Texting Anxiety; Yes, It's a Thing

I am in full-blown texting anxiety at the moment, so I thought, why not write about it? Before you think I am making this up, let me tell you it's a thing, and so many people suffer from it that you would be surprised. It happens when you send a message in any form to someone, and you're expecting a response. The more controversial the message, or the more important the person, the more severe this anxiety gets. First, you start blaming yourself for the medium you’ve chosen to convey the message. Yes, I know I am calling it "texting" anxiety because it's the most common form of it, but really it applies to any form of communication.

For example, if you sent a text, you'll tell yourself, "Why didn't I send an email instead?" If you've sent a long email, you might say, "Wouldn't it have been better if I'd called or set up a meeting?" The medium is always wrong. When you're done raging at yourself about that, you'll move on to the content.

That's the trickiest territory. You start thinking something must be wrong with what you've written or said, and they must be offended or angry, and that's why they are not responding. So, you start reading and rereading what you have sent until you can recite it by heart. With a voice message, it could be different because at this point, you won't exactly remember what you said due to all the anxiety.

Then there's the fear of being ignored. Let's say you were trying to be funny, which is normally out of your comfort zone, or maybe it's not, but it’s unusual for you to say something funny to that particular person. Now, you're thinking, "Am I being inappropriate? Or did they find what I said so unfunny that they're not even responding?"

The absolute worst-case scenario is when you've asked a question or made a request—and I’m not necessarily talking about a time-sensitive question. It could be any kind of question, but the fact that you're not getting a "timely" response is fuelling horror stories in your mind about being ignored.

Now, let’s talk about what “timely” means to someone with anxiety. Ideally, it means within 5 minutes of sending the text. But we’re not psychos—we know people have other things going on in their lives. So, based on what we know about the other person’s responding habits, we give it what we think is a fair amount of time before freaking out. If the other person is usually on their phone 24/7, any response taking more than 15 minutes might be considered as being ignored. Now, the devilish tech companies know about these human flaws, and they play games. Some of them is giving people the ability to read the text without showing it as read/seen. Imagine if, in 1595, people could read letters without opening the envelope—crazy, right?

So, basically, that person knows what you’ve said but chooses not to show they’ve read it, so you can’t go back and ask, “Why didn’t you respond when you read it?” Now, add another layer of complexity to the mix: these stupid apps now let people delete their messages altogether without leaving any trace. Editing, sure, I get that. You might make an embarrassing typo, and you should have the chance to revise it. But to delete the text altogether? Again, imagine in 1595 someone chasing a mailman (or whatever the hell the mode of delivery was at the time) to get back a mailed letter. To someone with anxiety, especially texting anxiety, you're always thinking you’re missing something if you don't check your messages instantly. Because the other person might send you a message and decide to delete it without you seeing it.

Basically, if you have texting anxiety and you use messaging apps as your main method of communication, you should see someone and talk about the possibility of a masochism diagnosis. But the issue is, in this day and age, you don’t have the luxury of easily choosing your method of communication, because more or less, everybody is doing the same shit. And if you tell someone, "Ah, I don't text. Give me a call if you want to catch up," there's a high chance you will never hear from that person again.

So, what do we do? If you look up ways to deal with texting anxiety, a lot of advice tries to teach you to do something you're incapable of, i.e. distracting yourself from focusing on the matter. I read one article that said to put your phone aside, so you don't keep checking it. Well, this isn't about the phone itself, my dear! Even if I throw my phone in the garbage disposal, I’ll still think about the fact that there’s an unanswered or unseen message out there.

So, what can we do? I say we anxious pals need to form a community and start normalizing clearly communicating this need with the people, especially those who care about us. They deserve to know what's going on. There shouldn’t be shame around talking about this. First of all, the closest people around you should know, and you could ask them never to play that game of seeing the message without showing it. So, if your message says delivered or it has one checkmark instead of two, you know they really haven’t seen it. Then, for example, if an hour goes by and they still haven’t seen it, you have something else to worry about—like, have they been hit by a bus and are lying in a hospital bed? (That’s a different story for another note about how catastrophizing works- another lovely trait of people living with anxiety).

But one of the most mature solutions, I think, could be to straight-up tell the other person you're experiencing anxiety sending this message and would appreciate some kind of response. For example, the other person could say, "I’ve read it, but I’m swamped right now" or "I need more time to think before responding, but I will get back to you by [a certain time]." I’m telling you, this will do wonders for someone like me, as long as you keep your promise, damn it!

And don’t be a coward—if you don’t want to respond or are not planning to get into that conversation ever, just say so. Don’t say, “I will get back to you” and keep it open. This is not a movie. We don’t appreciate open-ended endings. There's no interpretation involved in any of this.

And to give you a glimpse of what is happening on the other side, if you text a person with texting anxiety and don’t get a response within a reasonable amount of time from them, you should be worried. Like, you seriously need to be worried. They are either dead or mad as hell at you. It's time to give them a call.