What To Do About Adult Anxiety When Trying To Make Friends?
Each person has a different way of making friends. On the one hand, there are those who can approach a stranger without any hesitation and start a deep conversation in a few minutes; on the other, those who take a little longer to gain confidence. There are even those who can only open up to others if they have known each other all their lives. Furthermore, the ways of forging friendships vary according to the stage of life that a person is going through.
The experience of a teenager when making friends is not the same as that of an adult, who may have greater difficulties when making friends given certain characteristics specific to their stage. In particular, One of the most common experiences among adults is anxiety when trying to make friends
Since we are children we have the need to interact with our peers. In the early periods of life, these “equal” places are occupied by siblings, cousins or neighbors. Childhood relationships can last over time as solid friendships, beyond possible relationships, but others are rather volatile and ephemeral. If we look back on our history of friendships from when we were children, we may only have a vague memory of the names and faces of our friends from kindergarten, elementary school, or the neighborhood.
There’s nothing wrong with this! The way we establish social ties throughout the life cycle varies During adolescence, the situation usually changes: adolescents tend to search for their own identity through belonging to groups. In addition, they seek to become autonomous and independent from their parents. This leads them to pursue new friendships, which are generally forged around high school, a setting that attracts them day after day.
In youth, many of the friendships of adolescence last, but many others end up dissipating. Around the age of twenty, young people usually live experiences that invite them to meet new people, such as their university or work colleagues.
However, As the years go by towards adulthood, people may experience certain difficulties when trying to make friends since, in part, they tend to fall into biased interpretations of reality. For example, it is common for many adults to firmly maintain that it is impossible to establish meaningful relationships outside of early youth, saying that “everyone knows each other before,” that “it is already too late,” that “no one will want to integrate me into a group.” new group”, etc. However, all of these are precisely interpretations about reality; They are not reality in itself.
Another reason why people might find it difficult to make friends as an adult is a lack of openness and willingness to meet other people. Adults do not have the highly developed habit that children have to make friends. You just need to give them some freedom in a park where other kids are playing and observe how they behave. After a while, we will notice that he will have made a new playmate and that, later, it is very likely that he will explicitly ask you if “you want to be his friend.” On the other hand, adults do not usually ask these types of questions.
In fact, We even tend to stretch our lifelong bonds despite the fact that they are friendships that, due to the differences that spontaneously arise over the years, have expired. The acquisition of new habits such as starting to make friends requires that we dare to repeat a behavior in a sustained manner over time, in this case, relating to others.
Why do adults feel anxiety when making friends?
Now, many times, just the idea of approaching a stranger in a meeting and starting a conversation can be terrifying. This is where anxiety appears as an extremely unpleasant and sometimes limiting experience when making friends.
We know that Anxiety involves a set of physiological reactions that allow us to anticipate danger The possibility of anticipating threats was an evolutionary reaction that allowed us to adapt to the environment more easily, since it gave us the ability to detach ourselves from direct experience, establish relationships between hypothetical situations, and, ultimately, maximize our chances of surviving. . Feeling anxiety is not something bad or something that we should remedy, but, on the contrary, it is thanks to it that we are where we are.
Furthermore, it is expected that we feel anxiety when interacting with our peers, since the possibility of being rejected from the social group is a threat to human beings in evolutionary terms. For this reason, it is impossible to “deconfigure” our brain so that we stop feeling anxious when approaching new people. Trying to suppress our emotions will only increase the discomfort they generate in us.
The two ways to deal with anxiety when meeting new people
The problem is that many people cannot overcome that emotion. The fact of feeling anxiety makes it impossible for them to carry out the concrete actions necessary to establish new interpersonal relationships – approaching someone, asking what their name is, their interests, answering the other’s questions clearly and openly, etc. – which, in Ultimately, they would allow them to make new friends. In fact, Many consider that it is necessary to first get rid of that anxiety in order to relate to other people However, this leads them to systematically avoid encounters with others. Now, is avoidance useful to solve the problem?
The path of avoidance
Let’s look at it metaphorically. Anxiety, as well as other unpleasant emotions, puts people at a fork in the road. One possible path is avoidance or flight. A person chooses to walk this path when, having the intention of talking to someone, they experience a peak of anxiety and, in order to reduce that unpleasant emotion, they end up avoiding the meeting with the other person and replace it with other types of activities. In the short term, when walking this path the person feels little anxiety: escaping from the feared situation causes anxiety to decrease almost instantly. However, this effect is also short-lived. In the long term, it is very likely that the person will continue to feel anxious when wanting to make friends and, furthermore, they will not have managed to meet anyone along the way.
On the other hand, there is the path of exposure, coping or approximation. A person chooses to walk this path when they experience high anxiety when wanting to approach someone new and decide, even in the presence of that anxiety, to face the feared situation. This path is, in the short term, more tumultuous than the first, since it does not manage to calm anxiety quickly and efficiently. In fact, it focuses on a completely different objective: it does not seek to eliminate anxiety, but rather to have the ability to bond with other people even when feeling anxious. The effects are reversed: in the short term, anxiety does not decrease abruptly, but will do so gradually. However, in the long term, the balance is also opposite: the person may continue to feel anxious about making new friends, but they will have met many valuable people along the way. Anxiety can be very uncomfortable, but it is not a disabling obstacle
The invitation, from my side, is to dare to travel this second path. As we have seen, it is not easy to walk down that path. People tend to be tempted, time and time again, in different situations in our lives, to take the first path, that of avoidance. The key is that it is difficult to consolidate new friendships in adulthood if we always walk the same paths. This can be a very complex task for some people—for example, for those who have experienced painful experiences in relation to their friendships; or who are going through a crisis due to the loss or rejection of a close friendship—so it is always recommended, if it is very difficult to make friends in adulthood, consult with a mental health professional able to provide help. Other tips that can help you are:
