You generally aren’t anxious. But work has been out of control lately. And now your anxiety is interfering with work. Find 3 strategies for managing overwhelming anxiety at work.

You keep thinking you just have to give it time, but it’s been a LONG time. And it’s not changing. Your workload has just ballooned. The administration doesn’t seem to get it. And now your anxiety is affecting your work performance. You are aware that the stress is making your work even harder, but you don’t know what to do about it. You’ve been pushing through it but that, and getting out of bed, is getting increasingly harder every week.

Here are three simple cognitive and somatic strategies that you can use to manage your anxiety about work.

1. Turn off your stress response (somatic)

2. Dump your stress – empty the tank (somatic + cognitive)

3. Turn your focus (cognitive)

Turn off your stress response

When you encounter a stressor – your boss dumps another project on you; someone reminds you of an impossible-to-meet deadline; your partner gives you a hard time about being home late yet again – your body sounds an alarm and initiates a stress response. This response is useful in that it prepares you to have the focus and energy needed to respond to the threat.

But this system hasn’t evolved at the same speed as the modern day threats. So instead of your stress response being initiated once you flee the lion and terminated once you celebrate with the villagers, your stress response gets turned on by chronic problems and never turns off. The project that you’ve been struggling with for months that your boss just added a new component to? Your stress response has probably been active for the lifetime of the project – one month, six months?

Turning your stress response off, overnight for example, gives you some relief and lets your body rest and heal. Where you don’t shut it down, your body can’t rest because your sympathetic nervous system is active. When your fight or flight system is turned on, most of your rest and digest system is turned off, which means your immune system doesn’t have the space to strengthen itself; you may experience digestion issues; and your body doesn’t ever truly rest and heal.

The stress response does not automatically shut off when the stressor stops. Let’s say your boss leaves your office or you finish the additional part of the project that was dumped on you. At this point, the event or person or circumstance that initiated the alarm is gone or is over. Then, why is the overwhelming anxiety at work still present? It’s because the stress response process is still on-going. When you go home at the end of the day, you leave the office, the source of most of your stressors, but the stress walks right out the door and snuggles down in bed with you maliciously sniggering “just try and get some rest!”

To deactivate your stress response, you must signal to your body that you, and it, are safe. There are many different ways to do this, so if one of the suggestions below doesn’t work, try another or get creative and design your own intervention!

Some ideas for shutting off your stress response include exercising at a level of exertion that incites a “let down” feeling when you push until you feel the pressure exit your body – this works best in combination with visualizing a positive outcome; affection – a kiss that is awkwardly long or a bear hug that envelops you sends a signal to your body that you would not be doing this if you were fleeing a lion, so you are safe; or bottom of the belly laughter whether it’s incited by a comedy show, evening with a friend, or trying something novel.

In each of these, you wouldn’t be exercising, laughing, kissing, or trying something new if you were fleeing a lion, so your body understands it is safe. If these don’t appeal to you, read “Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle,” by Emily and Amelia Nagoski to find a wealth of suggestions.

Dump Your Stress – Empty Your Tank

All of us have an emotional limit. A point at which, our internal emotional tank fills up with too many emotions and, if we don’t empty it, it overflows. This can look like crying in the corridor, snapping at your boss, slamming a book on the table, shouting at your child, or not holding back hurtful words. It can also look like a constant thought “I can’t take this anymore.”

When you don’t empty your internal emotional reservoir, any encounter with a stressor will be difficult because you don’t have any way of coping with the stress that’s created. When the tank is empty and you encounter a stressor, you bite your tongue, you take a breath, you keep your patience, you empathize, or you persist. That’s because when you experience the stress and the negative emotions, you have storage space.

But over time, if the tank isn’t cleared out, stress and negative emotions pile up so much that you can feel it in the back of your throat. When the emotion is that high, you aren’t going to be able to hold back tears or bite your tongue. And if you do, then it will mean that the emotion doesn’t evacuate in an explosion, but in an implosion, which usually leads directly to burnout.

Some ideas for unloading your emotional tank include practicing Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), a form of tapping to release stress and negative feelings; meditation, where you focus on your sensations and leave the stressor such that your body starts the recovery process; transporting your self with dance, art, song, or film – watch a series that’s similar to what you are experience and cry it out. If it’s not to woo woo for you, dance a feelings death-birth cycle where your feet trod the stress to death and birth positive energy. Where you can bring the stress to life and intentionally release it, you empty your tank.

Turn your focus (cognitive)

Even if you turn the stress response off and dump the tank, you may still have a problem coping with anxiety. That’s because your mind is a whirring stirring generator of stress. Where your focus goes, your body follows. If you are thinking about the stressor and focusing on the negative possibilities of the situation, you are restarting your stress response. That thought that you are going to fail to meet the project deadline and your boss is going to be upset and that it’s not fair and that it’s your fault or his/her/their fault, and this is all going tits up, will kickstart the stress response you just turned off.

To shift your focus away from the negative counterproductive thoughts, you can challenge the thoughts. Ask yourself how true the thought is and try to produce concrete evidence – and by concrete I do NOT mean interpretations or opinions or hearsay – I mean emails, letters, direct statements – things that are tangible proof that your thought is true. Most of the time you’ll realize that what is proven in your head is actually based solidly on opinion or interpretation.

Then challenge yourself to a game to see if you can find any evidence that counters your thought. One of my clients actually found an email saying he had performed well when the evidence in his head pointed to the opposite.

And then reframe the thought to one that is helpful. If thinking you are a failure or going to fail isn’t helpful, how could you reframe it to see the situation differently? Maybe thinking this is a LOT of work, but I’m going to do my best, and my best will be enough helps you to see that someone who is dedicated and talented and cares, isn’t a failure and that if a person with those qualities “fails” then what is the learning to take from the experience?

One learning might be to measure your progress, rather than your to-do list. I have so many overachieving clients who come to coaching feeling like absolute failures. But all of them are looking up at the mountain of their to-do lists, which are not in their control (though I always challenge that thought!), instead of backward down the mountain of work that’s already done and is under their feet.

When they begin to see what they’ve accomplished and consider the contextual pieces – illness, struggling family members, financial stress, relationship difficulties – they suddenly get a different perspective that helps them shift the counterproductive mindset to one that recognizes what they’ve done. This mindset turns an evergreen to-do list into a feeling, rather than a character flaw. It helps my clients recognize that the feeling that they need to do more is actually a wish, not a flaw. And the wish to do more makes them more, not less.

Where your focus goes, your energy goes. Turn your focus to what empowers you and activates your rest and digest system, rather than your stress system.

Two things to keep in mind – you will have to make the choice to continually notice and practice these strategies. Where you practice for a month and see big difference, but then life gets busy and you forget to keep doing them, you’ll notice you shift right back into old patterns of anxiety. At that point you may wonder what you are doing wrong. I’ll tell you in advance, you aren’t doing anything wrong – you just need to start doing it again.

The second thing is to give yourself grace – studies show that meditation and mindfulness actually change your brain, creating new neural pathways. These aren’t created overnight, but over a process. If one time you successfully get yourself out of the negative thinking and the next you don’t, keep trying. The toddler doesn’t walk the first time they try – and if they gave up when they stumbled, none of us would ever walk! So shrug it off and try again.

If you want to map out a tailored plan to get yourself back on track, schedule a free 30-minute call with me! Your first step toward a calm and intentional way of being is on me.

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With gratitude to agnes-cecile (Silvia Pelissero) for artwork that opens our minds. Find her here: https://agnescecile.com/