If you often find yourself worrying about your friendships, even close ones, it could be a sign of friendship anxiety. Friendship anxiety means feeling insecure with your friends so that it impacts on your self esteem, wellbeing and relationships. It is different to social anxiety which can make you anxious in social situations due to thinking everyone is looking at you. You can actually be quite socially confident if you have friendship anxiety, but get triggered often by specific situations which makes you worry whether your friends like you. This blog will explore the 7 main signs of friendship anxiety tell you how to overcome it.
In the blog:
7 Signs Of Friendship Anxiety
You get anxious if you don't hear from them
If you send a friend a message and then you get radio silence, your mind goes into overdrive. Why aren’t they replying? Are they mad at me? Did I say something last time I saw them? Has my text offended them? A few days later you get a lovely message to say sorry they’ve not replied but they’d been swamped at work. It hadn’t occured to you that there might be another explanation but you feel relieved. Till next time. You might be very good at replying to your friends and always keep on top of messages. So assume the worst if you don’t hear back from people. If you notice your thoughts jumping to conclusions, pause and try to think of other explanations.
You feel like you cant't say no or you might lose them.
Perhaps you’re a busy person and have different groups of friends so find it hard to keep up with everyone. Or some days you’re just feeling tired and don’t want to go out. But the thought of saying no and letting friends down fills you with dread. You worry you’re friends will be mad at you for not showing up or they might start to leave you out. So you spread yourself thinly which causes more stress or if you can’t go to something it sets of anxiety. Regularly not turning up to invitations can eventually erode a friendship but most friendships are strong enough to not have to attend everything. Good friends understand and won’t want us to do anything that we don’t want to do.
You get jealous of their other friends
If you see your friend out with other friends on social media or they’re not around because they’re busy with others you feel pangs of jealousy. You wonder if you friend likes you after all or has more fun with others. Maybe this sends you spiralling into self critical anxious thoughts? It can be helpful to remind yourself that most people have a wide social circle. Perhaps you do to? If not that could just be your style of friendship and it doesn’t mirror your friends. Often people are able to feel close to more than one person. If you often feel like this try to occupy yourself with things you enjoy, or extend your own friendships, so that your social life doesn’t resolve round one person.
You feel left out by your friends easily.
If you ever find out that your friends have been together without you, you feel deeply hurt and jump to conclusions. You’ll assume plans were intentionally made without you to hurt you Maybe this causes more problems because you’ll fall out with your friends or push them away. Being in a group of friends can be complicated and sometimes people arrange things without including everyone or events just happen spontaneuasly. Obviously if this is something that happens more often than not then it could be a sign you friends are treating your badly. But try to get perspective and remind yourself of all the evidence that your friends care and generate healthier explanations.
You feel let down by your friends alot
When you friends don’t show up for you it feels personal. Perhaps they’ve dropped out of something last minute or turned down an invitation. Each time this happens you feel hurt that they don’t care or aren’t a good friend. This causes more problems as you accuse your friend of not caring or you might push them away. However, it might be that your friend does show up for you to plenty, but it easy to overlook it. Or perhaps they’re just a bit unreliable and its nothing to do with you.
You think you don't have enough friends
Everytime you log onto instagram or even TV shows you feel like you’re the onle one without the perfect group of friends. So you overthink it, feel like there’s something wrong with you or try to force friendship groups that aren’t there. It can seem like we’re meant to have a gang but in reality thats only one friendship style. Maybe groups don’t suit you and you prefer one to one? Let go of the pressure and recognise what suits you
You can't stop overthink your friendships.
Regularly overthinking situations with friendship is a good sign you experience friendship anxiety. Perhaps a situation snowballs into anxious, self critical thoughts which are hard to escapre from. Predicting you’ll have no friends or going over what you might have said in the past that could have caused your friends to be mad at you. The more you think about it the worse you feel and it affects your sleep and work. Its very common to overthink when we are anxious about something because humans have overactive minds that are good at imagining. But our thoughts are facts and it can be helpful to notice your thoughts and try exercises to bring you back into the present moment.
What causes friendship anxiety?
Although its easy to feel bad about yourself for struggling with friendships, the truth is its very common and there’s a good reason for that. We may think of ourselves as modern humans with our smart phones and netflix accounts but so much of how we feel, included friendship anxiety, is due to parts of the brain we have had since stone age times.
Back then, our fight and flight systems protected us against predators by sending signals to the body and brain that we weren’t safe. But as we depended on other people for food and shelter, our fight and flight systems also tried to protect us from rejected by “our tribe”. Therefore we have evolved with a part of the brain that is always on the look out for whether we are safe in our group.
If we’ve had difficult experiences in childhood which meant we’ve not always felt safe with other than this part of our mind will be overactive. For example, having parents that did not meet our needs or being bullied at school. This can cause low self esteem which increases our risk of friendships anxiety
How to overcome friendship anxiety?
The good news is that there are plenty of proven tools you can implement straight away to reduce friendship anxiety and start feeling more secure with your friends. Cognitive Behaviour Tools help you to generate different ways of thinking and mindfulness can retrain you brain to reduce overthinking. Finding ways to increase your self esteem and also learn self compassion will help you worry less about rejection. Read my blog “7 ways to shake of friendship anxiety” to find out more.
Stop Overthinking Friendships - FREE guide
About me: My name is Rebecca Stambridge and I am a Compassion Focussed Therapist and mindfulness teacher specialising in low esteem, stress and anxiety. I run courses both online and face to face as well as a 1-1 private therapy practice. Use this form to let me know you’re interested in working with me.
