Getting to the core of how to stop anxiety taking over at work

Mental Health Awareness week is here, and this year’s theme is anxiety.  This is a great opportunity to bring some focus onto such an important topic and something that we all experience as humans. Anxiety is important, it helps us spot and avoid potential danger and keeps us safe. However, the problems occur when our anxiety response starts to get a bit trigger happy. Not only do we feel anxious about things that might cause us harm and put us in physical danger, our brain can start to worry about anything and everything!

If we think about work anxiety this can encompass so many things; worrying about what others think of us, if we can do our job well enough, being around people, going into the office, that we might get something wrong, the list is endless. This might just be why anxiety is one of the most common mental health problems we face.  If we let our anxious brains run free there is no end to the potential threats and what if’s it will try and protect you from. It’s a normal human response but it's unhelpful when it starts to impact you and how you live your life.  Anxiety tells us to avoid situations to keep us safe and when we do this we might feel better in the short term but longer term this results in our comfort zone getting smaller and smaller and can make us feel frustrated and impact our mood. You might be missing out on so much both at work and in your personal life.

So how do you stop anxiety taking over when it’s a natural human response?

Don’t think about it and it will go away!

When I work with people experiencing difficulties with anxiety this is often their current go to approach to managing how they feel. It’s a really understandable response, anxiety and worrying thoughts don’t feel good and why wouldn’t we want to tell ourselves not to think about them. We can push them to the back of our minds and distract ourselves, stay busy and the thoughts go. The problem is that they don’t go, they stay in our minds and often get louder and louder. Our brain is trying to tell us something that it thinks is vital to our survival and if we aren’t acknowledging these thoughts then it needs to find a way to make us listen. This approach can often make things worse in the long run, staying busy is not a sustainable strategy and can lead to feeling more and more overwhelmed and eventually burnout out.

I often hear about people struggling with anxiety throughout most of their lives, since childhood they have notice feeling a bit more anxious than most. The story becomes fixed, I am just an anxious person, btu it doesn’t have to be this way. Yes, we are all different and some people may be more predisposed to experiencing anxiety but there are ways to help manage anxiety and help you to get more out of life.

So, try something a little different the next time you start to feel anxious just pause, take a slow deep breath and notice your thoughts, acknowledge that they are there rather than trying to push them away. Thoughts are not facts. Just because you think it does not mean it is true.

Show your anxious self some love!

Once you have started to notice and acknowledge your anxious thoughts try and show them some compassion. It’s your brains way of keeping you safe, it’s just not always helpful. Rather than pushing them away think about what you would say to a loved one who was thinking and feeling the same. This is such a useful question and something I use myself. It helps give us a little bit of distance from our anxious thoughts. It’s not easy to take our own advice but the more you practice asking yourself this question the easier it becomes. When your brain inevitably says “I know that, but I can’t do it for myself”, what would you say to a friend that said that? It might seem a strange concept but practising speaking to yourself like you would a friend really works, but like with any skill it takes time.

The power of self-awareness

Sometimes there might be a clear trigger to feeling anxious, it might be something you are very aware of but other times it might just be an overarching sense of being on edge or feeling uneasy. I work with people who say - “I don’t know why I feel this way”, “my life’s ok”, “nothing really awful has happened, but I can’t get rid of this feeling”. You might then start to feel bad about feeling anxious or even feel anxious about feeling anxious, it can be a vicious circle. Whether you know the trigger or not self-awareness is key. Create regular times throughout the day or week to check in with yourself:

·       How am I feeling?

·       Is there any particular tension in my body?

·       Are there any thoughts or worries I am getting stuck on?

·       Thank your brain for trying to help and remind yourself thoughts are not facts.

·       The worries you have are really understandable but not helpful.

·       Am I doing the things I know that are helpful for me?

·       What small thing would be helpful right now?

If you are feeling anxious and getting stuck in a vicious cycle it can be helpful to talk to someone you trust or seek out support from a trained professional.

Written by Steph