affect relationships?  Sometimes, these thought patterns and symptoms can lead people to inaccurate conclusions about their loved ones and the role that those different people play in their lives.  For example, saying someone’s anxiety makes them feel like they are a “burden” to others.  This person might stop reaching out or talking to people altogether.  Another example could revolve around someone experiencing symptoms of fatigue that are so intense that they lose all ability to engage in relationships.  Yet another example could be a person experiencing severe anxiety symptoms and negative thought patterns in different social situations, causing them to avoid social interactions altogether.

That leads me to my final point: what can be done?  One suggestion is to consider whether or not therapy might be a good fit.  Sometimes, having a trained professional who is a third party and someone who will provide honest and compassionate feedback can help people sort through how anxiety impacts their relationships.  The other suggestion I would have would be for someone experiencing negative effects on their relationships due to anxiety to begin practicing mindfulness. In particular, focusing on cognitive distortions and distorted thinking patterns and increasing awareness of these might be crucial to solving issues that might be coming up within one’s relationships. Asking for feedback from loved ones, gathering evidence that might contradict these perceptions, and even openly communicating fears around relationships could be a good start to repair some of the damage that anxiety might have on one’s relationships.