You’ve been there. You’re midway through a conversation and you decide to send a message—either a lighthearted but corny pun, a sarcastically sweet jab at a friend’s experience, or just a casual “share ko lang” about something you’ve been up to recently.

But then, crickets. No response. You start panicking, reading and rereading that message over and over again. You go back to your previous messages—maybe you missed an underlying tone, maybe they thought you were secretly annoying, maybe you said something confusing. Maybe—

Maybe you just need to breathe. And in most cases, you probably do. It’s easy to jump to conclusions when you’re chatting with friends, especially if you really care about them and are often anxious. If you’re starting to feel a little creature in your head taking control, here are a few ways to alleviate that.

1. Stop And Breathe

When you’re starting to panic or fall into anxiety, one of the best things you can do is directly cut off that train of thought. Breathing is one of the simplest yet most effective ways to take control of your panic. Focus on nothing but your breathing and try to calm it to a slower rate.

Distracting yourself from the worry and panic of the message is helpful since you’re often not in the right headspace to make decisions. Ground yourself so you can move forward with what you should do next, and hopefully make your next decision not in a state of fear or panic.

2. Remind Yourself That It’s Going To Be OK

The brain often cannot distinguish between real physical danger and the danger presented in these social situations, and you are most likely not going to be in a perilous situation just because of one bad joke.

Do not overthink because real conversations do not just exist in messages, but real connection becomes more authentic if it’s a face-to-face approach. Always imagine and know how they speak and that’s how they speak in the digital world. Internalize that the resolution of a situation won’t be as bad as you could imagine, because it will be okay. Remind yourself that it’s just a simple text.

3. Don’t Imagine A “Solution”

At this point, you might be tempted to reflect, check all of the messages you have sent before, and try to find a reason why they didn’t reply. You could think that the joke was in bad taste, it was a sensitive topic, or they weren’t aware of the topic enough. There are a million reasons you could imagine as to why they didn’t respond, so you shouldn’t.

It’s better not to waste your brain energy trying to figure out the exact reason they didn’t respond immediately because you can’t. You’re not a mind reader, and it’s a problem that you don’t have all the data to solve, one that can easily be resolved by waiting for the next time they reply. Trying to solve an unsolvable problem will only worsen your mood, so try to focus on the now.

4. Trust Your Friends

Finally, focus on the one variable you can observe in this situation: your friends. You likely have an idea of their personality, their reactions, their answers to things in life, and their way of talking. As friends, you are probably intimately aware of how they converse and interact.

Based on that, you probably know that they’re kind, caring, and understanding. They’re likely the type of people who will chuckle at a dumb joke or understand when someone misspeaks. After all, there is a reason why you’re friends with them, right?

This is a big anxiety boulder of a problem to untangle, but it goes a long way to help solve any future worries you have about such messages. There’s a reason why your friends are friends with you, and vice versa. Therefore, you might realize that you’re probably overthinking your message.

While you’re doing all of this thinking, you might suddenly get a response from the friend, who says they got busy doing something and were just a bit late in responding. Then you realize that you were probably overthinking your messages too much, and you should probably start trusting your friends not to have an adverse reaction to every one of your messages.

This list won’t apply to everyone, but it is meant for those who have the habit of panicking in social situations. Anxiety can be a difficult thing to overcome, but with time, it can be a beast that’s a little bit less threatening every time you see it.

It can be debilitating to worry about every single text message you send, but hopefully, with time, you learn to lessen the fear of doing so. Talking with your friend should just be a fun and happy experience, and you can start to deconstruct the worries you have every time you’re on your phone.