You've sent a text but haven't heard back. What might they be thinking? Why is it so hard to stop worrying? Here's how to understand and deal with those anxious times.
When you're waiting for a reply to a text and you have too much time to think, anxiety can prove overwhelming.Several well-known tactics can help minimize your worries about that last text. We’ve all been there.
You fired off your text, and the three reply-being-typed dots flickered briefly, but there’s been no answer. Why is it taking so long? Or maybe you texted a joke to a group thread that includes your manager, and you haven’t heard back yet. Perhaps you’ve summoned the courage to reach out to someone after your first date, and it’s been hours already, making you wonder whether they had as good a time as you did. When there’s been no reply and you have too much time to think, it’s awfully easy to worry.), then that means in the U.S. alone, more than a hundred million people experience this kind of text-based anxiety every day. The sophistication of our consumer technologies is a mixed blessing. Texting enables immediate communication, immediate contact with friends and family, and immediate gratification—but this means it comes with the feeling that your resultsbe immediate. But if the text reply you’re hoping for doesn’t pop up quickly enough, you’ll start to wonder why—and if you’re like me, your brain may not respond especially well to ambiguity. When you don’t know exactly what to expect, your—to be true. These confabulations may have nothing to do with the real reason you haven’t received a response, but they canMuch of the time, ambiguity promotes anxiety. Being uncertain about the future means losing a little bit of control over the outcome of whatever you’ve just attempted, which isn’t enjoyable for anyone but is especially difficult for people with long-term anxiety issues. Ehring & Watkins called it “Repetitive,” which is to say, the tendency to dwell on negative situations and bad feelings. They see RNT as a core cognitive mechanism in many anxiety disorders. A later study pursued the question of what topics caused the most RNT and reported that “the most commonly reported triggers for rumination and/or worry were social situations interpersonal interactions.” Which suggests that texting—messages that may appear to implicate you personally—could be an unusually powerful spark or accelerant to these negative, repetitive thoughts.can be especially difficult for people without a secure sense of attachment to others. As noted in Barrett & Holmes , attachment styles can strongly predict whether people interpret ambiguous social situations—such as the lack of a timely text response—as threatening rather than benign., which describes people who experience prominent emotional pain as a result of feeling rejected by others. As Minihan et al. put it, SRS can result in “hypersensitivity to cues of rejection by others, behaviorally expressed as a negative interpretationrejection, even when none is forthcoming. For people with SRS, then, the worries caused by “three-dot anxiety” can be especially challenging, as they’ll seem like confirmation that yet another painful social rejection has taken place. There are ways to deal with this type of anxiety. As with other worries, you primarily will need to understand that your worries are separate from your thoughts—that “feelings aren’t facts,” as some might say. The uneasy belief that your last text will destroy a relationship, or result in publicthat such a thing will happen is different from its actual likelihood of happening. If you can begin to notice the way your thoughts can spiral out of control while you’re waiting for a text reply, you might also notice the way this process coincides with the buildup of anxious feelings.When you recognize this, try to take a moment to reframe your assumptions. Remind yourself that there are plenty of alternative explanations for a text delay, and that the outcome you most fear is generally not the most likely. Becoming preoccupied with a potential outcome can exaggerate the perceived likelihood of its taking place. to avoid making things worse for yourself. Give yourself a short time to think about the text situation, and then move on for the time being. Distract yourself with something else you enjoy. Exercise, perhaps, or call a friend or close family member, or play a video game you like. Perhaps you can even get some work done. Decide to check for a text response later, after an appropriate amount of time has gone by—or, if the circumstances absolutely demand it, plan a time to revisit the situation and to text again, after your level of emotional activation has diminished. Maybe you should even call it off for the night and take another look in the morning.for potential threats, and as a species, we’re still adapting to the proliferation of text-based communication . The worries you feel when you haven’t received a reply to your latest text are, in all likelihood, focused on whatBarrett, P. M. & Holmes, J. . Attachment relationships as predictors of cognitive interpretation and response bias in late adolescence. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 10, p51-61. Charlton, E. . Texting is a daily source of stress for 1/3 of people - are you one of them? Retrieved from https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/11/texting-is-a-daily-source-of-stress-for-a-third-of-people-are-you-one-of-them/Joubert, A.E., Moulds, M.L., Werner-Seidler, A., Sharrock, M., Popovic, B., & Newby, J.M. . Understanding the experience of rumination and worry: A descriptive qualitative survey study. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 61, p929-946. Minihan, S., Kwok, C., Schweizer, S. . Social rejection sensitivity and its role in adolescent emotional disorder symptomatology. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health, 17. Saragosa-Harris, N. M., Guassi Moreira, J. F., Waizman, Y. H., Sedykin, A., Silvers, J. A., and Peris, T.S. . Neural representations of ambiguous affective stimuli and resilience to anxiety in emerging adults. Biological Psychology, 182., is a psychologist in private practice in New York City, specializing in helping people find success, fulfillment, and peace in their relationships and their work.Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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