Anxiety’s Large Impact At Work
For many professionals, anxiety feels like a necessary part of the work experience. After all, you have a lot weighing on your shoulders—you may be juggling numerous projects, doing challenging creative work, managing people or teams, and onward, all the while taking on new roles or projects before you can clear your desk of ongoing ones. While the particular work you’re doing depends on your job, there is often a constant: the anxiety and stress that you feel humming through your body and mind.
It's easy to think that this is inevitable. Perhaps you would rather not be anxious, but you assume that working at a high level means being stressed out and there’s no way around it. Anxiety that becomes habitual may not even feel like anxiety anymore, but rather, just like the way things are. You may even have positive associations with work stress and anxiety. There are cultural messages all around us that equate stress with high-prestige and well-paying jobs, as if the level of stress you feel in some way equals the job’s importance. Or, and this is a common one, you may feel that you need to be anxious to keep motivated at work—you may assume that if you stop feeling so anxious, your quality of work will decline, and your career will be in peril.
This leaves you in quite a predicament! Many of us spend a very high percentage of our waking hours working. Spending all these hours under anxiety’s thumb has all manner of negative impacts on our emotional and physical wellbeing, and on our relationships and family lives. And yet it often feels as if you can’t leave anxiety behind, or don’t know how to do so.
Anxiety therapy can help tremendously. Together we can come to understand your specific sources of anxiety and the patterns these create, and support you to experience work as productive but also gentler, more spacious, and more joyful. This doesn’t mean that work won’t be stressful at times, or that every job is the perfect fit for what you want work to be like. But we can support you to move through and out of stress rather than getting caught in an anxiety cycle that become the norm. We can also support you to navigate difficulties at work in ways that allow you to feel empowered rather than anxiously stuck. Anxiety therapy can support you to flourish at work without perpetual anxiety and its host of negative impacts.
Despite messages from movies and pop culture that link anxiety to high-level performance, constant anxiety is more apt to hinder your career and performance than to help it. While in the short-term anxiety can provide bursts of motivation, in the longer term it typically leads to decreasing productivity and burnout. All told, the impacts of habitual work anxiety can include: distractedness; difficulty with creative ‘flow’; losing the joy that you used to feel in work; falling into conflict with coworkers or having difficulty with bosses; and beyond.
Anxiety therapy is a wonderful way of interrupting this cycle and helping you to find greater ease in your professional life. I invite you to contact me at (510) 500-9722 so that we can explore working together.