Source: Lifehack
It can be disheartening to come across yet another self-help article that tells you to go for a walk or take a bath whenever you’re feeling stressed. Stop reading it! You’re probably done with listening to or reading reactionary advice about how to manage what you feel and experience.
Let’s face it. It doesn’t actually address the root causes and it’s a band-aid, temporary fix.
If you no longer want to just cope with anxiety and stress you experience in the course of your work, read on. Learning how to predict, be prepared for and apply proactive strategies to embrace the triggers which drive your adrenalin and cortisol hormone levels skyward, will have you thriving in times of stress.
So get ready to learn some performance psychology strategies and techniques that are truly going to help you long-term.
There is a catch. You have to commit different effort until you bed down these changes which will have you responding – not reacting – to your work-related unique stress and anxiety triggers far differently to how you have been up until now.
1. Realize that anxiety and excitement are physiologically expressed the same way
Unfortunately, every which way you look, the word ‘anxiety’ itself automatically attracts a connotation that we’re weak because we experience anxiety and stress responses. It is seen as something unhealthy. Negative self-judgement, self and talk and labels quickly transpire in our minds.
Sport and performance psychologists ascribe a different perspective to anxiety: arousal. In decades of research, optimal arousal responses have been shown to deliver peak performance not just in sporting contexts but in work and business as well. Everyone – and that includes you – will have their own optimal threshold of anxiety or stress symptoms for each circumstance that drives you to be alert, focused and ready to perform where it matters.
Unfortunately we often get stuck on the how badly our experiences have felt. Our physical symptoms combined with the emotional derailing of the moment, have a purpose: to keep the status quo. What we don’t realize is these physical symptoms and unhelpful thought processes operate to keep us safe. But we ended up feeling stuck.
When you have been anxious at work or remember times when those physical stress symptoms bared their unwelcome heads, see if you can ask yourself if there is an excitement component to what you are experiencing. Can you recognize that there might be a benefit to what you are experiencing here?
Start working with a coach or psychologist to undertake hind-sighted reviews of when you’ve felt work-related stress and anxiety.
Explore whether or not there have actually been positives in your experience that to date, you have not been able to see. Never do the analysis in the heights of feeling stressed or anxious. It’s like trying to throw more clothes into a front-loading washing machine that’s already mid-cycle. You’ll only end adding to the chaos!
Do, however, start asking yourself this question more. It will open up a perspective of possibilities as to how what you’re experiencing truly is helping you.
2. Look beyond the obvious to face deeper underlying causes
You don’t need yet another scientific explanation of what anxiety is.
You know what your own definition of anxiety and stress is. You know what it feels like. However, if you experience the symptoms of stress and anxiety continuously without any apparent triggers, (i.e. general anxiety)[1] detecting where it transpired from can be a more complex journey of discovery.
It’s also unlikely you can take an unpredictable required amount of time to figure it out. You can’t just stop the train, ask to get off and tell the world you’ll get back on board when you think you’re ready. When you have work demands, what can you do to keep moving and managing how you feel along the way?
If your experiences of stress and anxiety in situations are unique to you and not shared by others, it is likely values, principles, morals and ethics of your own are being violated or dishonored in some way. When this happens, our bodies will naturally show signs of stress and anxiety even if we try to convince ourselves with self-talk to ‘get over it’, ‘don’t over-react’ or ‘toughen up butter cup’. Your stress and anxiety will remain, each and every time one of those values and principles are violated and the negative effects will compound.
If you keep getting colds and flu’s despite eating well, exercising, sleeping properly and taking supplements you can guarantee deeper issues are going on that you need to face. We’re trying to trick ourselves and ignore what’s really aggravating, scaring or depleting us. We need to go deeper.
Let’s look at an example:
Customers not paying on time and your experiencing financial stress.
Customers who don’t pay on time are every business’ headache. When you are constantly stressed, angry and questioning your self-worth chasing for payment, there could be a few things to explore…
The post How to Cope with Anxiety and Stress at Work: 5 Psychology Techniques appeared first on FeedBox.