If you feel anxious with your friends and often wonder what they think of you, you may also spend time wondering why. Maybe you worry there is something wrong with you and whether there is such a thing as friendship anxiety? Although not an official medical term “friendship anxiety” is being increasingly used a way to describe people who regularly worry what their friends think of them. There are very good reasons why people do this and as a therapist specialising in self esteem and friendships, I can confirm that friendship anxiety is a thing and its a common one!
When Friendship Anxiety Is A Thing: 6 common signs
After helping many clients who feel anxious around friends, I can share below what I see to be the most common signs of friendship anxiety. You may experience all of them or some and not others.
You get anxious if you don't hear from your friends.
You send a friend a text and it takes a few days to reply but in that space your mind goes into overdrive. Are they mad at me? What did I say last time? Does my friend like me anymore? It doesn’t occur to you that they might be busy and the mental assumptions cause a great deal of anxiety. You overthink it, struggle to be present in your life and find it hard to sleep.
You get jealous of their other friends
Your friend is very important to you but you often wonder whether you are important to them? They seem to be close to other people as well as you and this often makes you feel insecure. You find yourself reflecting on your interactions alot. Do I make them laugh enough? Do they like my company? Or do they prefer their other friends? Such thoughts can make you feel really anxious and down on yourself but you don’t want to appear needy so keep it to yourself.
You feel you cannot say no to your friends or you might lose them.
If a friend invites you out or asks you to for a favour, most of the time you may want to say yes anyway. But if there are times you want to say no but feel you don’t have a choice it could be because of friendship anxiety. For example, worrying other friends will get closer without you or that your friend will be mad. These thoughts may cause anxiety so you say yes as a way of getting rid of those feelings but end up doing things you don’t want to do. Sometimes a friend may be pushy and thats why you feel you can’t say no. But if you recognise that the assumptions are coming from you, it would help to reframe those thoughts and test the assumptions. Good friends will not feel let down.
You worry whether you have enough friends
Does it feel like everyone else has the perfect gang of besties except you? Or maybe everyone elses social life seems so busy. Particularly in the age of social media its very easy for us to compare ourselves to others and think we should have more friends. The more we compare the more self critical we can be which either makes us feel low or pushes us to makes friends with people that might not be right for us. Social media is rarely an accurate display of someone else’s life. But its also human nature to compare ourselves to others and think that we need to have lots of friends to feel good enough. But some people are more introverted and thrive on smaller groups of good friends. Maybe you do to? Quantity does not always mean quality.
You struggle to be yourself with your friends.
Maybe you feel you have to be a certain way to impress your friends. So try to be happy and funny even if you are feeling low. Or not tell you friends if you are struggling. Perhaps you pretend to like certain things that you don’t or hide things about yourself if you worry they will reject you. Its natural to feel this way if you don’t feel good about yourself and therefore assume you will be rejected. But not being yourself is draining, can lead to inauthentic connections and erodes self esteem.
You often feel let down by your friends and think they don't care about you
If you invite friends or a good friend to something thats important to you but they cancel or turn ir down, you feel rejected easily and take it very personally. Perhaps you assume its because they do not care about you and you tell yourself that a good friend would not do that. Maybe you withdraw which causes more problems with your friend.
What causes friendship anxiety and why it is so common
There are many good reasons why people find it hard to feel secure with friends and it can help to understand the feelings in the context of evolutionary human behaviour.
For example, alot of what humans do in modern life is actually linked to what made us safe in stone age times. So for example, your body goes into fight and flight whenever it does not feel safe. But how we relate to other people is also strongly linked because we needed to be safe and accepted by a tribe. If we were rejected by our fellow stone age clan then we would be dinner for a sabre tooth tiger. This means we are often on the look out for what poeple think and, to save time, our mind will jump to negative assumptions because thats the safest behaviour. When this happens we lose perspective and only see what we think backs up our suspicions but most of the time these are just feelings and assumptions not facts. We cannot help this, its just the way our brains are wired.
However, certain experiences can make some people more prone to feeling unsafe in groups than others. For example, if you have had experiences in childhood where you did not feel safe or were rejected then you are more likely to assume that will happen again. This can include the way our parents treated us but also our relationships with siblings or how we fitted in at school.
And then when you combine our evolved brain and childhood experiences with social media its not wonder friendship anxiety is such a big thing. These days we know so much more about what other people are doing that it feeds our anxiety. You’ve not heard from your friend but she posts that she has had a great night out with someone else? Or the constant posts about other people with their big gang of seemingly perfect friends can spiral us into negative comparisons and self criticism. You can read more about the causes of frienship anxiety here.
How to overcome friendship anxiety and feel more secure with your friends.
The good news is that there are plenty of proven tools you can implement straight away. As a qualified therapist and mindful self compassion teacher, here are the my most effective tools to feel more secure in your friendships.
Practice Mindfulness
When we struggle with friendship anxiety we can feel consumed with overthinking situations. The stories our minds are telling us feel very real and trigger anxious feelings. This can impact on our concentration and stop us being present in the rest of our lives. Unfortunately the more we try to push those thoughts away the stronger they can feel. Learning mindfulness is a very useful skill to help you recognise that “A thought it just a thought” and give space to the overthinking. We can also stop thoughts from spiralling so that they have less affect how we feel.
If you are very motivated to reduce friendship anxiety then setting up a regular meditation practice can be very helpful. But we can practice mindfulness by being more aware of our senses as we go about daily life. Each time we are doing this we are building a “mindful muscle” that helps us have more control over our thinking. You can read more about how mindfulness can help anxiety here.
Reframe what is happening by weighing up evidence
As explained above, often when we are feeling anxious about our friends its often because we are jumping to conclusions. This is just what the mind does and we cannot help it. We may feel very rejected and uncared for if a friend cancels, but this does not mean that our friend has. It can be helpful to ask yourself “Is this a fact or a feeling” and then weigh up evidence. For example, is your friend cancels maybe its genuine reasons? Can you look for signs that demonstate she does care and attends most of what you invite them too? Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is an effective way to challenge thoughts which you can access from a therapist or help yourself.
Learn to sooth yourself and reduce anxiety
Experiencing friendship anxiety often means our fight and flight system having uncomfortable feelings in the body. This includes shallow breathing, tight muscles, a knot in the stomach. These physical symptoms effect our mind so we may have racing, anxious thoughts and overthink. Its very useful to calm the body in order to calm the mind so tuning into what you are feeling and inviting the muscles to relax will help. Also learning breathing exercises will calm down the fight and flight response.
Learn to accept yourself and increase self esteem.
Underneath many peoples friendship anxiety is low self esteem. If we have a low opinion of ourselves we will be more likely to assume that friends will leave or judge us. Low self esteem often has a seeds in early childhood relationships so if we felt rejected by our parents, we would blame ourselves and feel unloveable. If so, we are likely to project those feelings ont other adults around us. There are many ways we can start to build self esteem and you can read more about that here.
"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.
