Own It. by Caroline Foran

Author:Caroline Foran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2019-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter

13

Relationships can help and hinder your well-being

our relationships have a huge impact on both our experience of anxiety (in fact, they can sometimes contribute to our anxiety) and our eventual recovery from that horrible low point where it seems to govern our entire existence. For me, when I first fell apart, I cut myself off from my social circle, but in retrospect, I needn’t have. I just didn’t want to burden anyone with my troubles or drag anyone down with me, and I knew that I wasn’t exactly fun to be around. I didn’t want to leave my house, and I spent most of my time feeling upset.

Although shutting yourself away from the world is not the best way to handle anxiety, sometimes, if it’s particularly bad, you just need a little break—a hall pass, a moment to bring yourself back to basics, rest, and rejuvenate. As it happens, it’s in this time where your true friends will shine through. The keepers will be there regardless; they’ll sit with you and distract you and allow you to feel the way you feel, and they will try their best to empathize. They will understand why you feel the need to take a step back, but they won’t let you retreat to the point of no return. They will listen, and even if they’ve never felt a flutter of anxiety in their own lives, they will respect that, for you, it’s a real struggle. We will all go through hard times, and a good relationship—be it a friendship, a family relationship or a romantic one—should be able to endure the bad times and not just be there for the highlights.

As you read this chapter, I want you to think long and hard about the relationships in your life. Are they serving you well? Are there any relationships that affect you negatively? Are these relationships worth having? Do they stress you out? Do they fuel your anxiety? We’ve all found ourselves embroiled in a toxic relationship at one point or another. It could be a boss, a peer, an ex-anyone. It might be a friend who expects too much of you or has their own ideas about what friendship means. It might be a friend you grew up with and, sure, you were the yin to his or her yang back then, but now it feels a little forced, and you know your core values and outlook on life no longer align. That’s okay. Sometimes one of the most harmful things we can do to our sense of well-being is maintain relationships that cause us stress.

If you’re really struggling right now and, like me, you need to take some of the pressure off (especially when it comes to maintaining your social life), my advice with your key relationships is this: just bare all so they can understand—or try to—what you’re going through. Tell them how you’re feeling, in person preferably, and that you’re taking it upon yourself to find your own way through,

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