Living with someone with anxiety

Breathe Magazine | February 2020

How can someone else having anxiety impact your own mental health? 

The trouble is, because we’re all programmed to survive rather than to be happy, we’re likely to spend a lot of our time in the safety-checking ‘anxious’ part of ourselves, rather than the ‘calm and alive’ state we’re all happiest in. This anxious part automatically identifies, even imagines, endless flaws, problems and slights. To worry is therefore automatic, whilst calming ourselves takes practice and is learned as we grow up. And for many of us, healthy soothing from our original caregivers wasn’t as present as it could have been. 

If you therefore couple your own inbuilt tendency to worry with living with someone with anxiety, this simply gives you much more to worry about. You’ll not only have to process the problems your own brain intrusively produces, but those of another person too. Fear is meant to be infectious. It’s also often accompanied by anger, probably the most difficult emotion to share your life with. Even if you’ve become pretty adept at managing your own anxious and angry thoughts, it’s psychologically tiring to try to do that for another person over long periods of time. This can particularly be the case living with adolescents, for example, who often have lots of worries and anger, but with a limited inbuilt ability to helpfully soothe themselves.  

Can this happen even if you are ordinarily mentally ‘healthy’? 

Even if you’re usually able to manage our own anxiety well, you’re inevitably going to be affected by someone else’s because you’re programmed to take fear and anger seriously. If you care about the person, you’re also going to be porous to their distress. Moreover, it’s easier for you to put your own worries into context because you know the people and situations involved. You might be more inclined to fall in with someone else’s catastrophizing thoughts when these factors are unknown to you.  

What techniques can be used to keep your own thoughts separate from those of the person who has anxiety? 

There are a number of helpful techniques you can use to maintain your own sense of calm in the face of someone else’s anxiety. One of the key ways is to really get to know your own anxious thought processes and how you soothe them. As different as we all are, everyone’s anxious thinking sounds similar. It catastrophises, makes problems both permanent and pervasive and creates a victim/perpetrator dynamic. Once you know your own anxious ways, you can recognise the other person’s anxiety distorting their perception of what’s happening. You’re then more likely to do the most helpful thing, which is to keep calm yourself. Anxiety focuses on the wave and not the sea, but when you’re calm, you maintain empathy for everyone involved, hold an expansive, balanced view of events and can therefore suggest the most helpful response.

In terms of keeping yourself calm, practising mindfulness daily is a really helpful way to keep focused on your own present moment experience, particularly what’s happening inside your body. Rather than just reacting to the other person’s anxiety, you can ‘drop inside’, notice your own anxiety is being triggered and try to keep calm as you respond.  

Fundamentally though, unless it’s a child, it’s important to know you’re not responsible for managing another person’s emotional state on an ongoing basis. It’s not even possible to do that. Of course you can model for another how to helpfully soothe anxiety through both your language and your behaviour. Over time, they might hopefully internalise what they see and hear. Try to remember though, aside from any dependent children, only your psychological well-being is your responsibility. 

As a way of maintaining a psychological boundary between you and another person, you can use the technique of imagining winding a window up between the two of you. Through this window you can still clearly see and hear them and provide the empathy and validation they need, but you’re also clear they’re not you and you don’t need to take their fear and anger on as your own. It might also be in your best interests psychologically to spend less time around someone who is highly anxious and making no attempt to manage it themselves.

What measures can you take to look after your own mental health when someone you love with has anxiety? Particularly someone who might effect decision making (ie. your partner and/or co-parent of your child)? 

As well as some of the specifics above, if you’re living with someone with anxiety, you need to be really familiar with your own psychological ‘toolbox’ keeping you in the ‘calm and alive’ state. This includes all the rewarding and/or relaxing ways of thinking and feeling and the body-based activities and other behaviours that are your ‘go to’ as anxious thoughts intrude. In this calm and alive place, you’ll more easily distinguish between helpfully protective anxious thoughts and those that have crossed the line into unhelpful and destructive. You can then provide someone with constructive suggestions, rather than buying in to the distortions of unhelpful anxiety. One of these constructive suggestions might of course be that someone actually seeks professional help for their anxiety.