Work Anxiety and Therapy
Work anxiety, the “Sunday scaries”, or whatever we call the persistent fear and anxiety associated with one's job, can significantly impact both professional and personal life. If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed, fixated on work, or paralyzed with procrastination even while you’re stressed, therapy can provide valuable tools to help you manage and alleviate these anxious feelings.
The Impact of Work Anxiety on our Lives
Intense work anxiety rarely stays focused just on work. We often feel its impact in other areas of live, where it can:
Impair relationships. Chronic stress and anxiety can strain relationships with family, friends, and romantic partners. Being preoccupied with intense anxiety can make you irritable, withdrawn, or less present in your relationships.
Contribute to physical and mental health problems. Work anxiety and the chronic stress that accompany it can lead to various physical symptoms, such as headaches, digestive issues, and poor sleep. These symptoms in turn may also contribute to poorer mental health – both general anxiety and depression, as well as a sense of hopelessness or overwhelm.
Lead to burnout. Chronic or sustained work anxiety can lead to burnout. Though this term is used quite often now, we may experience it as a state of general emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion that decreases the overall quality of our lives.
The Role of Therapy
Therapy offers a safe and supportive space to explore how work anxiety is impacting you today, as well as understand its connection to other parts of our lives. Increased understanding of our anxiety helps us to develop ways of coping with it and interacting with it differently. In therapy, we might:
Explore past experiences. Your past experiences, including how you were brought up, the messages you learned about how you need to achieve, as well as past professional experiences, can all play a significant role in your current anxieties. Examining these past experiences in a safe and non-judgemental environment may help you understand how they’re influencing your current feelings and behaviors.
Address connected, underlying issues. As you begin therapy, you may discover underlying–often unconscious–factors that may be contributing to work anxiety. These often include things like negative core beliefs you hold about yourself, unresolved conflicts, and defense mechanisms you’ve used in the past, that may no longer be working. Therapy provides a forum to explore and adapt.
Build resilience. By exploring and identifying more of your past, related drivers of anxiety, you can build a stronger sense of self, and begin to develop healthier ways of coping with stressful situations, that don’t fall back on negative patterns, like self doubt, negative self-talk, or feelings of paralysis.
Seeking support for work anxiety is often where the work starts, but not where it always stays or ends, because of how connected these core issues may often be to other areas of our life. It can also be a sign of strength and readiness for things to change. Book a free consultation here to get started.
