For many people with anxious attachment, the experience is deeply familiar. Something small happens — a slower reply than usual, a partner who seems a little distant, a comment or social media post that’s open to interpretation — and suddenly your body reacts before your mind has had a chance to catch up. Your heart rate increases, your thoughts begin to race, and it can feel as though you’re being pulled into panic without choosing it.

What’s often most distressing in these moments isn’t just the anxiety itself, but the feeling of losing control. You may be very aware that you’re spiralling and yet feel unable to interrupt it. That sense of helplessness can quickly turn into frustration or shame, which only adds another layer to an already overwhelming experience.

What’s actually happening in an anxious spiral

To understand anxious spirals, it helps to look at how the nervous system and our core beliefs interact. These two systems are closely linked, and when they’re activated together, they can quickly reinforce one another.

Imagine a situation where your partner usually replies to messages fairly quickly, but this time an hour passes with no response. On its own, that’s a fairly neutral event. But if you carry a history of abandonment, inconsistency, or emotional unpredictability in relationships, your nervous system may interpret that change as significant. Past experiences shape what your body registers as safe or unsafe, often well before your rational mind weighs in.

When the nervous system senses a potential threat, it responds by mobilising the body. Stress hormones increase, your focus narrows, and your attention naturally shifts towards anything that might help you make sense of what’s happening or protect yourself from loss. This isn’t a personal failing — it’s a biological response designed to keep you safe.

At the same time, this physiological response interacts with long-held beliefs about yourself and relationships. If you tend to carry stories like people leave, I care more than others do, or I’m not enough to be chosen, those beliefs quickly step in to explain the situation. A delayed reply stops being about timing or circumstance and starts to feel like evidence that something is wrong between you.

From there, things can escalate quickly. The activated nervous system makes it harder to access nuance or perspective, while the beliefs you hold give meaning to what you’re feeling. Those interpretations then further activate the nervous system, creating a loop that gathers momentum and becomes harder to slow down once it’s underway.

Why spirals feel so convincing

One of the reasons anxious spirals are so difficult to interrupt is that they feel real. When your system is activated, you’re not experiencing your thoughts as anxious guesses — you’re experiencing them as accurate assessments of the situation.

In that state, it’s much harder to hold multiple possibilities at once. Ordinary explanations for a partner’s behaviour don’t feel reassuring, and attempts to reason your way out of the spiral often fall flat. The body is already on high alert, and the mind is doing its best to make sense of that activation.

This is why reassurance-seeking behaviours — calling repeatedly, sending follow-up messages, replaying conversations, checking social media — can feel urgent and necessary in the moment. They’re attempts to regain a sense of certainty and control when your internal system feels unstable.

Interrupting spirals in the moment

Although anxious spirals can feel automatic, the ability to intervene is something that can be developed over time. The first step is learning to recognise what dysregulation feels like in your own body.

You might notice physical cues such as a racing heart, shallow breathing, tension in your chest or stomach, or a sense of urgency that feels hard to sit with. Rather than trying to make those sensations stop, it can be more helpful to simply name what’s happening: my nervous system is activated right now.

That awareness alone creates a small amount of space. It shifts you from being fully inside the spiral to observing it, even briefly. From there, the goal isn’t to solve the relational issue straight away, but to support your system in settling enough that you can think more clearly.

This often means pausing contact rather than escalating it. Putting your phone down, changing your physical environment, or moving your body can all help your system process the stress response. Gentle movement, time outside, or even slowing your breathing can support your body in returning towards baseline.

It’s also important to question the urgency that shows up during a spiral. The feeling that something must be resolved immediately is part of the activation itself. In reality, very few relationship issues require instant action. Giving yourself time to regulate doesn’t mean avoiding the issue — it means choosing to address it from a steadier place.

The deeper work beneath the spirals

While learning how to manage spirals in the moment is important, lasting change usually comes from addressing what’s underneath them. For many people with anxious attachment, spirals are fuelled by deeply held beliefs about worth, safety, and belonging.

These beliefs often formed early as reasonable adaptations to relational environments that felt unpredictable or unsafe. Becoming highly attuned to signs of disconnection may have once been necessary. The difficulty is that these strategies can remain long after the original conditions have changed.

It can be helpful to explore the specific stories that tend to surface when you feel triggered. What do you tell yourself about what’s happening? What conclusions do you jump to about yourself or the relationship? Over time, patterns usually emerge.

Many people also notice that their fear of abandonment in relationships mirrors how they treat themselves. If you worry that others will leave when you have needs or make mistakes, it’s worth noticing how you respond to yourself in those moments. Self-criticism, minimising your own feelings, or withdrawing support internally often reinforces the same wounds you fear externally.

Healing anxious attachment involves developing a more secure internal relationship — one where you can offer yourself consistency, reassurance, and compassion. This doesn’t remove the need for connection with others, but it reduces the sense that your safety depends entirely on someone else’s responses.

From reactivity to agency

Change happens gradually. Each time you notice a spiral beginning and choose to pause rather than react, you’re building a new capacity. Each time you meet your anxiety with curiosity instead of shame, you’re strengthening trust in yourself.

Over time, these moments add up. You begin to learn that you can tolerate uncertainty without falling apart, that your emotions will pass even without immediate reassurance, and that you’re capable of responding thoughtfully rather than reflexively.

The goal isn’t to never feel anxious or to eliminate spirals altogether. It’s to develop enough awareness and self-trust that anxiety no longer runs the show.

When that shift happens, relationships start to feel different. Not because they’re perfect, but because you’re meeting them from a more grounded place — one where you’re able to stay connected to yourself, even when things feel uncertain.