Anxiety can make connecting with friends hard. Add COVID, lockdowns, social distancing, and isolation to the mix, and it can feel overwhelming.

With this COVID year, we’ve had to focus so much on ourselves and our mental health. Stress has been at an all time high. So it makes sense that connecting with friends, especially after losing contact with them over 2020, feels hard to do.

Anxious people need friends, even when their anxiety and stress makes it hard.

And you may have worries about what they think or how they’ll react when you reach out again. That’s ok and normal! Of course you have anxiety around that. But that anxiety shouldn’t keep you from doing the things you need to do to benefit yourself, your mental health and, yes, your friendships that have fallen by the wayside.

Because I specialize in anxiety, I know how frequently addictive behaviors can co-occur.

I even have clients on my schedule specifically because of their media addiction, with anxiety as the underlying concern. So, I was so happy to talk with Huffington Post earlier this year on "going dry for a month" regarding tech, social media, and smartphones.

The reason addictive behaviors can occur so frequently is because anxiety is tough to deal with. And an anxious mind feels better when it’s distracting itself with media, sugar, or alcohol. All can be self-medicating behaviors.