The 1 Thing You Should Never, Ever Text Someone With Anxiety

Texts are inherently difficult to decipher. Unlike in-person interactions or phone calls, these brief, digital messages lack many nonverbal cues ― such as eye contact, gestures or a smile ― that provide important context for what a person’s trying to say. As a result, texts often go misunderstood and, in some cases, are relationship killers, research has found.

For people with anxiety, texting can be particularly tricky to navigate. Though communicating digitally may alleviate feelings of anxiety by helping people feel less self-conscious or inhibited, the ambiguity of some text messages can also cause people with anxiety to fill in the gaps and interpret vague messages more negatively than they were intended to be. This, in turn, can spike anxiety levels.

One of the worst texts to send with someone with anxiety: “Can we talk?”

If you have anxiety, this might have just sent a shiver down your spine. If you don’t, you may be wondering why the heck this even matters. Below, therapists break it all down.

Why This Can Be So Triggering For People With Anxiety

“The ambiguity and lack of tone or context in this type of message leaves a huge amount of room for interpretation and catastrophizing,” Alex Oliver-Gans, a licensed marriage and family therapist with a private practice in San Francisco, told HuffPost.

Because text messages lack certain nonverbal cues, we’re constantly assuming the sender’s tone and intention, Oliver-Gans said. For example, a study published in 2020 highlighted how responding “K” to an invitation to go see a movie could cause the recipient to assume their friend isn’t enthusiastic about the activity when, in actuality, the sender maybe didn’t have enough time to type out a full reply. If you talked