Anxiety at work is something very common. Most people, unfortunately, suffer this condition in silence. There are many different forms of anxiety, including social anxiety, for example, which has been shown to interfere with work in several studies.
Anxiety should also be seen as a signal. It may be telling you something about how well areas of your life currently are aligning with what you need, value, and aspire to. Very often, people are afraid to look at what they truly need because they have given up hope that it could be satisfied in some or all areas of their life, including work. A first step towards burnout is to again reconnect with oneself and the world without anxiety. And while it is true that there are other areas in life that can bring us satisfaction and fulfilment, if work over the long-term just pays the bills but is otherwise wasted, we may become disillusioned, disconnect from what we do, the world and ourselves, and find ourselves in a state of burnout. Or we just experience more anxiety over time.
The Smaller Picture of Anxiety
The little things in everyday life, whether on the job or elsewhere, can sum up to a big thing. Communication with ourselves and others is key to how effective we are in our work and how satisified we are with it. Through communication, we make and find meaning in the world, and the more meaningful the world is to us the better we feel and the less anxious we are. A hallmark feature of depression is that we experience less meaning within and outside ourselves. The less meaningful and predictable the world seems the more anxious we also feel. From how you interact with others to how you organize your tasks and the time you allot for them can all raise or lower the stress you experience. But in order to make things more meaningful, small steps can often lead to immediate improvements. Taking short breaks and at intervals, longer breaks can all be helpful. Taking a walk during lunch break or talking to colleagues can be helpful.
There are different forms of anxiety, the one where worries, particularly about the future, are in the foreground or the one you may feel more physically, such as through sweating, increased heartrate, more rapid shallow breathing, and other feelings of discomfort. Frequently, people experience both worrying as well as bodily discomfort, the sense of not feeling fully comfortable and at peace in one’s own skin. Often, a first reaction is then to withdraw more from the world into ourselves, distrust ourselves and the world more, and cut helpful communication even further, which keeps the vicious cycle alive.
Anxiety in the workplace can lead to:
- Failure to meet deadlines or taking too long to do things
- Forgetfulness
- Inability to concentrate
- Inability to focus or excessive self-focus
- Sick days or lost productivity
- Spillover effect on family life
- Somatic (body) problems like tension, headaches, feeling of pressure, dizziness, and upset stomach
Often the way how we do things, whether on the job or outside of work, has become so engrained that we do not notice anymore that it is actually the cause of our dissastisfcation and misery in the workplace. However, by taking a step back and really seeing and refglecting on how we do things we can bring about massive change. Improving our strategies and ways of going about day to day tasks is helpful in getting greater satisfaction from the current and any future workplace. Noticing and connecting with the thoughts and feelings we experience in our work, helps us identify what may actually be unrelated with the job. For example, you may be distracted by thoughts about what is going on at home or by other issues and emotions you need to deal with, such as grief and loss. Therapy can be helpful in not only gaining greater clarity but also in reflecting on and resolving these issues.
How you do your work may also go against your personality. Some people are better working tasks sequentially and others doing them in parallel. It is important to know what works better for you because we all work differently, even if it is the same task. Aligning how you execute tasks to what feels more naturally is not only a way to be better at your work but it also makes it much more enjoyable. There may be many reasons why we feel we cannot be ourselves. Blocking may be experiences from our past, such as childhood experiences.
Quite often, it may not just be that we are worried about failure, but that we may also be worried about success. Think about how it feels like to be appreciated and praised by others? Is it a good feeling to be visible? Why or why not? Many writers who experience writers block and many professionals who find themselves standing in front of a seemingly inpenetrable wall have been successful in removing it by asking themselves not only ‘what if I fail?’ but also ‘what if I succeed?’
The Bigger Picture of Anxiety
Your work has to be meaningful for you, particularly in the long run. While we may frequently have to do things we do not like very much, over time the overall story has to make sense. In determining what is meaningful to you, it can help letting go of some social programming that may not be helpful. When you work with people who are in the late stages of their lives, they rarely pay much attention to their job titles or a particular award. They want to say it was a good ride. It made sense. Life was enjoyable, enjoyable not in a hedonistic way but in a truly fulfilling and contentful way.
Our feelings cannot decide for us whether to change a career or make some minor adjustments, which also requires the input of our thinking mind. However, they integrate a lot of information from within us, which brings us closer to where we need to be on our journey. This information in us is the product of our interactions with the environment and ourselves, our functioning in the situation and environment in which we find ourselves. Using feelings, thoughts, reflection, trying out things and reassessing where we are, we can find out what makes us tick, which helps us to avoid work that is not cut out for who we really are.
The Issue of Money
Money is important, but then it’s also not. Most of us cannot live without generating a financial income, particularly in countries where the work specialisation is so high that the link between our work and obtaining what we need to keep us alive goes through money. The food we eat has gone through many hands before it reaches us, and unless we work on a farm or know a selfless farmer, we can get food only through money. However, research on income and subjective well-being has shown that increased income has little or no lasting impact on happiness once we are classified as ‘non-poor’. The same researchers argued that money is mainly important to us as a social tool. And the more society believes in money as a social tool, the more important it seems to become. However, that is ultimately an illusion because it has no intrinsic meaning. It just is a means of exchange, like seashells on some Pacific islands. But meaningfulness is really the key in not only maintaining intrinsic motivation but also in increasing one’s quality of life, and thus lowering anxiety. If your work becomes more meaningful, your life feels more meaningful. Psychotherapy can help you to get there both more quickly and more comfortably, which usually has a very significant effect in reduing anxiety, burnout and other mental health problems.
Anxiety and Bodily Symptoms
If the anxiety comes with bodily symptoms, one should get them checked from the medical side for peace of mind. However, anxiety can cause many symptoms of discomfort, and when your anxiety improves any bodily symptoms that are due to the anxiety usually improve as well quite rapidly.