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:
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:
Practical Strategies for Managing Workplace Anxiety
Several practical strategies can help you navigate anxiety at work:
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.
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