This post is all about living with someone with anxiety.
You’re dealing with a lot and there’s no easy way to say that. As much as you may love the person you live with, living with someone with anxiety can be overwhelming and scary. When you don’t have any experience with mental illness, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
More often than not, you ask questions and your loved ones answer them. But, that still isn’t the same as experiencing firsthand. And, if no one else has said it, you are a good friend, partner, or roommate and you’re doing the right thing by seeking out support and resources on anxiety.
So, let’s dive into ways you can help someone with anxiety while also helping yourself not burnout from dealing with someone who deals with anxiety.
This post is all about living with someone with anxiety.
LIVING WITH SOMEONE WITH ANXIETY:
1. Educate Yourself
The first step is to learn. Get as much information as you can find and absorb it. Find books, search for documentaries, or use google to find readily-available sites with endless amounts of information. You’re already doing a lot, and that should never be diminished.
But, that doesn’t mean you can’t continue learning about the experience of your friend, family member, or partner. In fact, the more you come across information about anxiety, the more you cement what you already know and develop questions about the stuff you don’t.
2. Open Communication
It’s tough. Open communication can feel impossible when someone has anxiety because they might not even be able express themselves without experiencing anxiety. Therefore, you feel like you’re doing all the work and they’re doing none of it.
This can feel like it describes 99% of your interactions with someone who has anxiety. That’s frustrating, normal, and a good reminder to take care of yourself as much as you want to take care of others.
Open communication starts with listening to their rants, stressors, and rambling. Make your conversations a judgment-free zone because that will encourage them to continue talking to you. The more you make them feel comfortable and accepted for being open and honest with you, the more it will happen. This simple act is powerful.
Pair it with validation of their feelings (“That makes sense.” “You have every right to feel that way.” “I’m sorry. That sucks.”) and you’ve developed the type of environment that makes them want to continue sharing their feelings.
3. Be Patient
When you’re interacting with someone who has anxiety, they’ve been dealing with it for as long as they can remember. Everyone’s mental healthy journey is different, so ask them about theirs before you make assumptions. However, it’s safe to assume they believe they anxiety keeps them safe to an extent.
So, it’s going to be a struggle for them to distance themselves from their anxiety. As much as anxiety causes a lot of unnecessary pain and stress, it also happens to be right at least some of the time.
When it turns out to be wrong, anxiety still skews our perspectives into thinking that it’s right enough of the time to be useful. Therefore, we struggle in letting it go. It’s hard to understand that something can feel safe and still be harmful at the same time.
So, go slow and have patience when you’re living with someone with anxiety.
4. Practice Active Listening
If someone is telling a story and you look away, their anxiety will tell them you aren’t interested or they’ve offended you. Active listening helps to prevent that by reminding you to not only stay present in the conversation but convey that presence to the other person in that conversation.
Active listening looks like verbal responses (“Okay,” “Mhm,” “Right.”). It also looks like nodding, maintaining eye contact, and avoiding distractions. If you struggle to maintain eye contact because you’re neurodivergent or introverted, that’s totally fine.
There are lots of other active listening techniques you can use to make it clear you care and you’re listening to the other person.
If all else fails and you’re struggling to stay in the conversation, be up front with the other person. The moment you’re honest with someone who has anxiety, you’ve told them exactly what’s going on in the conversation and why you can’t be present right now.
Anxiety is most effective when there are gaps in human interaction. Anytime someone can guess why you did what you did, their anxiety will tell them it’s their fault in some way or another. Active listening helps to prevent those gaps from forming.
5. Validate Their Feelings
Let them know their feelings are valid. Just the simple idea that someone’s feelings are valid, normal, and reasonable can do wonders for someone who has anxiety.
When someone has dealt with anxiety all their life, they’re used to be called dramatic and their feelings are often invalidated.
Plus, they often learn they’re not supposed to trust their true feelings. So, they struggle to know when their feelings are the result of anxiety instead of actual being their authentic feelings.
When they talk through these struggles with you, you can make them feel safe and understood by validating them when living with someone with anxiety.
6. Encourage Professional Help
You can love the person with anxiety, you can help them find resources, and you can do your own research to better understand their needs. But, ultimately, you can’t hold all the responsibility for their mental health when living with someone with anxiety.
Not only is that not fair to you, but it’s not fair to the person with anxiety. Instead, you can continue the strong efforts you’re already doing while also letting them know that it’s understandable and even encouraged to reach out for professional help.
As much as they might be able to cope or maybe they’ve gotten used to their symptoms, they deserve to feel their best and the way to do that might be attending a therapy session.
7. Learn Their Triggers
While you can’t possibly know or avoid all of their triggers, you can learn which triggers are particularly easy to avoid and which ones are most damaging for them. These triggers are often related to how they grew up, whether that’s how they were treated in school or in the home. So, a great place to start is asking them.
Unfortunately, there’s always the chance you’ll find out their trigger by accidentally triggering them. In this case, you might notice they shut down, lash out, or experience a panic attack.
As a general rule of thumb, when their behavior changes dramatically in a short period of time, it’s a good idea to check in. Ask what they’re feeling, if they’re getting increasingly anxious, and if you might have triggered them unintentionally.
Whether you learn about their triggers through trial and error or by asking them, you’re taking a step in the right direction so long as you attempt to avoid that trigger in the future.
8. Practice Breathing Techniques
Breathing is one of the useful, accessible tools you can use to help when living with someone with anxiety. When our minds are spiraling with hundreds of thoughts, grounding ourselves in the moment is incredibly helpful.
This can look like holding a piece of ice, identifying five different colors around you, or practicing box breathing. Box breathing refers to the practice of breathing in slowly, holding for a few seconds, releasing slowly, and holding before you breathe in again.
The goal is to focus on a physical sensation (breathing) instead of focusing on all of the thoughts in your mind. This is particularly useful when the thoughts are uncontrollable and leading to physical symptoms of shallow breaths, tapping their foot, or other nervous habits.
9. Plan Relaxation Activities
While you can’t always take away someone’s pain, anxiety, or stress, you can plan activities that help them do that naturally. The benefit of planning activities is that you can keep them accountable.
When you suggest calming activities like taking walks, reading, or doing yoga, you’re giving them a healthy coping mechanism while also making them feel safe. Anxiety has the tendency to make people feel alone and isolated.
When someone’s thoughts spiral, they can feel like their worries are theirs alone, no one else shares them, and no one else can help them. So, go for it and plan a relaxing activity when you’re living with someone with anxiety.
10. Help with Routine
When it comes to establishing a routine, it can be difficult to find ways of helping someone from the outside. You are not that person and, therefore, you can’t know exactly what they need or want to achieve on a daily basis.
If you ask too many questions or are too directive, they might feel infantilized, which can be incredibly frustrating to experience as someone with a mental illness. So, the best way to help them is to treat them like a person who may need extra support or structure.
It could be as simple as asking them if they have a routine or if they’d find one useful. For some people with anxiety, they may never have stopped to think about the fact that they don’t have a routine.
11. Be Flexible
Anxiety is anything but flexible and it makes people think they need to prepare for every possible, horrible outcome. Most of the time, your anxiety does not prepare you for the real outcome and, if it does, it’s not worth the anxiety that got you to the outcome.
Having said that, anxiety acts up in strange ways and it might cause someone to want a change in plans last-minute. Maybe they got anxious about a project or assignment that wasn’t giving them any stress an hour ago, so now they don’t want to go out to eat.
It’s frustrating to accept last-minute changes, especially because you are a person with your own needs. But, if you’re able to adapt and understand when anxiety changes the plans, you can be the reason that person feels safe, supported, and less anxious.
12. Offer Reassurance
Tell them you’re there for them and show them. Offer to help them out with tasks that might be giving them added anxiety.
Let them know (meaning say it out loud because their anxiety will not let them believe it otherwise) that their anxiety doesn’t define them and you love them as a person aside from their anxiety. This is a great place to remind yourself of the “why.”
Ask yourself why you’re bothering to do the research and find tools to help someone with their anxiety. Loving someone with anxiety, whether they’re a friend, family member, or partner, is a lot of work and it can be frustrating and hurtful.
The key is to remember why they’re worth the work and love outside of their anxiety.
13. Avoid Pushing
As tempting as it is to force someone into a new experience you think they’ll love or you want to experience with them, you have to remember that you two experience life differently. You experience it without the lens of anxiety affecting every perception.
While you might have an inner critic, you probably don’t have a voice simultaneously telling you everything will go wrong while also telling you that you can’t believe anything you hear, see, or think.
Keep this in mind when you want to push someone out of their comfort zone. Maybe it’s not rational to avoid going to the edge of a cliff or going on a spontaneous roadtrip over the weekend, but it is what makes the person feel safe.
Take small steps with them and respect their needs.
14. Set Boundaries
Take care of yourself. You deserve as much time and energy as the person with anxiety you love. So, set boundaries. You can support them while caring for your wellbeing. Let them know that you have needs and communicate those needs to them regardless of the anxiety it causes.
The caveat to this is that you have to be clear that you’re not setting boundaries to hurt them or distance yourself. You’re doing it for your own well-being and support home in lots of other ways.
If you’re struggling to accept that you need to take care of yourself too, then remember you can’t help someone else until you help yourself first. You can get burnt out and resentful, which will ultimately hurt your relationship with the person you love who has anxiety.
15. Celebrate Progress
Celebrate the wins because there are always wins. Whether they managed to get out of bed or they just performed at a major concert venue, celebrate their wins. Let them know they deserve to celebrate those wins and that you celebrate them.
You both deserve to celebrate because you both put so much work into the relationship and helping them overcome their anxiety. It’s way too easy to get stuck on all the limitations, stress, and arguments. So, when you get the chance to celebrate, don’t take it lightly.
Have fun together and enjoy the moment.
16. Practice Patience
Every day comes with different feelings, triggers, and anxieties. They might wake up from a horrible dream that sets the tone for the rest of their day. They don’t choose to be anxious and they never want it to hurt the people around them.
But, that intention isn’t always clear when they’re feeling too anxious to think about how it affects the world around them. Remember they still love you even when they don’t make it clear.
17. Show Unconditional Love
As hard as it is, you can’t love them without understanding that their mental illness is a huge part of who they are. People shouldn’t be defined by their mental illnesses, but it’s important to consider the way they are affected by mental illness.
Take care of yourself just as much as you take care of others. Having said that, the best way to help someone with anxiety is to show them love no matter how their mental illness presents on a given day.
