How to Help a Partner With Anxiety

When your partner has anxiety, you both live with it. You watch someone you care about struggle, and you want to help. At the same time you may be tired, frustrated and unsure what really helps.

What it can look like

• Plans are cancelled at the last minute

• Your partner asks the same thing many times to feel calm

• You take over whatever sets the anxiety off: phone calls, errands, social occasions

• Irritation and outbursts that are really worry

• You tiptoe around to avoid making it worse

What helps

Listen without fixing. "That sounds hard" goes further than a suggested solution.

Ask what helps. Do it on a calm day, not when the anxiety is at its worst. The answer is often different from what you expected.

Stay calm yourself. You do not need to convince your partner that the danger is not real. It is enough that you are not pulled in.

Encourage small steps. Show that you believe in your partner's ability, even when they do not.

Back the idea of getting help. You can offer to help with the first step, without pushing.

What feels helpful but makes anxiety worse

Two things feel like care and work the other way over time: reassuring again and again, and helping your partner avoid.

Both bring relief in the moment. Over time they teach the anxiety that the danger was real and that your partner could not have coped alone. Research on anxiety in close relationships points the same way: the more the people around someone adapt, the more room the anxiety takes.

That does not mean you should stop helping overnight. Talk about it together, and reduce the adapting in small steps you both agree on. There is more on how avoidance keeps anxiety going in Avoidance and the anxiety cycle.

What rarely helps

• "Calm down" and "there is nothing to worry about"

• Arguing with the anxiety using logic

• Taking the anxiety personally

• Becoming the person who manages your partner's anxiety

Look after yourself

You are a partner, not a clinician. Keep your friends and the things you enjoy, including on the days your partner cannot face joining you.

Say what you can and cannot manage. Your limits are not a betrayal. They are what lets you stay for the long run.

When the relationship is suffering

If anxiety has become what you talk about most, or if you have slipped into the roles of carer and cared for, counselling together can help. Read more about online couples counselling.

For your partner there is more to read in Anxiety: symptoms, causes and support and on the page about anxiety.

You cannot take the anxiety away from your partner. You can stay beside them while they learn to carry it.