If you have an anxious attachment pattern, your nervous system treats ambiguity as threat. A delayed reply is not data to your brain, it is evidence. The story builds fast: they are pulling away, you did something, it is ending.
The spiral is not a character flaw. It is an alarm system doing its job too well. The problem is what the alarm makes you do next: reread, draft, double-text, ask for reassurance in a way that costs you, then feel worse about having asked.
