Top 10 ways to support someone who is suffering with anxiety

At one point or another in our lives, we’re all going to suffer from anxiety. In fact, one in six people in England admit to experiencing a common mental health problem like anxiety every week. When you consider this data doesn’t cover those living homeless, in prisons, hospital or sheltered housing, you can only assume the true number is much higher.

So, how do you support someone whose anxiety has got to the point where it is impacting their life in a big way? Here at MYNDUP, we help people work through anxiety or stress every day, so here are our top ten tips for supporting someone who is suffering from anxiety.

1. Understand What Causes Anxiety

Your body is designed to respond to stressful situations through two methods – fight or flight. In both scenarios, it’s completely normal to feel unease or worry, but when these feeling start to dominate your life, that’s when anxiety becomes an issue.

Understanding how someone reacts to different situations and judging whether their reaction is in keeping with how they normally deal with stressful situations is the first step to understanding whether an individual is suffering from GAD (generalised anxiety disorder).

GAD generally means someone is anxious almost constantly, rather than anxious about a specific event or situation, and can often stem from problems in childhood, issues around drink or drugs, or simply genetics.

If you can identify this type of anxiety in someone, you can begin to take steps to support them. Of course, it’s often extremely difficult to recognise these traits in people unless you are very close to them, and that is completely fine. At MYNDUP, we recognise that, unless you are close to the person suffering from anxiety, it is very difficult to offer any real support.

2. Learn to Recognise the Signs of Anxiety

Anxiety can manifest itself in a number of different ways, including through physical symptoms, through particular thought patterns, or certain behaviours. We at MYNDUP understand that individuals virtually never display anxiety in identical ways, so keeping on the lookout for a number of different clues is important if you are to support someone suffering with anxiety.

Physical symptoms include a fast pulse, sweating, lightheadedness, diarrhoea or shortness of breath, which are usually hard to spot in an individual.

If the anxious person is intimate or close with you, they may admit to having anxious thoughts such as constantly fearing or expecting the worst, worrying constantly about a number of different situations, or extrapolating a single bad experience onto every aspect of their life, or you may simply be able to recognise these thought processes.

Finally, the aspect of anxiety you are most likely to take notice of are changes in behaviour. If you notice someone close to you constantly looking to avoid certain situations, consistently seek reassurance over certain things, constantly second-guess themselves or develop compulsive actions, which can range from eating, shopping, to small things like repetitively counting or washing, then these are all signs of someone suffering with anxiety.

Once you suspect a loved one is suffering with anxiety, you can begin to take steps to support them.

3. Do Not Enable Anxiety

Understanding what not to do can be just as important as taking active steps to support someone, particularly with a complex mental health issue like anxiety.

One common response a lot of people jump to immediately is to try and help an anxiety sufferer avoid any stressful or fearful situations. Here at MYNDUP, although we recognise the good intentions in this, we would not recommend it.

Helping someone avoid ever confronting their anxiety is not going to help them overcome it, and over time those stressful situations will only build in their minds to become completely insurmountable.

4. Do Not Force People Into Facing Anxiety

In the same vein, don’t try to force someone to confront their anxieties by bringing about situations where they are forced into dealing with their fears. This kind of ‘sink or swim’ attitude will only cause strain on your relationship as it can be difficult for people suffering from anxiety to understand why you are bringing about these situations.

Take the pressure off yourself by allowing an experienced professional to work through these kinds of scenarios, as someone who can remove themselves from what is a very close personal relationship.

5. Provide Validation for Their Anxiety

One important step is to help people understand that they aren’t being unreasonable or ‘silly’ when it comes to the things they’re anxious about. When individuals suffering from anxiety get it into their heads that they are being unreasonable or worrying about trivial things, they are less likely to open up about their anxieties and share their thoughts and feelings.

At MYNDUP, we are all about sharing your feelings so that you can begin to address them, and asking someone how you can help with their anxiety, rather than making their worries seem ridiculous, is a good place to start when it comes to making someone feel comfortable enough to open up.

6. Approach Their Anxiety in a Measured Way

It’s important not to make someone suffering from anxiety feel like they’re going ‘crazy’ or like they aren’t the same person that they once were. By reassuring them that the way you perceive them is the same, that you still see them as the same person despite their anxiety, can help a person open up and feel more confident that their anxiety is temporary.

When you broach the question of anxiety, you also don’t have to cover up your emotions in order to be the ‘strong shoulder to lean on’. If you’re concerned by the changes in their behaviour, make it known in a compassionate way. Be careful not to make the conversation about yourself, but let them know you’ve taken notice of the changes in their behaviour, and ask them if there’s anything you can do to help.

7. Help Put Their Anxieties in to Perspective

It can be useful in some cases to talk to someone who suffers from anxiety about potential outcomes, as the default position for most people suffering from anxiety is to immediately assume the worst.

By asking someone what the best, worst, and most realistic outcomes of a certain situation are, you can begin to temper their thinking and get some perspective. It’s always best to focus on how they might cope with each potential scenario, rather than convincing them that it won’t come to pass, as this can help to empower the person suffering from anxiety and help them realise ‘”even if this does happen, I will cope with it by…”

8. Make Sure You Understand What They Need

Do not try to second guess what a person suffering from anxiety needs. If in doubt about how you can support someone suffering from anxiety, ask them.

By trying to pre-empt what support they need and what actions they need to take, you will only send mixed messages, increase the chances of you doing something harmful, and potentially put strain on your relationship.

At MYNDUP, we would always suggest being very clear and direct in asking how you can support someone, without going ahead with your own ideas of what they need. The simple act of asking someone what they need can be supportive in itself, as the individual understands that “here is someone trying to help me, and someone I can count on'.'

9. Understand When You Need Help

It’s absolutely no shame to admit there’s nothing you can do to help someone truly get over their anxiety. Anxiety is an extremely complex mental illness that can stem from any number of factors, and professionals spend decades learning how to help people through it.

If you feel as if your support is not enough, seeking out professional help, with the individual’s permission, is probably the most helpful thing you can do to support someone suffering from anxiety.

Broaching the idea of professional help without stigmatising the sufferer or making them feel ‘as if something is wrong with them’ can help them on the right track to recovery, as they can begin to speak to trained professionals who can a) remove any close, complicated personal feelings from the relationship to help the sufferer work through their anxiety objectively, and b) use practices that they have honed and perfected for years with serious study.

Approximately 1 in 8 adults with mental health problems are currently getting any kind of treatment due to the supposed stigma around therapy and mental illness. And when certain types of professional support can reduce feelings of stress, anxiety or depression in 96% of people, at MYNDUP we feel that seeking treatment is often overlooked.

10. Look After Yourself

It’s not fair to yourself, and it can actually be detrimental to your own mental health, to take on too much responsibility for someone else’s anxiety. Your aim always needs to be to simply offer support when it is wanted, not to ‘cure’ the individual of anxiety.

It’s virtually impossible to help anyone get through anxiety if you are suffering from mental illness yourself, so taking care of yourself should be of utmost priority. Helping someone through anxiety can be extremely tough, and often you can feel as if you’re getting it completely wrong.

As long as you maintain the outlook of supporting someone with a positive mind-set, and ensure you don’t feel as if you are becoming too responsible for their mental health, particularly to the point where it is starting to impact your own life negatively.