Chronic Anxiety vs Work
“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”
Chronic anxiety can, in some ways, be akin to having a faulty radio, or in modern terms, spotty Wi-Fi. You may find, depending on the day, that your radio sound is crystal clear and your Wi-Fi is as fast as it needs to be. But other days may range from the radio emitting a low crackling noise to the Wi-Fi being excruciatingly slow. Anxiety works much the same way. Some days are wonderful, and you may forget you have anxiety. However, most days are somewhere in the range of a low buzz of worry to an overwhelming sense of inability to engage in important daily tasks. While our first instinct may be to constantly adjust the radio dials or restart the Wi-Fi over and over again, this often causes us to not only spend our day trying to fix something that is out of our control, but we end up feeling frustrated and even more overwhelmed. The key to working a job with chronic anxiety is to try to develop an understanding about your anxiety and try to work with it. If today is a low static radio day, then spending all of your time trying to get rid of the static will likely only serve to increase how much mind space the static takes up, rather than reducing how much actual static there is. Trying, instead, to accept that today’s radio is going to have static or that the Wi-Fi is just going to be a bit slower, will help to set your expectations in a way that doesn’t add extra stress to what you are already feeling.
I often get the question, what if today CANNOT be a slow Wi-Fi day? What if I have projects due and people counting on me?
This can be a very scary and emotionally overwhelming thought for a lot of people, but the answer is still the same. Unfortunately, despite our deepest desires, we are unable to fully control our thoughts, feelings, and emotions all day, every day.
In situations like this where we “can’t” have a poor Wi-Fi day, it is important to do the following. First, is to accept that we may not be able to do everything that we or other expected of us today. Second, trying to utilize our tools such as: calling upon trusted colleagues, friends, or supervisors to indicate our need for assistance on pieces that may feel like too much for us right now. Additionally, prioritization is another important tool. For example: a client once painted the picture of having all of your responsibilities sitting at a dinner table that only has a certain number of spoons. While we may want to make sure that each responsibility is “fed,” we must acknowledge that we may only have so much energy or “spoons,” and it can be helpful to decide which of our responsibilities are truly in need of immediate attention and which can wait. Try not to get stuck in the ranking process, just go with your gut.
Another good tool is to acknowledge when we engage in “all or nothing” thinking. Such thoughts might look like “I totally failed today” or “I’m so anxious I can’t do ANYTHING today” “I’m only a good enough friend/coworker/employee/human when I’m not anxious at all”. These kinds of thought processes hinder us in a couple different ways. First, they don’t tell the whole story and disallow us from acknowledging the work we HAVE done by over-emphasizing the use of single, monolithic, self-categorizations such as: winner, loser, failure, etc. Second, they distract us. When we become hyper-focused on beating ourselves up we have even less energy available to do what we were hoping to do. Lastly, because of their “all or nothing” nature it is quite likely that these types of statements are quite far from the truth. It is important to be intentional in taking a more realistic look at what we actually were and weren’t able to accomplish. This allows us to both hold acknowledgement for the things we did accomplish and the effort we put in while also holding the disappointment, frustration, anxiety, etc. that we may feel at not getting to do everything we wanted to. In conclusion, nobody wants slow Wi-Fi, but it is much easier to work with slow Wi-Fi if we chose to accept it rather than spend all day fighting it.
