Is Anxiety Eating Up Your Emotional Bandwidth?

Anxiety can take a lot of forms. Perhaps your worries from work are carrying over and intruding on your personal life; or you find yourself worrying about calamity such as losing people close to you; or you worry a great deal about your health or the health of those close to you; or perhaps you find yourself deeply anxious about what you see in the headlines, and you carry with you this anxiety about the state of the world. Or perhaps your anxiety is less specific, but you feel it in your body, a continual tightness and tension. Or you may just know that anxiety is there to throw you into emotional and physiological high alert when anything emerges in your life that is difficult or unexpected.

Whatever the nature of your anxiety, one thing that we can say about all forms is that ongoing anxiety is exhausting. Living in a state of worry can leave you feeling emotionally depleted. You may feel as if your emotional range has narrowed; that rather than moving through your life experiencing the full expanse of emotion including joy, sadness, and levity and lightness, you feel emotionally constricted. Perhaps you feel numb. Or perhaps the emotion that you do feel moves generally in the realm of overwhelm, frustration, anger, and annoyance. It may seem that, in the context of how anxious you feel, the demands of your life are always too much.

This emotional exhaustion and constriction can in turn hamper your relationships. You may find yourself speaking abruptly to the people you love most, such as your partner, kids, friends, and other loved ones. With so much anxiety running through your system, it can be difficult to engage with others a full and present way. It can be particularly difficult to engage with others in terms of being together in a relaxed way, enjoying the moment, laughing, playing, going with the flow. This kind of subtle being together and enjoying each other gets lost in the strain and electricity of your worry, the sense of danger. And, as difficult as the anxiety is for you to feel internally, not being your best self with those you love can add to this burden a great deal. In addition to your anxiety, you may end up carrying with you a sense of guilt and inadequacy, the feeling that you are letting down the people you love. Your inner reservoir of patience and emotional presence feels depleted.

Anxiety therapy is a particularly useful way of addressing your anxiety’s root causes, and helping you to regain a sense of ease and comfort. Easing your anxiety in therapy also helps expand your emotional bandwidth, and your experience of emotional range and flexibility. We can work together to support you in feeling relief from your anxiety, and also to help you to be able to feel your full range of feelings again, and to be more present and engaged with those you love.

If anxiety is leaving you feeling depleted and emotionally constricted, anxiety therapy can help. I invite you to contact me at (510) 500-9722 so we can explore working together.