How do I stop anxiety from sabotaging my chances with my ex?

By Benny Lichtenwalner, breakup coach & author ofHow to Get Your Ex Back · Updated2026-07-13

Short answer: Anxiety about your ex is not a signal about what's happening — it's a thought-control problem. The disaster you're imagining lives in the future, not the present. Worry leaks into your energy and timing, and your ex picks it up. Name the spiral, return to the present, and do nothing from that state.

How Do I Stop Anxiety from Sabotaging My Chances with My Ex?

Anxiety feels like a warning. It isn’t. When you spiral about your ex, you’re thinking about a problem that doesn’t exist yet — a future you’re projecting, not a present you’re living. That’s the whole thing. Benny Lichtenwalner, breakup coach and author of How to Get Your Ex Back, frames it plainly: anxiety is a thought-control problem, and treating it as something more is what turns it into a real one.

When does anxiety actually cost you?

Here’s what most people miss: you don’t have to act on the anxiety for it to cause damage. It leaks. Into your tone when you text. Into how quickly you reply. Into the energy you bring to a conversation. Your ex — especially a dismissive-avoidant — is reading those signals before you’ve said a word.

A dismissive-avoidant ex is particularly sensitive to this. DA exes are already conflict-averse and scared of emotional intensity. Anxious energy in the space between you doesn’t draw them back — it confirms the thing that sent them away.

Is there a real problem or a projected one?

The most important question to ask when a spiral starts is this: is something actually wrong right now, or am I imagining a future outcome?

Almost always, it’s the latter. A slow reply is not a rejection. Silence during no-contact is not confirmation it’s over. These are data points with no inherent meaning — you’re assigning meaning from a place of fear, not fact.

Your anxiety tells you the problem is urgent and real. That’s the lie. The problem exists in your thoughts, not in the relationship.

What to do when the spiral starts

1. Name it immediately. Say it out loud: “This is overthinking.” You can’t course-correct what you won’t name. Labeling the thought disrupts the loop before it compounds.

2. Check whether the problem is present or future. Ask: is something actually wrong right now? If there’s no concrete behavioral evidence — just a feeling — the answer is almost always no.

3. Get out of your head physically. The spiral grows when you sit still with it. Move. Do something with your hands. Change rooms. The thought only has power because you keep feeding it.

4. Do nothing impulsive. Don’t test your ex, don’t post something to trigger a reaction, don’t reach out before your window is right. Actions taken from anxiety almost always break one of the Five Rules and restart your clock.

5. Stay strong. During no-contact, the only real question is whether you’re worrying or staying strong. Those two paths lead to very different places.

What NOT to do

• Don’t try to relieve anxiety by gathering information about your ex. Checking their social media, asking mutual friends, scrolling their profile — anxiety feeds itself this way. It never delivers the reassurance it promises.
• Don’t reach out to “see how they’re doing.” That’s a temperature check in disguise. It breaks Rule 1 and tells your ex you need status updates to function.
• Don’t post jealousy bait from a panicked state. Done from desperation, it reads that way — not confident, not attractive, just scared.
• Don’t replay ambiguous signals hunting for a meaning that makes the fear stop. There isn’t one. A late reply is a late reply.
• Don’t catastrophize silence. An avoidant ex not reaching out yet is not confirmation they’re done — it’s confirmation they’re avoidant.

What this looks like in practice

Two separate clients I’ve worked with show this pattern clearly. One had been in no-contact for three weeks and was convinced the silence meant it was permanently over. Nothing concrete had happened — no blocking, no new relationship, no stated finality. Just silence, and what she was building from that silence inside her head. Every few days she was drafting a “just checking in” message and deleting it before sending it.

The other was in a different situation — he’d already received several warm messages from his ex and things were moving in the right direction — but was spiraling because the replies had slowed down over the previous few days. He was treating the slight shift in pace as a reversal of everything.

In both cases, the anxiety wasn’t tracking reality. It was tracking their worst fear projected forward. In both cases, naming the spiral and executing the plan without acting was what allowed the situation to develop the way it needed to.

Worry doesn’t protect you from the outcome you’re afraid of. More often, it causes it.