Anxiety is a major hurdle in the realm of mental health and well-being for adults. According to a survey in Great Britain, 1 in 6 adults faced some kind of ‘neurotic health issue’ in the week leading up to the survey, with anxiety and depressive disorders topping the list. Considering that adults often spend a considerable part of their waking lives at work, it’s understandable that anxiety, regardless of its origin, will start to affect their work environment.
Feeling anxious usually occurs when we feel like we have too much on our plate or when we believe that everything needs to be done immediately and that each task is incredibly daunting. If anxiety becomes a regular occurrence, it can easily turn into a habit. This means that even the smallest things can trigger it and make it feel like it’s coming out of nowhere.
There are only two types of anxiety. No matter how complex your anxiety maybe it is useful to remember that: Anxious apprehension and Anxious arousal.
Anxious apprehension is verbal worrying. Talking to yourself, inside your mind in an anxious way. What is interesting about anxious apprehension is that when people’s brains have been scanned during an EEG, primarily, it’s the left brain that lights up if someone is running anxious apprehension. When they’re having those anxious thoughts, it’s their left brain that gets illuminated and that’s because the front lobe of your left brain is associated with speech. That’s why self-talk comes into it.
The other kind of anxiety that we have is anxious arousal. This one relates more to anxious feelings like fear and panic. This kind of anxiety typically lights up the right brain. If we conduct an EEG brain scan on someone behaving fearfully or showing panic, it activates the temporal lobe which we associate with danger – and it sends the message that we need to avoid that danger.
If you have anxiety in the workplace, you can begin to unpick your anxiety by assessing how your anxiety works. There is a sequence of steps that you follow, which you probably do very quickly and have not been aware of until you begin to slow down the process and study them. To do this it may be easier and more effective to work with a Hertfordshire-based NLP Practitioner or Hypnotherapist who will be trained to help you have more awareness of your thoughts and actions.
For example, you may start the process of anxiety by making images in your mind of all of those tasks at work that cause you to feel overwhelmed. Or a picture of your boss’s face looking disappointed. It might be that your self-talk in a particularly panicked or aggressive way. You may be particularly good at tuning into your internal sensations and notice small flutters that are then distorted to be out-of-control stomach-churning worries.
The anxiety you experience could be caused by work itself, in which case a therapist can work with you to help you have better control of your emotions. This isn’t just to enable you to be more productive – it is important to increase your overall enjoyment of your time at work so that you do not keep putting your body through unnecessary stress.
As an NLP Practitioner in Hertfordshire, I often work with my clients in practical ways too. For example, it might be that there are changes to your routine or working habits that can alleviate the anxiety at work too.
By Gemma Bailey
www.HypnotherapyandNLP.co.uk
