6 Ways to Accommodate Your Spouse’s Anxiety

If you are married to a person who suffers with anxiety, it will often be up to you to help them cope with their symptoms. But that can be exhausting and can tax your own stress level and peace of mind. Here are some ways to accommodate your spouse’s anxiety without surrendering your own mental health.

Why Anxiety Makes Relationships Harder

Every marriage has challenges that put a strain on the relationship. But if you or your spouse are among the 30% of adults who suffer from an anxiety disorder during your lifetime, that anxiety can make maintaining that relationship harder. Anxiety disorders like GAD (general anxiety disorder), social anxiety, phobias, and other forms of anxiety can elevate stress and result in a number of mental, emotional, and even physical symptoms that make relationships harder.

Anxiety as an emotion is a normal reaction to heightened stress. But in an anxiety disorder, that nervousness, fear, or worry about the future can interfere with a person’s life, affecting everything from their ability to concentrate to sleep patterns, and yes, their relationships too.

When anxiety strikes, your spouse may be unable to “pull their weight” as they normally would, leaving you to take on additional tasks in the home. In addition, as their spouse, you may find yourself becoming a lightning rod for your spouse’s anger, frustration, and agitation. Spouses of people with anxiety disorders have been found to report a poorer marriage quality and less satisfying marital life. However, treatment can help reduce or even eliminate a person’s anxiety symptoms.

Ways to Accommodate Your Spouse’s Anxiety

As the spouse of a person with an anxiety disorder, you are a central line in their support network. As they learn coping strategies and consider medication or other treatment options to better control their disorder, there are things you can do to accommodate your spouse’s anxiety while preserving your own mental health.

1.      Learn About Your Spouse’s Anxiety Disorder

The term “anxiety disorder” covers a variety of different diagnoses. Any one of those mental illnesses can express themselves in different ways for different people based on their age, gender, culture, family role, and personal history. If your spouse has a specific diagnosis, learn about the disorder. Talk to them about what they experience. Help them identify their triggers and explore how they feel without judgment. As you better understand what your spouse is going through, it will help you empathize with them and make it less burdensome to accommodate their needs.

2.      Prop Up High-Stress Areas

Talk to your spouse about the causes of their stress. Find the high-stress areas of your spouse’s life and focus your accommodations there. Are they struggling at work? If so, you could give them time to decompress when they get home before asking things of them. Is childcare overwhelming? Consider helping with homework or hiring a babysitter to give your spouse a break. By prioritizing high-stress parts of your spouse’s life, you can make the biggest impact without burning yourself out.

3.      Adjust Daily Routines to Reduce Anxiety in the Household

Depending on the nature of your spouse’s anxiety disorder, there may be aspects of daily life that trigger their stress, like the flurry of getting everyone out the door for work and school or the dread of coming home to the “doom pile” of uncompleted tasks. Some triggers may even seem small or insignificant, like running out of toothpaste or having unfolded laundry. One way to accommodate your spouse’s anxiety is to adjust your household’s routines to remove those triggers. For example, you could:

• Stagger working hours so your spouse isn’t competing to get out the door on time
• Remove shame triggers from the common areas of your home
• Reassign household tasks to give your spouse work that doesn’t carry anxiety with it
• Adjust buying habits to avoid running out of items your spouse finds important
• Schedule time to decompress or debrief after work
• Establish a habit of exercise or outdoor activities to relieve stress

4.      Offer Affirmation and Support

Many people with anxiety struggle with negative thought patterns or low self esteem or self-worth. This can create a negative feedback loop in which feeling bad makes your spouse feel worse. You can help interrupt these negative thoughts with affirming language and supportive comments, reminding your spouse that you care about them and want them to be happy and healthy.

5.      Encourage Professional Treatment

Anxiety can be well controlled with professional treatment, and in some cases medication. But often, people with anxiety may resist professional treatment because they feel “it’s not that bad” or not worth professional help. Increasingly, psychotherapists and other mental health professionals are recommending couples therapy, bringing a person’s spouse into the person’s treatment program. This allows you to accommodate your spouse’s anxiety, joining them in high-anxiety situations, and reminding them to employ the techniques they learned in treatment.

6.      Build Your Own Supports First

Airline attendants always tell you to “put your own mask on first, before helping others.” That applies to accommodating your spouse’s anxiety as well. If you want to support your spouse in their mental health journey you need to have your own support systems in place first. This may mean recruiting friends to serve as confidantes, planning and attending events on your own, and receiving treatment of your own. These strategies can help shore up your own mental health, making you better able to provide support for the love of your life.

David Stanislaw is a psychotherapist with over 30 years of experience. He helps adults, teens and children with anxiety and other mental health concerns. Contact David Stanislaw to get help today.