I've found a CBT* technique useful for overcoming that sort of anxiety (it's called catastrophising). I write down the situation and my prediction in a spreadsheet. An example would be: Situation - at work, I emailed [girl]; she hasn't emailed back yet. Prediction - She is going to break up with me.
Then when you receive an email back, you write down the outcome in a third column, e.g. received email back - we are meeting up tonight.
Looking back over the spreadsheet, you can see how accurate your predictions have been. I expect they tend to be too negative.
*CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) has a strong evidence base.
ETA: I hope that explanation is clear - I'm in a bit of a rush right now! I really wanted to explain it though, as it's had an extremely positive impact on my anxiety levels.
For similar advice, I highly recommend the Feeling Good Handbook for both anxiety and depression.
It has lots of written exercises primarily aimed at contradicting irrational thoughts.
For example, CBT applied to body dysmorphic syndrome proceeds by challenging the beliefs that patients have about their own attractiveness. But what if you are, as you believe, truly unattractive (as most men seem to be)? And what if lack of physical attractiveness has a major impact on most aspects of your life (as seems to be the case for both sexes)?
Assuming both of those are true, CBT isn't be about denying that. The next step would be to ask "why is that bad?" and "exactly how bad is it?" Eventually, if you do it in a precise structured manner, you'll find some irrational thoughts hidden away somewhere (for example, "if I'm physically unattractive I'll never find romantic love" may be one irrational thought, which is easily countered by pointing out that lots of unattractive people are married).
The act of writing it down and following a structured approach is also really important. Even if you know a thought is irrational, it helps to write down all of the reasons it's irrational. I don't know why, but the act of writing it down seems to be important even for things you already "know" in order to believe them on a gut level and actually start to feel better.
All of this is described in the Feeling Good Handbook, which you should be able to find a free pdf of if you can't afford it.
But why assume that an honest answer to those questions will make you feel better, rather than worse?
I think it's not that an honest answer will make you feel better. It's that a detailed honest answer is more likely to help you find tools for improving your situation, while a generic honest answer will make you feel bad and very little else. It's really just general steps for solving any problem.
Unattractive people have a much harder time finding romantic partners.
Much harder doesn't mean impossible! How much harder is it? How many people that look [a certain way] have partners and how many don't? Where did the ones that do have partners find their partner? Maybe you could look there. What other personality traits did they develop that helped them succeed at dating while looking [that way]? Maybe you could work on those!
And the partners they do find tend themselves to be unattractive.
This statement really requires data. Unattractive to whom? Probably not to them.
I don't want to sound overly negative, but why assume that an honest answer to those questions will make you feel better, rather than worse?
It's not an assumption; four weeks of bibliotherapy in the form of reading Feeling Good and doing the exercises has been shown in experiments to be superior to a placebo book for treating depression (75% of patients no longer qualified for DSM criteria of major depressive disorder afterwards), and the improvements were sustained at 3-month and 3-year followup.
Of course, you could then argue that the book doesn't actually make you evaluate your situation honestly and is just mindless positive thinking, but I don't think that'd be a fair assessment of the book.
The example you mention about romantic love is quite telling. Unattractive people have a much harder time finding romantic partners . And the partners they do find tend themselves to be unattractive. (The issue of physical attractiveness is of course just one example. There are many other cognitions underlying depression and anxiety which may also be rooted in solid evidence.)
Sure, but my example was "if I'm physically unattractive I'll never find romantic love" not " "if I'm physically unattractive I'll have a much harder time finding romantic love."
That's not quite how it works. Sometimes rational people get depressed and they can tell that their thinking is distorted and un-distorting it doesn't make them feel better. They just feel bad. Meanwhile, some depressed people contribute to their depression through cognitive distortions, such as all-or-nothing thinking and catastrophizing that PECOS-9 pointed out, and CBT can help (though not necessarily cure) that subset of people.
But for many of the rest of us, being depressed is simply being realistic.
Feeling bad about a problem is only useful if it helps motivate you to do something about it. If you can't completely fix a problem, then once you've done everything you can about it, feeling bad becomes useless and you shouldn't feel bad anymore.
"Oh no, what if X happens, what'll I do? I might lose Y!"
I find that asking and answering a couple different question helps.
"What'll I do if I lose Y?" Not gnashing your teeth over losing Y, but actually answering the question. "If I lose Y I will ..."
"What's my best strategy here?"
One claim in some depression book - catastrophizing is at bottom a worry that you won't be able to handle the loss. It's a boogeyman in the closet, and you're too scared to open the closet and check, so live in fear, night after night, that the boogeyman will jump out and get you.
Open the closet and look. The boogeyman is there or he is not. Do you think he won't come out and kill you just because you refused to look to see if he was there? Buck up and look. What you'll likely find is that the boogeyman really isn't so fearsome, and your fear of the boogeyman is more crippling than anything he might do to you.
Either you'll spend from here to eternity with this fantastic girl, or you won't. Likely not. Someday you'll lose her. You'll weep and moan and move on to some other girl in a few weeks. Or maybe you'll dump her. You'll look back on your time together fondly...
Have you dated before?
It sounds like these contact points are natural accumulation points for your anxiety - not so much that you're specially anxious about them.
That said, what sorts of things are you requesting? I'd recommend a shift to make suggestions, or invitations where a 'no' answer can very clearly (even to you) be accompanied by 'It's sweet of you to offer, though' rather than 'GTFO'. If requesting something comes up so often that you've noticed the pattern, and they cause an aversion, perhaps you should avoid making so many requests per se?
You've already recognized the pattern. Now, when you send her an email, before anxiety kicks in, plan out a realistic anxiety schedule. You tell yourself, "I am sending this now, and I recognize that she might not respond tonight. Or tomorrow. But she usually replies within three days. If she hasn't written back in four days I'll be justified in feeling anxious." Precommit so you're not constantly thinking, "It's been 7 hours. That probably means it's anxiety time, right?"
I think that CBT techniques could be helpful. They tend to be about reasoning things out on paper in a structured manner.
You could work on realistically assessing how likely the feared result is, and on assuring yourself that, even if it happened, you could cope with it.
I'm resisting the urge just post a one line comment saying #humblebrags by posting the comment anyway and giving some advice :)
Below Joshua mentioned studying PUA and I agree. One method that works for me that I learned from PUA is to try to convince yourself that you don't care if she breaks up with you. Tell yourself "she's just a girl" or "there's plenty of fish in the sea" or whatever motivates you. I also combine this with a "just fuck it" attitude. If I find myself worrying about something like this, I'll say either in m...
So I think a variant of this approach is useful and a variant of this approach is really harmful. If you say "fuck it, she's not important," you'll be conditioning yourself not to care about her or even actively resent her for "making" you anxious. That way lies a lot of badness.
Nevertheless, I do think it's handy to come to terms with the idea that if she decides to break up with you, then it's not the worst thing in the world. It's an admittedly sucky but manageable state of affairs. You will be a finite amount sadder than you were when you were single! And although you have some influence on her decisions, you have no control over them. So think "I have done everything in my control in this situation. Now I will go play video games/exercise/whatever." This is a more detailed, more accurate, healthier variant of "fuck it, she's just a girl."
Fantastic girls are important! But they're not your whole life! But they are also not unimportant! There's a large range in between those two!
But there's certainly no evidence supporting the idea that this is likely to happen, nor is the anxiety helping me prevent it or helping me in any other way.
A simple way to put that anxiety to use would be whenever you feel that anxiety, to do 10 pushups. Becoming more fit makes you more attractive, so it's not irrational to start doing more sport to increase your chances with woman.
Channel the anxiety into some useful activity.
personal history
It seems that you lack some personal experience in regards to relationships, am I correct? I know some here are going to hate me but I would give you pick-up related advice: what you need is not an easy fix but more experience in relationships. The way to get there is not easy: try to interact with as many people/women as possible, consider dance classes, etc... Competence breeds confidence(Mystery).
I wish you the best with this relationship.
From personal experience the best advice is to date a lot and get hurt a lot and build up a thick enough skin to where you don't care anymore about the rejections.
Worrying about the rejection will only make rejection more likely.
Act as if you are a confident person, then other people think you are confident, and you'll become more confident. While of course actually trying to do things to actually become more capable too, since that improves your confidence as well.
The other ideas here also are good techniques too, but what I found is that when I had been burned enough to stop caring about rejection was when I suddenly became successful at dating. The main thing that had changed was not worrying about it.
Not an advice, just wanted to mention that if you are so worried offline, so to speak, some of it is bound to eventually leak through into the together time, and few people like it when the other person comes across as desperate or clingy. Also note that in most cases people get dumped in person, or sometimes over the phone, not by email/text/facebook status update, so the most dangerous time is probably the first few minutes after you meet up. Hope none of that happens to you.
Yes, that feeling is called abandonment. I suggest you keep an eye out for whether you devalue and/or idealize people too. If both those are the cases, you may have some personality quirks that are thought to cluster. In that case, mention that to your preferred expert and you can take it from there.
Study Pickup Artistry. The cold-blooded rational approach presented there will quell your anxieties.
Do you want advice about whether or not your concerns are rational, or advice on how to overcome these concerns?
And by evidence-based advice, do you want studies? Because I think the specific case may be, well, too specific for evidence-based advice to be useful. Unless your anxiety is more generalized, at least.
So my suspicion is that you're not being irrational, you're simply responding to evidence you're not comfortable calling as such.
I strongly advise against taking this advice in this particular instance. It constitutes some insight ("beware denial") and was a lesson that OrphanWilde needed at the time. However the overwhelmingly strong indication of Kenoubi's words (and also the correlated symptom "best two weeks of my life") is that Kenoubi is experiencing the oh so common effects of social anxiety and nerves that often comes when relatively little experience with dating. He doesn't need to be taking irrational fears more seriously.
I started going out with a fantastic girl a couple of weeks ago. Everything is great, except that whenever I've sent her a text message or email requesting something and haven't received a response yet, I experience significant dysphoric anxiety, fearing that her response will be not just "no" but "no and I don't want to date you any more". This is due to brain chemistry or personal history, take your pick—either seems like a possible explanation to me. But there's certainly no evidence supporting the idea that this is likely to happen, nor is the anxiety helping me prevent it or helping me in any other way.
Does anyone have evidence-based advice, or pointers to same, on dealing with this kind of issue? It is the only splotch on what have otherwise been the best two weeks of my life.