Coping with Anxiety in the Workplace

In relation to problems you may experience in your career, coping with anxiety can frequently come up. 

It is very difficult to cope with anxiety: worry about the future is characterised by feeling undefined, overwhelming and out of our control. 

I would suggest that the best strategy to pull anxiety back is to turn those characteristics around:

·       by defining it

·       by putting it in perspective

·       by clarifying what elements of your stress are within your control.

This post focuses on the elements of your stress within the workplace that are within your control. A job change may not necessarily solve this problem for you.  It can help to stop and think more closely about what you are experiencing in the now.  You are learning how to cope with stress.

What are the Problems Within the Workplace

The first step is to make sure you are very clear on where the problems lie.  Identify the sources of stress and whether you can develop a response to them.  For example, it may be that you are unclear about who you report to and what is expected of you.  Perhaps nobody is developing your skills. Or there may be elements of your work that you find especially challenging, and these may flood your thoughts but actually represent only a small portion of your work.  Perhaps stress is a pattern that has followed you from job to job, indicating that the core changes you want to make are in how you respond to work stress in general.  Perfectionism can also be a source of stress and may require a response where you adjust your personal expectations or your kindness to yourself when you experience a setback.  It’s important to be clear on what you are experiencing before you can decide how best to respond.

If you are trying to articulate what is wrong, this graphic may be helpful. These are ingredients for happiness and well-being. Where work is meeting none or few of these needs, it can be considered a source of stress.

Ingredients for Happiness and Well-Being. Source: Dr. Patricia Daly, University of Limerick, 2019

Are any External Factors Impacting on your Performance and Happiness

If one aspect of life is causing you distress and it begins to impact on other parts of your life, it inhibits your ability to act purposefully and protect yourself from burnout.  It may be helpful to mention to someone at work (that you trust) that you are experiencing difficulties outside work.  Each company culture is different, and someone who understands your work context could be a helpful ally in figuring out what would be the next step in order to cope with work tasks alongside this external stress. You may need nothing more formal than an occasional check-in by your colleague, or you may decide that it would relieve your stress to be open about difficulties you are experiencing outside work to a manager or to HR.  Generally it is best to try to put strategies in place that can keep home stress and work stress separate.

Relaxation is a Skill

If we can turn on relaxation, then we can turn off tension.  Regulation of anxiety through relaxation is a skill that can be learned through practice.  While implementing change, take time for yourself and self-care strategies that meet your needs, such as alone time, exercise you enjoy, phone-free evenings, early nights or meaningful connections with others.  Develop skills that you enjoy outside of work. Consider mindful practices that keep you in the moment, such as writing in a daily journal or sitting quietly while drinking a hot drink.  When you are working, pace yourself and plan breaks (or rewards) after periods of intense work.

Keep the Consultation Going

Not knowing when or how to say ‘help’ can lead to escalating anxiety.  If you do not have clear communication with your boss and this causes you stress, try to establish a regular slot or structure to communicate better.  Explore whether you can prioritise some tasks while delegating or postponing others.  There may be skills or training that would interest you and increase your enjoyment of work. Generally a communication breakdown is bridged when people have a better understanding of each other’s needs and experiences.  Make sure your employer understands your needs and keep the consultation going by communicating with your employer and colleagues on a regular basis.

Who Can You Talk To

A friendly chat with someone you trust is a vital support to stress in the workplace. Reach out to someone who knows you well and who can provide an external point of view.  This may be a family member, a friend, a colleague or a person you studied alongside.  Consider the value of a professional support service such as a counsellor, who can help you towards insight, self-acceptance and who can support you if you decide to no longer engage in behaviours that create stress for you in the workplace.  Sometimes, validation from someone who cares about us is all we need to cope.

Don’t Overdo It

When  managing anxiety in the workplace, small changes can make a big difference.  Small changes, implemented thoughtfully, can change your life.  Once you have a clear idea of what is causing you stress, try setting a reasonable response to it.    In the long run, little and often may the best strategy to change.

Empathic Listening Skills: For Clients Who Have Experienced Trauma

Several years ago I read a 1997 booklet called ‘Empathic Listening for Use with Traumatised Clients’ and thought it was full of ideas that deserved to be more widely read. I was delighted when the below note which I developed from the booklet was published by Guideline Magazine in March 2021. From September I will be offering CPD workshops to the branches of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors on the ideas presented in this post. It represents a small departure for my blog but I am so pleased to be part of disseminating these ideas to a wider audience.

Empathic Listening Skills: For Clients Who Have Experienced Trauma

Support work is a difficult task and this note aims to offer some guidance on how to handle a complex listening situation should it arise.  This note is not about counselling or questioning a person, it is simply about listening. 

Traumatised people are ordinary people who have been exposed to extraordinary situations.  Their feelings are also ordinary – but have been given the power to overwhelm and so seem extraordinary.

Listening in an Ordinary Situation

Essentially, listening is a decision made by one person to give another person their undivided attention so as to make them feel at home.  The first person decides to take their attention off their own concerns, thoughts and feelings for a while and to put it onto another person.

Listening is a difficult task since it is based on a total appreciation of the other person’s situation.  The more you move towards acceptance of another person’s point of view, the better you are becoming as a listener.

We use two methods to communicate that we are listening:

1.      Attentive Body Language

Your body language signals whether you are paying attention and willing to listen.

2.      The Listening Process

Observe: Notice non-verbal behaviour

 Focus: Don’t do anything else while listening

 Acknowledge: Acknowledge the message, even if you don’t agree with it

Respect: Let the speaker finish

Listening in an Extraordinary Situation

Shock or trauma is associated with situations that could be described as extraordinary.  Equally, the feelings which accompany trauma are extraordinary in that they tend to overwhelm the person so exposed.

The feelings which overwhelm at the core of psychological trauma are aloneness and helplessness.  These two emotions are the opposite of identity; people who feel alone and helpless begin to wonder who they are.

The presence of such powerful emotions require a form of listening known as empathic listening.

Empathic listening involves hearing and speaking

To be a good listener is to be a good student.  It makes sense to view the speaker as the teacher – and to stop thinking that you have something important to tell them.  Teaching and directing have their place, but not when you are supposed to be the listener.

Do not tell someone that you understand them.  Rather, ask them if you are understanding them – and they will tell you.  Understanding is an award, not a right. 

Empathy as an attitude

An empathic attitude can be similar to role play or drama. It’s not just a matter of mirroring or echoing the speaker, it requires the ability to get into the character of the other person.   To think as if you were them.  To try to see the world through their eyes.

Listen for the images the person uses, or the metaphors they use.  By reflecting these metaphors back to them, they will begin to show you the world as they see it.

As you seek understanding, the speaker will sense this and see themselves in you, and begin to feel less alone and helpless in the world.  This is empathic listening.

How to listen empathically

When someone begins to talk to you, there are two basic questions to ask yourself.

 1.      What is this person feeling?

 It is important to focus on how they are being/ feeling rather than what they are doing/ thinking.  The number of feelings listed can be used as a rule-of-thumb guide as to the number of issues involved.

 The classic formula is as follows: You feel (state the emotion) because (describe what they are thinking).  “You feel upset because of what happened.”

 If you find yourself saying “You feel THAT…”, then you are describing an opinion or a thought, not an emotion.  Avoid using “that” and instead put a feeling word. “You feel sad.”

2.      How does this person see the world?

People tend to see things in terms of doubles which represent opposites in conflict.  While the core conflict is probably “good vs evil”, this tends to appear as “us vs them”, “men vs women”, “old vs young”, “person vs person” etc.

A useful rule of thumb is the more negatives, the longer the process will be. This can help you to decide whether you are the right person to act as support.

If someone uses “but” in the middle or towards the end of a sentence, they are presenting opposition to what they have just said.  The words after the “but” are more important than the words before it but the speaker is not focusing on them. If you can reverse these statements, you may help them to connect their feelings (message from their body) with their thoughts (message from their head).  This may lead to insight. 

They say: “I feel upset at what happened but I think it is important to forgive.”

You say: “You think it is important to forgive but you feel upset at what happened.”

They say: “I do still feel upset.” (Insight)   

Your Task

A good listener does not explore the items in the client’s story, start asking questions or go after facts that they do not need to know.  Don’t be drawn into other people’s feelings who might appear in the story and don’t pass judgment.

This means:

• Never agree or disagree with what is said

• Never add a diagnosis or analysis to what is said

• Never exaggerate or minimise what is said

• Simply review what was said to the person’s satisfaction

If you don’t, you will be resisted by the client.  This resistance will appear as:

“Yes, but…. “

“I suppose you’re right”

“Well, not exactly”

“No!  That’s not what I mean!”

If the person senses that you are not “following” them, they will not feel listened to and your efforts will be classified as “not helpful”.

It can be difficult to find the words.  When Captain Cook first visited Australia, people could not “see” his ship because they had no word in their language for such an object.

Trauma and the Power to Overwhelm

This brings us back to the idea that traumatised people are ordinary people who have been exposed to extraordinary situations. The “power to overwhelm” appears whenever a person is faced with the unknown  and experiences a gap in their knowledge.  They fill that gap with demons.  The person does not have words to put on what they experience and so they think in pictures.

This seems to be precisely what happens in cases of shock; the person is exposed to something extraordinary and words fail them.  The person tends to think in terms of pictures instead of words.

Helping a Traumatised Client

If someone discloses trauma to you, do not ask the person to be specific about the actual traumatic incident.  They might feel that they are losing control and traumatised people need to feel in control of themselves and their environment.

Rather, you can acknowledge what they have said and ask them to be concrete and specific about their life before and after the event, but not the event itself.

 All the person wants from you is that you listen to them.

Projections

As empathy is a way of being with people, projecting could be described as a way of not being with people.  When you project onto the unknown, you create the illusion that you now know it and can control it.

In all of this, there is a danger that your creation of the person is no more than a projection of you, not an accurate image of the person. 

It is essential that you continually check with the person as to the accuracy of your understandings, and that you evaluate yourself to ensure that you are empathising properly.

 A person is projecting (not empathising) when:

• one experiences very strong feelings about the other

• one is convinced that the other is the source of one’s emotions      

• one is obsessed with someone or something

• one feels chained or tied to the other

• one feels isolated from the other

• the other begins to look strange or shady

• one’s feelings about the other become divided or mixed

• one becomes fascinated by an “-ism”

If this is happening, it is essential for your well-being that you ask for supervision or external help.

Be Self Aware

Please keep in mind that to listen to the traumatised is to risk becoming traumatised in turn.

The danger for those who care is that they can become addicted to helping with little awareness of what is happening.  And helpers can become angry or depressed when their efforts to control (or help) do not seem to work.

Because of this danger it is of the utmost importance that helpers, in turn, make use of a supervisor, if for no other reason than to ensure they are not becoming addicted to helping, and thus feeding from the people whom they set out to help in the first place.

Take care, and go gently with yourself.

Source: McCreave, E. (1997) Empathic Listening: For Use with Traumatised Clients. Belfast NI: A Twin Spires Publication.

Published in Guideline Magazine, a publication of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors, March 2021

Self-Care: Simple Tools that Can Work

I’d like to talk about self-care.  It’s important because if we look after how we physically and emotionally feel, our cognition will also function better and we will be able to think more clearly and make more reasoned decisions.    Self-care is in many ways the core of all good decision making. 

I am going to write today about a number of tools that I have found effective in diagnosing stresses and improving our relationship with ourselves.

Voice the Difficulties

The first step to change is to name the difficulties.  If you write out a typical day hour by hour, you can note where your stress triggers are.  Do they happen during the working day, during the transition from work to home life, during idle hours when dissatisfaction seeps in?

Manage the Manageables

Then draw a large container image. You can see the container as a membrane between yourself and the world. 

I draw three sides of a rectangle that’s open at the top.  Everything you write inside the jar are things you can control.  Everything that is stressing you but that is outside your control goes in the white space outside the jar.

The Container helps you to visualise the membrane between you and circumstances beyond your control

The container helps you to appreciate that there are limits to what is within your control and to visualise what life would be like if you focused your energies on managing the manageables.

The Incredible 5 Point Scale

The Incredible 5 Point Scale is actually a sensory tool developed to help children to emotionally regulate by becoming more aware of the stages and levels of their emotions.  However like many sensory tools, it works well for almost everyone.

To develop your own self-care scale, draw a table.  4 columns, 5 rows :

Example of an Incredible 5 Point Scale Table. Make your own!

And start to fill it in, relating your emotional state of mind to what you do when you are unaware and what you could do instead to move yourself down through the scale to a calmer state.

Reflect on What’s Changed

When developing new coping strategies for yourself, reflect on what you have learned about yourself that you didn’t always know.   Many of us have experienced transformative change during the pandemic and drawn on resources we didn’t know we had.  What’s changed for you?  What new information have you learned about yourself?  Did you discover new coping strategies or new joys in your life?

Make a list for yourself that you can draw on: Things that help you cope.  Be as specific as you can be. Is there a certain TV show, a certain moment in the day or a view you really enjoy? Name it!

Early Warning Signs

What are the warning signs for you when the self-care is slipping?   Are they likely to trigger you into feeling worse?  Make a note of them so that you can recognise when they’re happening. These may be the things that will move you up the 5 Point Scale instead of down

Maintain your Supports

Now that you have named what works for you , keep it in your mind by writing your list of coping strategies somewhere you will find it, like at the back of a work diary.

I like to write it in a gentle way.

I Can Try:

• Keeping a little structure on the week; Getting exercise; Only scheduling two things a day; Sitting in my garden; Drinking water with ice; Making time for play.

Start changing your life by changing your self-care and see if it helps you to identify your stress triggers and make clearer decisions.