Relationship Anxiety: 6 Signs and How to Overcome and Find Love

Relationship Anxiety: Signs, Causes and How to Overcome It

“Thought is not reality; yet it is through Thought that our realities are created.” Sydney Banks

Relationships are a beautiful journey, but more often than not they bring out our deepest fears and anxieties, holding up a mirror to insecurities within us that have yet to be healed.

If you’ve ever found yourself overthinking, feeling insecure, or constantly worrying about your partner’s actions, you’re not alone! I’ve been there and got the T shirt (in fact I used to have a whole chest of drawers full of them!).

Having spent over a decade helping people with my relationship anxiety coaching, I’m sharing the signs, the causes, and what actually works, drawing on my own stories and the transformations I’ve witnessed in my clients.

What Is Relationship Anxiety?

Relationship anxiety is the experience of persistent worry, fear and insecurity within a romantic relationship, even when there’s no obvious reason to feel that way. It’s that nagging voice that asks “does he really love me?” when everything is fine. It’s the spiral that starts when a message goes unanswered for an hour. It’s the knot in your stomach when you can’t work out where things are headed.

And here’s what most people don’t realise: relationship anxiety has very little to do with the relationship itself.

Sydney Banks said it best, thought is not reality, yet it is through thought that our realities are created.

Relationship anxiety is a thought problem, not a relationship problem. The anxiety isn’t coming from your partner’s behaviour, the uncertainty about the future, or the fact that he hasn’t texted back. It’s coming from the stories your mind is generating about all of those things. And when those thoughts become habitual, which they do, they create a pattern that follows you from one relationship to the next, regardless of who you’re with.

That’s why you can be with someone wonderful and still feel anxious. That’s why changing partners doesn’t fix it. And that’s exactly why understanding what’s really driving it is the first step to changing it.

Why Do I Have Relationship Anxiety? Where Does It Come From?

This is the question I get asked most. And the honest answer is that relationship anxiety doesn’t come from nowhere, it develops from a combination of your attachment style, your beliefs about your own worth, and the experiences that have shaped how safe you feel in relationships.

For most people I work with, one or more of these is at the root:

An anxious attachment style formed in early life. Limiting beliefs about whether you are truly loveable or enough. Unresolved experiences from past relationships, betrayal, loss, or emotional unavailability. A nervous system that learned at some point that relationships weren’t safe. And sometimes simply a very busy, overactive mind that has learned to use relationships as its primary source of worry.

The important thing to understand is that relationship anxiety isn’t a character flaw and it isn’t about the person you’re with. It’s a pattern, and patterns can change. I know because I’ve been there myself, and I work with people every day who have completely transformed their experience of relationships.

But first, you need to recognise what you’re dealing with.

What Are the Signs of Relationship Anxiety?

1. Anxious Attachment and Why It Keeps You Stuck

12 years ago, I fell head over heels in love with a guy who I’ll name Mr Big, AKA Sex and the City.

While dating Big, I became aware that I had attachment anxiety. Until becoming a therapist, I’d never heard of the term attachment anxiety or attachment styles. Yet understanding them helped give me insight into my behaviour and past relationship patterns.

An anxious attachment pattern means you do a LOT of anxious thinking about the relationship! Anxious attachment style people crave emotional and physical closeness and are more likely to hold onto a relationship even if they’re unhappy in it. The anxiety is heightened when our needs aren’t being met. In the case of Big, when I knew I was seeing him, I wasn’t so preoccupied with my thinking. My mind was calmer, and therefore I felt more relaxed.

Part of the problem came from the fact that I never knew when I was going to see him. Friends would ask me when I was next seeing Big, and I could barely answer them, which created a lot of shame and embarrassment within me.

Unfortunately, Big had an avoidant relationship style. He enjoyed being in a relationship, but when things were getting intimate, he’d pull back. You may have experienced this in the form of blowing hot and cold.

While I didn’t want to be seen as clingy or needy, my mind would start to wander if I didn’t hear from him. He didn’t feel the need to be in constant communication via text, and he wasn’t big on phone conversations.

With an anxious attachment style, I needed (or so I thought) more reassurance and contact as a source of validation that all was well.

While he told me he loved our relationship and what we had, he couldn’t commit more than a month in advance. And living at opposite ends of the country didn’t help.

After having hypnotherapy for anxiety with a peer, doing inner work on my identity, sense of value and fear of walking away, I ended the relationship a year later. I am grateful for that relationship because it taught me so much about myself and where I needed to heal and upgrade my identity, to value my worth, so that I could behave differently in the next relationship.

I believe every relationship, if we allow it, provides us with the opportunity to grow and evolve.

2. Jealousy and Possessiveness | When Insecure Thinking Distorts Reality

The fact is that jealousy and possessiveness are simply lots and lots of insecure thinking, which leads to insecure behaviour.

A big part of this is a lack of self-esteem or feeling unworthy or valuable. I was the green-eyed monster in my early relationships. And those jealous thoughts would distort reality, and I’d end the relationship.

But I always went back. Why? Because I’d wake up the next day in a blind panic about what I’d done and try to get them back.

Now I understand that the anxious attachment pattern mixed in with limiting beliefs about my value, or rather not feeling valuable, was the culprit. And if you have an insecure mind, you’ll see situations through the eyes of insecurity.

This is why awareness is key. The mind sees what it wants to see, and if you are seeing a situation through jealous thought patterns, you won’t have clarity on what’s true and what assumptions your thinking has brought you to.

Thoughts themselves are neutral. But when you have a landslide of thoughts on a subject and an identity that you’re not enough, that combination creates a story, and that story looks like it’s real!

3. Overthinking and Catastrophising | Why Your Mind Won’t Let It Go

I remember a coach saying to me that the only battle we are in is the one with ourselves. How true that is.

Here’s something to reflect on. All the feelings you want to feel, such as calm, happiness, peace, security and similar, are all there within you. In fact, these feelings reflect your true nature, your true state of being.

Therefore, if you want to feel calm, peaceful and secure within a relationship, you need to recognise what you’re doing which takes you away from your natural state, which is your thinking.

Analysing everything they’ve said or every message you’ve received will keep you stuck in your head, going around in circles.

I recognise the amount of time I’d spend thinking, overthinking, analysing and ruminating about my relationships, instead of being in the present moment. I’ve worked with hundreds of clients over the years who recognise exactly the same pattern in themselves.

Somewhere along the line, we’ve been led to believe that we need to ‘think’ about things to resolve them. That worrying about a relationship is somehow going to help us. When in truth, worry gives you nothing but takes everything away from you.

Journaling has helped me to recognise my habitual thinking and to see it as exactly that, habits of thought. These thoughts give me no information about reality, and it’s only if I give these thoughts my attention or believe in them that they have the power to create a drama.

4. Trying to Control the Relationship (and Why It Backfires)

A healthy relationship is one where the couple allows the relationship to naturally unfold. They don’t try to force the relationship to develop. They take time to get to know one another.

Being anxious about where the relationship is going and trying to make things happen is more likely to destroy the relationship, as I discovered. I was the ‘chaser’ in relationships. Looking to meet the parents or friends of my partner. Suggesting weekends away that, in my mind, equated to commitment.

In my twenties, I tried to get a boyfriend to sign up for a National Trust joint membership in a bid to prove he was committed to me and had a complete meltdown when he wouldn’t!

When you feel anxious in a relationship, you’re looking for security. But trying to control the relationship in a bid to feel secure is more likely to push the other person away.

Security is a feeling. Security doesn’t come from anything outside of you. What creates insecurity is lots of insecure thinking.

5. Staying When You Should Leave | Fear Disguised as Love

During my twenties, I was together with someone for six years. The last few years of the relationship, I was desperately unhappy and felt very alone, despite being in a relationship. Yet I was too scared to walk away.

I kept trying to convince myself that things would get better. But the spark was gone. The whole time we were together, we had plans to emigrate to Australia. He had secured a visa, and the plan was to apply for a de facto visa for me. However, it was never the right time to apply for it in his mind. He’d come up with excuses which ebbed away at my self-esteem.

Eventually, I had had enough. I left him and booked a flight to Australia, and spent three months there. I tried to get sponsored, but it seemed the Universe had different plans for me. I returned to the UK and saw an advert for a life coaching course. There was one place left, and I took it. I had a sense that this was meant to happen. That move paved the way for a brand-new career path as a hypnotherapist, coach and employee wellbeing trainer.

Life is short, and you deserve to be with someone who rocks your world! Relationships aren’t all plain sailing, and there will be stormy patches at times, but what matters is that you feel you’re with someone for all the right reasons.

Everything you want is on the other side of fear. Fear is the ego trying to keep everything the same, no matter how unhappy you are.

One of my first clients was a wonderful young woman who came for help with anxiety. As part of our time together, it stuck with me that the marriage she was in was a very controlling one. As we worked together, her anxiety subsided, and she grew stronger and more confident in herself.

As a result, she became more assertive in her marriage. She started to see her partner’s behaviour as controlling and manipulative. Long story short, but thanks to the deep changes she’d made through working with me, she left her marriage, her job, landed a brilliant new job and met a wonderful new man, and they are still together.

6. Fear of Vulnerability | Why Letting Someone In Feels So Hard

At the time I was dating Big, I celebrated my birthday. He came down from Edinburgh, and a big group of us went out for dinner and pretty much drank the restaurant dry of red wine. At the end of the evening, feeling half-cut and wearing very high heels, I fell over, landed straight on my face and broke my front tooth. I was traumatised.

I’d gone from having a great night to looking like a pirate with grazes and blood all over my face. There’s nothing like an accident to suddenly sober you up, and I decided I needed to go to A&E. Big said he’d come with me, and I refused.

All I kept thinking was that he’d come all the way down from Scotland for my birthday and that he hadn’t signed up for this. Looking back, I was already vulnerable because I was a mess, but I couldn’t bear for him to see me like this. I didn’t want to rock the boat by dragging him across town in the early hours of the morning to sit in A&E.

Ironically, while sitting there on my own in A&E, all I wanted was him.

My anxious attachment style meant I was scared to be vulnerable, to show vulnerability. I was trying to project an image that I was perfect and sorted.

Being vulnerable is something a lot of people struggle with. I’ve learnt that to have healthy relationships, I needed to let those guards down and allow people in. As Brené Brown speaks about, there is great power in being vulnerable because it leads to deeper and more beautiful connections.

Is It Relationship Anxiety or Are You Just Not in Love?

This is one of the most common and most distressing questions I hear and it deserves a direct answer.

Relationship anxiety and genuine incompatibility can feel remarkably similar from the inside. Both create doubt. Both make you question the relationship. Both can leave you feeling unsettled and confused.

The key difference is this: relationship anxiety tends to be driven by fear rather than truth. The doubts feel urgent and consuming, but when you get calm and quiet, really quiet, there’s usually a knowing underneath that you do want to be with this person. The anxiety is the noise on top of that.

Genuine incompatibility feels different. It tends to be quieter, steadier, and more persistent. It’s less of a racing spiral and more of a low-level knowing that something fundamental isn’t right, regardless of how much you care for the person.

If you’re not sure which one you’re dealing with, that uncertainty itself is worth exploring with someone who can help you separate the thought storm from the truth underneath it.

When Does Relationship Anxiety Go Away?

This is the question people ask when they’re exhausted by it and I completely understand why.

The honest answer is that relationship anxiety doesn’t tend to just go away on its own. If left unaddressed, the pattern usually follows you into the next relationship and the one after that, because the source of it isn’t the relationship, it’s the internal patterns driving it.

What I’ve seen in over a decade of working with clients is that relationship anxiety shifts, often dramatically and relatively quickly, when the work happens at the right level. Not just talking about it, not just understanding it intellectually, but actually shifting the underlying beliefs, attachment patterns and thought habits that are creating it.

When that happens, the change isn’t just that you feel less anxious in your relationship. It’s that you feel fundamentally different about yourself. And from that place, relationships look and feel completely different.

How to Get Rid of Relationship Anxiety: What Actually Works

Recognising yourself in any of the signs above is the first step. But awareness on its own only takes you so far, at some point the patterns need to shift at a deeper level, not just be understood intellectually. Here’s what I know works, both from my own journey and from over a decade of working with clients.

Understand where your anxiety is really coming from. Relationship anxiety feels like it’s about the relationship, about him, about what he said, about what might happen. But 100% of it is coming from your thinking. The moment you start to see your anxious thoughts as thoughts rather than facts, you create space between you and the anxiety. Journaling is one of the most powerful ways to start doing this. Write your thoughts down and watch how repetitive and habitual they are. That alone begins to loosen their grip.

Work on your attachment pattern. If you recognise an anxious attachment style in yourself, start there. The book Attached by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller is a brilliant place to begin. Understanding your pattern gives you insight into your behaviour rather than shame about it.

Come back to your own worth. Most relationship anxiety, at its core, is a self-worth issue. When you know your own value, really know it, not just intellectually but in your body, you stop looking to the relationship to provide security. Security becomes something you carry with you rather than something you need someone else to give you. This is the shift that changes everything.

Go deeper than talking about it. Understanding your patterns is one thing. Shifting them at the level they were created is another. Modalities like hypnotherapy, EFT tapping and the MAP Method work at the unconscious level, where the patterns actually live, which is why the changes people experience are often faster and more lasting than years of analysing the problem. Many of my clients notice shifts within just a few sessions that they’d been trying to achieve through willpower and self-awareness alone for years.

Ready to Stop Managing Relationship Anxiety and Actually Overcome It?

If relationship anxiety is something you’re ready to address at the root, rather than just manage on the surface, I’d love to talk. Book your free consultation and let’s look at what’s really going on and what’s possible for you.

Sara Maude

Sara Maude provides Hypnotherapy for Anxiety and Trauma Therapy for professionals who are looking to break the cycle of anxiety and find freedom from the past to feel calm, confident and in control. Sara has worked privately with individuals for 14 years, held over 5,000 sessions, and is also the founder of the award-winning global workplace wellbeing training company, The Mind Solution International Ltd.

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