Anxiety is a natural human experience, but when it becomes overwhelming or constant, it can significantly impact one’s life, including their work. Dealing with anxiety in the workplace involves understanding its nature, recognising unhelpful patterns like avoidance, and actively engaging in strategies that promote a different relationship with anxious thoughts and feelings. The goal is not necessarily to eliminate anxiety entirely, as some anxiety is a vital emotion that helps in task completion and meeting deadlines, but to prevent it from controlling your life and interfering with your work goals. Living well and working effectively can happen even with anxiety present.
Here’s a breakdown of what’s involved in dealing with anxiety at work:
Understanding Workplace Anxiety
Understanding what anxiety is and how it manifests is a crucial first step. Anxiety in the workplace can show up in various ways, from intense energy and physical sensations like sweaty palms or increased heart rate to feelings of dread, confusion, or feeling frozen. It can also manifest as constant worry that is disproportionate to the issues at hand. People dealing with workplace anxiety might experience muscle tension, headaches, or difficulty sleeping.
A common pattern is worrying about worry itself. While worry can sometimes be productive when channelled into action, it can also become cyclical, leading to paralysis and avoidance. At work, this might involve hearing a strong internal critical script telling you you’ll fail or are worthless, which contributes significantly to the anxiety.
Anxiety is considered a natural process, not a disease. It’s nature’s way of alerting you to potential danger and preparing your body for action. However, it can become “disordered” when it interferes with living a full life.
The Workplace Anxiety Trap: Avoidance and Control
When anxiety feels intense, people can get caught in a cycle of attempting to control or avoid their anxious thoughts and feelings. While these attempts might provide temporary relief, they often don’t work in the long term and can actually make the anxiety worse. Efforts to control or avoid can happen at cognitive, emotional, and behavioural levels.
In a work context, this trap often looks like avoidance behaviour. Examples include:
- Staying silent during meetings or not sharing ideas.
- Avoiding interaction with colleagues, such as arriving right on time and leaving immediately, or avoiding eye contact.
- Declining opportunities for presentations or other anxiety-provoking tasks.
- Using technology like email or texting to avoid face-to-face communication.
- Procrastinating or delaying tasks that trigger anxiety.
Avoidance can become a ingrained habit or even feel like an addiction. While it offers short-term escape from uncomfortable physical symptoms and self-doubt, it comes at a significant cost. These costs can include strained work relationships, missed opportunities for advancement (like raises or promotions), and in severe cases, job loss. Furthermore, keeping anxiety a secret and trying to manage it through avoidance can lead to physical health problems. Constantly talking about your anxiety without focusing on action can also reinforce the problem. The effort spent battling or avoiding anxiety takes energy and time away from doing what matters in your work and life.
Changing Your Relationship with Workplace Anxiety
Rather than trying to eliminate anxiety, a different approach involves shifting your relationship with it. This means learning to be present with your fear and accepting anxiety as part of being human. Acceptance involves choosing to experience the anxiety when it arises, without trying to change it. It’s the opposite of trying to control it.
Key aspects of this shift include:
- Observing Anxiety: Pay attention to how you respond to anxiety in the workplace without immediately trying to change it. Just notice what’s happening internally.
- Recognising Thoughts: Understand that thoughts are often what fuel anxiety. Learn to observe your anxious thoughts without getting entangled in them.
- Developing Flexibility: Learn to relate to your anxiety in new, less frightening ways. Foster psychological flexibility to navigate challenging situations at work.
- Clarifying Values: Identify what is truly important to you in your work and career. Use these values as a guide for your actions and behaviour, rather than letting anxiety dictate what you do. This helps you spend your time doing what matters most.
- Addressing Shame and Embarrassment: Workplace anxiety is often tied to feelings of shame or embarrassment. Actively identifying and attaching to these emotions, rather than suppressing them, is important for moving forward.
Practical Strategies for Managing Workplace Anxiety
Several practical strategies can help you navigate anxiety at work:
- Identify Your Triggers: Pinpoint the specific situations, people, or tasks at work that consistently provoke anxiety. Look for common themes or factors across different anxious situations. Prioritise which triggers or situations to address first, perhaps focusing on those that significantly interfere with your work goals or cause the most distress.
- Assertiveness: Develop skills to express yourself directly and set boundaries at work. This can involve stating what is bothering you clearly, setting limits on tasks or interactions, and learning to say “no” when needed. Setting boundaries around work hours, for example, can help manage stress. Keeping assertive interactions short and direct can be effective.
- Mindfulness: Practice staying grounded and present, especially in work situations that trigger anxiety, such as meetings or presentations. Focus on the task at hand rather than getting lost in anxious thoughts.
- Exposure: This involves willingly confronting anxiety-provoking situations at work, like leading a presentation or speaking up in a meeting. By facing these fears, you test your anxious predictions and learn that you can handle more than you thought. Repetition of facing these situations helps build confidence. Willingness to experience the anxiety is key to this approach.
- Conscious Questioning and Writing: For situational anxiety related to tasks and deadlines, practices like conscious questioning can help organise anxious thoughts. Asking yourself what truly needs to be done can help channel this anxiety productively. Writing down your anxieties in a stream-of-consciousness way can also help you become more aware of them and organise them.
- Lifestyle and Physical Techniques: Strategies like breathing exercises, relaxation techniques, regular exercise, and making dietary changes (e.g., reducing caffeine, sugar, and processed foods) can support overall well-being and reduce anxiety levels. Getting enough sleep is also important.
- Workplace Environment: While not always within your direct control, contributing to or seeking out an emotionally well-regulated workplace can be supportive. Learning emotional skills and communication practices can help navigate interactions with colleagues.
- Communicating Needs: Consider speaking with your manager about specific adjustments that could help you perform better if anxiety is a barrier. Simple, direct requests for support can be effective.
- Self-Nurturing: Acknowledge that dealing with workplace anxiety is challenging. Allow yourself to feel difficult emotions like fear, confusion, or anger. Actively counter negative self-talk with self-compassion and affirmations.
Seeking Professional Support
Engaging with these strategies can be challenging, and the process of identifying triggers and facing difficult emotions can itself be anxiety-provoking. Working with a professional can provide support and guidance through this process. Some underlying issues, such as unresolved anger, shame, or activated trauma, may require one-to-one exploration. Professionals can offer different approaches and techniques tailored to your specific needs. Seeking help earlier rather than waiting until anxiety severely impacts your career is often beneficial.
Summary: Dealing with anxiety at work
Dealing with anxiety at work involves moving beyond trying to control or avoid it, which is often unworkable in the long term and can make things worse. Instead, it encourages understanding anxiety as a natural part of the human experience and, in some ways, a helpful signal. Key steps include identifying avoidance patterns at work and their costs, and consciously shifting your relationship with anxiety towards acceptance and willingness to experience it. Practical strategies involve pinpointing anxiety triggers, practising assertiveness, incorporating mindfulness and exposure techniques, using writing to organise thoughts, and adopting helpful lifestyle changes. Addressing underlying issues like shame or unresolved anger is also important. Seeking professional support can provide invaluable guidance and tailored approaches for navigating workplace anxiety effectively, allowing you to live a life guided by your values rather than controlled by fear.