Warning: It can deteriorate or even kill you mentally & emotionally (Relationship anxiety)

RELATIONSHIP ANXIETY, this term may sound normal but it isn’t just about disappointments in relationships! It’s beyond this level, it’s about how your feelings impact your mind, it’s about our mental state and holds the power to grab a control over us emotionally and mentally. This anxiety doesn’t have any specific reason, too much loving and possessiveness in close-knit relationships can also develop it as well as society, past betrayals and high insecurities also result by arising it’s level.

What is Relationship Anxiety?

Having a close relationship, being insecure about it, questioning yourself, questioning other person’s feelings, questioning the relationship, exaggerated doubting, overthinking, ” Am I loved the same way I do?”, “What if I’m betrayed?”, “Will the relationship last forever?”, “I need to prove my love superior”, for all such cases, these constant worries, there is a combined name, that is, Relationship Anxiety.

What does Relationship Anxiety look like?

It has some of the very common symptoms which can be easily understood from all of us. Many of us have experienced the urge to restart same conversation on old topics again and again just because of constantly thinking what we said or where we looked wrong. In such conditions, people develop the misconception that, they have to be always right otherwise others will abandon them.

One more common sign of the anxiety is that if you don’t receive the reply of people to your texts or calls right away, you start assuming and overthinking, your mind starts creating imaginary stories that the second person is not interested in conversation anymore thus ignoring you, while most of the times such thoughts are nothing more than just assumptions.

Next sign is very normal nowadays, when people are suffering from relationship anxiety, they immediately try making deep connections in every new relationship and jump 100 percent into the relation by neglecting other important parts of daily life. Their fear of being abandoned or insecurities force them to do the same. Such people suffer a constant nagging fear that their partners are going to get bored of them someday and thus they be betrayed and left alone that they cannot shake or handle.

This anxiety controls the way you think while meeting a new person. You entire focus is centered around the questions like, “What are they thinking about me?”, “Are they liking me?”, “Will he/she choose me?”, “What if they misjudge and misunderstand us?” Aren’t such questions quite relatable even though we know that these questions are just the clouds of our assumptions?

Once you are fallen into the pit of relationships anxiety, you always feel like being trapped or overwhelmed in the relation all time. Due to this, many teenagers and adults tend to date multiple partners at the same time because they want to be loved, pampered and supported but run away from commitments, attachments or expectations.

How is Relationship Anxiety a threat?

If you are also the one experiencing relationship anxiety then, it isn’t just about feeling low but it also degrades your immunity, spontaneously make you depressed and mentally ill. This makes you feel like staying in the dusk while it’s actually dawn for others and little by little, you find yourself stuck into a big empty room filled with darkness.

A study was led by a team of researchers under Lisa Jaremka with Ohio State University College of Medicine. In the study, 85 couples who were married for avg. of about 12 years, were examined to analyze the level of anxiety that the participants had in context of close relationships, as well as the samples of their saliva and blood were also checked. While going through the results, they came through the fact and observation that the levels of cortisol, that is a hormone related with stress, were on an average 11 percent higher in body of the people having higher levels of attachment anxiety compared to those who were less anxious. Additionally, it was found that more anxious people were having 11 percent to 20 percent fewer T-cells, which help the body in fighting off disease.

“The thing that was surprising was the magnitude of the difference, especially in the immune cells that we saw,” told Jaremka. She further added that, “Some of the differences in the immune cell numbers, between the higher and the less high anxious attached people, were on the magnitude of what you’d see between obese and non-obese people.”
Such styles of attachments are believed to be derived from the way of caregiving that people experienced in their childhood, but the effects of those childhood memories extend towards and create impact over relationships in adulthood also.

A big reason behind such anxiety is that when we grow in a society or family where we witness lot’s of insecure and broken relationships, we feel emotionally alone or suffer the lack of a personal space while growing as a teenager we start behaving accordingly in adulthood too. We keep trying to protect ourselves from the negative sides of relationships that we saw in our past. We start projecting expectations from them that they will protect us from all fears and will help us escape the unwanted memories hence, we end up stepping into our ‘inner child fantasy stage’.

How can people suffering from this anxiety heal themselves?

Well, healing in this case isn’t about medicines and consuming lot’s of pills. But, one simple way to heal is having a ‘me-time’ and spending more time in selflove and connecting with ourselves. We need to explain our inner sensible child that neither everyone will stay with forever nor everyone will abandon or hurt us hence we have to be self sufficient firstly. We must learn to keep moving ahead by overcoming all the ups and downs. We need to stop running away from our fears instead we should stand erect to face and accept the reality, have a positive and practical approach for looking around and stop living in the word of assumptions. Once we start to genuinely respect ourselves, love ourselves, value ourselves, and change our perspective of looking at relationships slowly and slowly we will feel free, confident and peaceful in relationships thus finally we will heal!

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