How to Deal with Anxiety in the Workplace
It’s Sunday and you notice that familiar feeling of dread washing over you, one that seems to visit you every week. It always kicks off in the same way, once you realise the weekend is coming to an end, and you have to face the idea of gearing up for another week at work. Your stomach is in knots, worries circling round in your head as you think to yourself, “I don’t want to go to work tomorrow”. The anticipation of work builds over Sunday, leaving you feeling distracted by your thoughts and unable to fully be present and enjoy your evening. You’re irritable and snappy with your family, feel low energy, and a little down. You don’t sleep well on Sunday nights either. You wake up the next day with Monday morning dread, already feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders as you commute into work.
If this sounds like you, you’re not alone! Workplace anxiety and stress is a very common experience, especially as you climb the career ladder. With more responsibility comes more stress, pressure, and expectations. The stakes are high, and you need to deliver. You may be dealing with demanding managers, clients, challenging colleagues, or impossible deadlines. It may feel like there are never enough hours in the day, and you are constantly playing catch up, coming in early, leaving late, and skipping lunch.
Over working yourself can work in the short term. You can use the extra adrenalin to boost your performance temporarily. Unfortunately in the long run, this approach always catches up to you as the body is not built to sustain this. Over time, research shows this leads to burn out, exhaustion, fatigue, anxiety, and depression.
So what can you do about this? How can you stop work stress from taking over the rest of your life? Here are my top 3 tips as a clinical psychologist to get that workplace anxiety under control:
- Set boundaries. As an experiment, commit to one week of enforcing healthy work/life boundaries and notice how you feel at the end of the week. One week of taking all your allotted break times, leaving work on time, refraining from checking work emails outside of work hours. It may feel hard at first, but sometimes taking breaks away from tasks (even if you are forcing yourself) actually makes you more productive, not to mention less anxious and stressed.
- Have a transition time when you leave work. This is usually a 30 minute block of time to help transition from your work life to your home life. It can involve listening to your favourite music on the way home, going for a walk or a work out as soon as you finish work, or coming home and journaling. It can be any activity that helps you leave work at work. The key is that transition time gives you that extra bit of time to act as a buffer between work and your personal life so that a bad day at work will be less likely to spill over into other areas of your life.
- Proactive, non negotiable stress relieving activities. Daily self care is important to helping people manage anxiety, as it restores our capacity to cope with day to day stressors. Unfortunately, in times of high anxiety, people usually let go of these self care activities, or allow them to be squeezed out due to time pressures. It’s important to note that socialising, hobbies, exercise, and other calming activities serve an important function in helping you manage anxiety. When you de prioritise them, stress and anxiety build up again and this can often lead to feeling overwhelmed. Whether it’s a simple cup of tea, deep breathing for five minutes, or a full on work out at the gym, intentionally committing this time to yourself will help you stay on top of managing your anxiety!
Next time you find yourself feeling anxious about work, try out these top tips and notice which one makes the biggest difference for your work/life balance!
If you are concerned about anxiety please contact me.
