How Do I Explain Anxiety to Family and Friends?: Tips from a Maryland Anxiety Therapist
Knowing how to explain anxiety can help your loved ones support you better.
It can be hard to explain anxiety to someone that has never personally experienced it. As a therapist specializing in anxiety treatment in Maryland, I see how challenging this can be for clients to explain and for their loved ones to understand.
Therapy can help us understand our own thoughts, feelings and behaviors more clearly. It can also help us to learn how to share that information with family, friends, partners and other people who care about us and probably want to know how they can best support us.
why Explaining Anxiety to loved ones feels so hard
Anxiety is not always visible to others.
Many times, anxiety isn’t something that is visible to other people. Crutches would immediately alert others that someone has an injury to their leg or foot. A loud cough tells everyone around us that we are managing a respiratory infection, allergy or some other upper airway problem. But most of the time, anxiety is invisible. There may be some outer signals, especially if anxiety is extremely high, but often times people with anxiety can look calm on the outside even when they are suffering on the inside.
There are also lots of misconceptions about what anxiety is and is not. People who love you may genuinely think you “just need to relax” or “stop overthinking so much”, like these ideas you haven’t thought of yet. Your loved ones might think anxiety is simply about being nervous, like someone might be right before a big test. They likely don’t have any idea how much anxiety can impact the way you think, body sensations, how you process information and your relationships.
Being able to understand your own anxiety is the first step to being able to help share that information with the people in your inner circle. If they are better able to understand your experience, they may be in a better position to offer the kind of support and encouragement that is genuinely helpful to you.
For some folks, the barrier is that asking for any kind of help or support is hard. I get that. This older blog post goes into more about asking for help and support.
Helping Family and Friends Understand What anxiety really feels like
It can be helpful to language and examples that they can relate to in their everyday lives. One way of explaining anxiety that has been useful to many people is to compare it to a fire alarm that keeps blaring and won’t turn off. Most people have had the experience of hearing a fire alarm and feeling how jarring and disruptive it can be. It’s designed that way so we PAY ATTENTION and get out of the building to avoid the danger of a fire! But imagine that the alarm is broken and it goes off even when there is no actual smoke or fire and just keeps going and going and going. That’s what it can feel like for a lot of people with anxiety—that there is a danger signal inside them that keeps going and going, and won’t turn off, even when there is no actual danger at the moment. Even if they understand that there is no fire right now, it can be hard to function with that alarm blaring away inside all the time.
There are many physical symptoms of anxiety that can help others understand what it feels like in your body, as someone that struggles with anxiety. Your loved ones may recognize them as sensations they have felt at particular times when they were under a lot of pressure or in danger. Physical symptoms of anxiety can include:
Feeling nervous, restless or tense.
Increased heart rate or the feeling of palpitations.
Breathing rapidly (hyperventilation).
Sweating.
Trembling.
Feeling weak or exhausted.
Trouble sleeping.
Having an upset stomach or other problems with digestion.
The emotional and mental symptoms of anxiety are also important for others to know so that they can understand your feelings and how your thinking is working as well. Emotional and mental symptoms of anxiety can include:
Worry
Irritability
Having a sense of impending doom or danger.
Trouble thinking clearly or concentrating on anything besides the current worry.
Difficulty controlling worry.
Having the urge to avoid things, places or events that may trigger anxiety.
Set yourself up for success by knowing how to talk about anxiety.
Tips for talking about anxiety with loved ones
Ok, so you’re ready to talk to the folks in your inner circle about your anxiety. Let’s talk about some communication tips and suggestions to set yourself up for success.
Choose the Right Time to Talk
It might seem like a simple suggestion, but picking the right time to talk can make a big difference. It can feel tempting to want to talk about it right when you are in the middle of experiencing some difficult anxiety because you could really use the support, but that might not be the most useful moment if you aren’t entirely sure how that conversation is going to go. When we are experiencing anxiety, we aren’t always thinking very clearly and can be more on edge and overestimate negative reactions from others, which can then lead to our own negative reactions or shutting down. Choosing a time to talk when you aren’t in the middle of an intense anxiety experience can help you navigate the conversation with a little more perspective, remember what it is you want to say, and be in tune with your loved one or friend.
We also want to pick a time when our listener is ready and willing to be in a listening frame of mind. Trying to have this conversation when the other person is distracted, busy or preoccupied with their own challenges, gets the conversation off of the wrong foot. Have the conversation when you are both have the time, are relatively calm and able to focus on the conversation and each other.
Be Honest, bUt Keep It Simple
When you’re trying to explain anxiety to family or friends, it’s understandable to want to dive into all the details about how your heart feels like it is beating out of your chest or how your mind replays your mistakes over and over again. But often, too many details can overwhelm a listener. A good approach is to be honest about what you’re experiencing while keeping your explanation simple and relatable. A good starting point might sound like, “Sometimes my brain feels like it’s stuck on a worry loop, and it’s hard to turn it off.” You’re describing your experience clearly without needing to unpack every detail right now. Over time, you can share more, but starting simple helps loved ones stay engaged and actually hear what you’re saying, without getting overwhelmed or confused.
Share Personal Experiences Without Shame
If your initial simple explanation is met with kindness and a willingness to listen, it can be helpful to share some of your personal experiences with anxiety to help your loved ones understand your unique perspective. Not everyone experiences anxiety in the same way so it can be useful for your loved ones to understand how it shows up in your life and impacts your mood, your health, your relationship and your functioning. Remember that anxiety is an incredibly common condition and is nothing to feel ashamed about. If you’ve gotten this far in your conversation with a loved one, this is obviously someone that you trust and who you believe cares about you.
Recommend resources
Feel free to share resources with your loved ones that can help them learn more about anxiety. If there are podcasts, books, articles or websites that have been helpful to you in understanding your anxiety, you can pass them along. Factual information from reputable sources can provide basic foundational knowledge about anxiety, and many articles or podcast episodes that touch on other people’s personal experiences with anxiety can help others understand the many ways that anxiety can show up and impact people. Not sure where to start? Here are some suggestions:
Overview information about anxiety disorders from the Cleveland Clinic
An article on VeryWell Mind about how different parts of the brain play a part in anxiety: This Is What Happens in Your Brain When You’re Anxious, According to Experts
A podcast called The Anxious Truth by Drew Linsalata
Information on anxiety disorders with the National Alliance on Mental Illness
Personally, I love Pixar’s Inside Out movies and they way they talk about emotions. Inside Out 2 has a terrific depiction of how anxiety can feel and function for some folks, and can be a great starting point for a conversation.
How Anxiety Therapy in Maryland can Help
Learning to Speak the Language of Anxiety
First off, a lot of times folks aren’t quite sure that what they are experiencing IS anxiety. Maybe they’ve been told they have a “Type A” personality (important tangent—The term “type A” does not have any clinical merit and was made up and promoted by the tobacco industry to blame individual personality types, instead of the addictive nature of tobacco, for smoking. Please don’t use this term. It’s meant to suggest negativity and blame. “Conscientiousness” is the term for the scientifically studied personality trait associated with folks that have often been labeled as “type A”. Have some time to head down this rabbit hole? Start with this article from The Cut). Perhaps they think it’s how everyone feels. Symptoms of anxiety can also overlap with other mental health diagnoses as well. Learning to identify what anxiety is, spot how exactly it shows up in your life and have the language to describe it to someone else, can be a challenge! Anxiety therapy can help you find a way to communicate your unique experience to the people that care about you.
Building Coping Strategies Together
Once you know that the problem is anxiety, then we can get to work on finding solutions to manage it better. This can include figuring out how loved ones can support your progress in a meaningful way, and avoiding some common pitfalls. One common mistake a lot of people make about supporting someone managing their anxiety is offering TOO MUCH reassurance. Believe it or not, this is a thing! People with anxiety need to tolerate some degree of uncertainty. Both avoidance and constant reassurance can interfere with this. For more about both of these pitfalls, see some of my older posts about the myths of anxiety, including how too much reassurance can worsen anxiety and how to get out of the anxiety-avoidance spiral. A skilled anxiety therapist can work with you to find a level of support from your loved ones that helps you feel empowered and encouraged, without hindering your progress.
Team Up with a maryland Anxiety Therapist
Ready for some more support about understanding and communicating about anxiety? I offer specialized anxiety therapy appointments in-person, located in College Park, MD. Online anxiety therapy appointments are available anywhere in Maryland. Click here to schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation and take the first step toward a clearer, more peaceful mind.
Other services I offer include hypnotherapy, mindfulness-based therapy, life coaching, and support for LGBTQIA+ clients. Additional information is available on my home page.
About the author, an anxiety therapist:
Beth Charbonneau, LCSW-C, is a Maryland therapist, specializing in anxiety therapy and treatment. With over 20 years of experience, she brings a holistic approach to calming both the mind and the body, and helping her clients feel empowered to find more joy in their lives. Learn more about her counseling practice here.
