How to Reduce Relationship Anxiety
Popular culture teaches us that relationships are for comfort and pleasure. Real life disagrees.
Most committed relationships are full of anxiety. As humans, we have a deep desire to form long-term relationships, but once we have established those relationships we have no idea how to make them places of comfort and pleasure. Instead, they become nests of anxiety.
1. Practice Somatic Kindness
When you feel anxiety, see if you can identify where you feel it in your body. The things we call emotions are just interpretations of physical sensations, usually located in our chest or abdomen. My anxiety usually feels like pain and tightness in my chest. By focusing on the physical sensation instead of the emotion, we turn our attention to what is most real in the moment.
Once you have identified what you feel in your body, practice directing a string of acceptance, kindness, and love to that uncomfortable sensation. This is a counter-instinctive practice because we learned early in childhood to distract, dissociate, or tune out uncomfortable sensations in the body. As adults, our capacity for feeling intense sensations is much greater than what it was when we were children, but we still distract and dissociate because that is what we are used to doing.
I use the mantra feel more, do less to describe the practice of opening my heart to uncomfortable sensations.
2. Learn to self-validate
Most relationship anxiety is a byproduct of validation-seeking behavior. Validation (the feeling that you’re good enough and it’s OK for you to be here) is a constant undercurrent in any relationship. As children, we all depended on others for validation. As adults, we have to learn how to feel good about ourselves without relying on the approval of others.
This shift from external to internal referencing is critical to the survival of any romantic relationship. Children are external referencers by nature — they aren’t capable of self-validation. Adults are not only capable of external validation, it’s the only kind of validation that actually works in adulthood.
I can remember times in my childhood when I my parents displayed approval of something I was doing, and it felt like molten sunshine pouring into my soul. That same feeling doesn’t come in adulthood, at least not from external sources. In order to really feel good about who we are as adults, we have to actually earn our own self-respect.
3. Make room for disagreement
Trying to get your partner to agree with you is one way of seeking external validation. It’s common for two people in a relationship to have different memories of the same event. If unkind feelings are involved, memories of past events will change to support the way you feel at the moment of remembering.
You make room for disagreement by allowing your partner to have their own memories, opinions, perceptions, and preferences. When those don’t match up with yours, it gives you an opportunity to practice self-validation and internal referencing.
4. Breathe Together
Intentional breathing is an easy way to calm the body and the soul. Breathing in sync with your partner gives you both the experience of feeling safe and being together at the same time, something that might not happen very often in a challenging relationship. You can use any number of apps or recordings to help time your inhalation and exhalation, or you can just listen to each other breathing and figure out a way to stay in sync.
Intentional breathing sends an “all clear” message to the brain that can counteract built-up sensations of anxiety, fear, uncertainty, and unsafety. These effects multiply when two people breathe together.
