How Anxiety Affects Relationships

What to Do When Anxiety Impacts Your Relationships

Anxiety doesn’t just live inside one person — it often shows up in relationships, too. While anxiety is a normal human emotion, chronic or heightened anxiety can influence how we communicate, interpret situations, express needs, and connect with our partners.

Many individuals and couples I work with are surprised to realize how deeply anxiety shapes their relational patterns. Understanding this impact can be the first step toward creating more security, clarity, and connection.

Anxiety Can Increase Reassurance-Seeking

When anxiety is present, the nervous system is often scanning for threat — including relational threat. You may find yourself frequently needing reassurance that your partner is okay, that the relationship is stable, or that you haven’t done something wrong.

Questions like: “Are you upset with me?”, “Do you still love me?”, “Are we okay?” often come from a place of fear rather than insecurity alone. While reassurance can temporarily soothe anxiety, the relief is often short-lived. Over time, this cycle can leave one partner feeling overwhelmed and the other feeling misunderstood.

Therapy can help unpack the attachment fears beneath reassurance-seeking and build internal stability alongside relational security.

Anxiety Can Lead to Conflict or Misinterpretation

When we feel anxious, our brains are more likely to interpret neutral situations as negative. A delayed text response may feel like rejection. A tired tone may feel like criticism, which can ultimately lead to increased defensiveness, escalated arguments, jumping to conclusions, or difficulty listening fully.

Often, what appears to be “overreacting” is actually a nervous system in fight-or-flight mode. Slowing down these moments and learning emotional regulation skills can significantly shift relational dynamics.

Anxiety Can Create Avoidance or Withdrawal

Not all anxiety shows up loudly. For some people, anxiety leads to shutting down, avoiding difficult conversations, or withdrawing emotionally to prevent conflict. This may look like avoiding bringing up concerns, keeping feelings to yourself, over-accommodating to keep the peace, or feeling disconnected but unsure how to say so.

While this may feel protective in the short term, it often increases emotional distance over time.

Anxiety Impacts Intimacy

When the nervous system is chronically activated, it can be difficult to feel relaxed, present, or emotionally open. Anxiety may affect physical intimacy, vulnerability, and the ability to fully enjoy connection.

If one partner is highly anxious and the other is more avoidant or withdrawn, this can create a “pursue-withdraw cycle”, which is a common pattern in many relationships.

Understanding this pattern through an attachment lens can help couples move from blame to understanding.

How to Treat Anxiety and Its Relational Effects

Anxiety does not mean you are “too much,” “needy,” or incapable of a healthy relationship. Often, anxiety is rooted in earlier attachment experiences, chronic stress, or past relational wounds that shaped how you learned to seek safety and connection.

In individual therapy for anxiety, we work to strengthen emotional regulation, reduce rumination and catastrophic thinking, and build a more secure, trusting relationship with yourself. As your internal stability grows, relationships often begin to feel less reactive and more grounded.

In couples therapy, the focus shifts to understanding the patterns anxiety creates between partners. Together, we slow down anxiety-driven cycles, improve communication, and rebuild emotional safety so that connection feels steadier and more secure.

You Don’t Have to Navigate This Alone

If anxiety is affecting your relationship — whether through conflict, withdrawal, or persistent worry — support can make a meaningful difference.

I offer individual therapy and Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) in Encino and online throughout Los Angeles and California for those navigating anxiety and relational stress. With the right tools and understanding, anxiety can become something you work through together rather than something that pulls you apart.

If your’e interested in working with me, you can reach out today!

With Gratitude,

Atalie Abramovici