Chapter 4: Worried Days: Anxiety at Work

A Letter from Leila

Dear Jiwoo, I am an accountant, and I am good at my job. I can find a missing figure in a long column faster than anyone on my team. Numbers have always felt safe to me, because they do what they are supposed to do. People are different, and meetings are the most different of all.

Every Thursday morning our team holds a meeting where each of us reports on our work for the week. By Monday I already feel a knot in my stomach. On Wednesday night I hardly sleep. I lie awake rehearsing what I will say and imagining every question that might go wrong. When my turn comes, my heart pounds, my face goes hot and my voice shakes. Sometimes my mind goes completely blank, even about work I know perfectly well.

The worst part comes afterwards. For hours, sometimes for the rest of the day, I replay every word I said. I hear my shaking voice again and again, and I am sure that everyone noticed and thought less of me. Twice this year I told my manager that I was ill on a Thursday, when really I could not face the meeting. I am ashamed of that, and I am afraid that one day someone will find out.

When I mentioned my nerves to a colleague, he smiled and told me to just relax and think positive. I wish I could. Everyone around me now uses the word "anxiety" about everything, and I do not know whether it applies to me. So are these just ordinary nerves, or something more? Why does my body react as if I were in danger, when I am only sitting in a meeting room? And what can I actually do? Thank you for listening, Leila

Dear Leila

Thank you for your honest letter. I noticed that you wrote about your shame and your fear of being found out, and I know that it can be harder to write those words than to describe any racing heart. Please know that nothing in your letter makes me think less of you. Many capable, careful people feel exactly what you feel, and many of them hide it as carefully as you do.

Let me say one thing clearly at the start. I cannot tell you from a letter whether what you feel is ordinary nerves or an anxiety condition. That question belongs to a doctor or another qualified professional who can talk with you properly. What I can do is tell you what different kinds of sources say about worry and anxiety, where they agree and where they differ, so that you can understand your own experience a little better and decide what to do next.

I also want to say something about your colleague. He probably meant well. But "just relax" is one of the least helpful things a worried person can be told, and later in this letter I will explain why. You are not failing because you cannot relax on command. Nobody can.

Ordinary Worry and Anxiety That Takes Over

Worry is a normal part of being human, and much of the time it is useful. It is the mind's way of looking ahead and preparing for what might go wrong. Picture a woman who sells fruit at a market. Before dawn, as she sets up her stall, she looks at the grey sky and worries that rain will keep her customers away. So she ties a cover over the stall and puts her most delicate fruit at the back. Her worry has done its job. It pointed at a real problem, it led to a sensible action, and once the action was done, it let her go.

Psychology textbooks use the word "anxiety" for the feeling of fear or unease about something that might happen. In this everyday sense, everyone feels anxiety sometimes, before an exam, a journey or a difficult conversation. The same word is also used for a group of conditions in which anxiety becomes so strong or so constant that it takes over a person's life. This double use of one word is part of why you feel confused. When everyone around you says "anxiety," some of them mean the everyday feeling and some of them mean something much more serious.

The sources also differ in tone, and it helps to know why. Some popular writing treats anxiety almost as a fashion, a word to describe any bad mood. Other popular writing treats every worry as a warning sign of illness. Psychology textbooks and public health guides usually take a calmer middle path. They describe anxiety as a normal human feeling that everyone has, and also as something that can grow strong enough to need care and attention. Helplines' public information adds another point that the textbooks sometimes leave in the background: that fear can feel unbearable in the moment even when it is not dangerous, and that it is always all right to reach out to someone when it does.

The textbooks, and the public mental health guides that draw on them, tend to describe the difference with similar markers. Ordinary worry is usually in proportion to the situation, it comes and goes, and it does not stop a person from living the life he or she wants. Anxiety that is taking over tends to be much stronger than the situation seems to call for. It lasts a long time or keeps coming back, it is very hard to control, and it begins to shape a person's choices, so that he or she avoids more and more places, people or tasks.

There is another difference that the guides often mention. Useful worry usually moves toward a solution, as the fruit seller's worry did. Anxiety that is taking over tends to go round in circles. It asks "What if?" again and again, but every answer only leads to another "What if?" Your sleepless Wednesday nights, rehearsing every possible question, sound a little like those circles.

I do not say this to put a label on you. I say it so that you have some words for what you notice. You might ask yourself, gently, how strong the fear is compared with the situation, how long it has been going on, how much of your life it touches and how much it is beginning to decide for you.

The Body's Alarm in a Meeting Room

You asked why your body reacts as if you were in danger when you are only sitting in a meeting room. The answer is that, as far as your body is concerned, you are in danger. In my letter to a nurse a little earlier in this collection, I described the body's alarm system: the stress response that speeds the heart, quickens the breath and tightens the muscles. Anxiety uses the same alarm. And this alarm is very old. It was built long before meeting rooms existed, and it cannot tell the difference between a wild animal in the grass and a room full of colleagues waiting for you to speak.

Why would a meeting set off such an alarm? General explanations of research offer one idea that many people find comforting. For most of human history, people survived by belonging to a group. Being rejected by the group could be truly dangerous. So the human mind became very sensitive to signs of being judged, criticized or left out. A fear of speaking in front of others is not a strange weakness. It is an ancient protection, firing at the wrong moment.

This also explains your blank mind. When the alarm is ringing, attention narrows onto the threat. That narrowing helps in a real emergency, but it makes it harder to reach calm, complex memories, such as the details of a spreadsheet. Your knowledge has not disappeared. It is simply behind a door that the alarm has temporarily closed. Many people find that the knowledge comes back the moment the meeting ends, which is exactly what this explanation would predict.

Your replaying afterwards is part of the same pattern. Textbooks describe how anxious people often go back over social situations in detail, looking for mistakes. Because the mind is searching for mistakes, it finds them, and it gives them far more weight than anyone else would. Here, general explanations of research describe something else that may help. People tend to believe that others notice their nervousness much more than others actually do. Your shaking voice sounds very loud to you, because you are inside it. To the people around the table, who are busy thinking about their own reports, it may hardly register at all.

Finally, there is avoidance. You told me, with shame, that twice you stayed away. I want to explain why that happened without blaming you.

When we avoid something we fear, we feel immediate relief. The mind learns from that relief that the situation really was dangerous, and that avoiding it kept us safe. So next time the fear is a little stronger, and the pull to avoid is a little stronger too. Psychology textbooks describe this cycle in detail, and public guides often warn about it. It is one of the main ways that ordinary fear can slowly grow.

The two Thursdays you stayed away were not moral failures. They were the alarm doing what alarms do. But they are also a sign worth paying attention to.

Steadying Yourself in the Moment

Now to your question about what you can do. I will begin with your colleague's advice, because it shows something important. Telling a frightened mind to "just relax" is a little like telling a ringing alarm to be quiet. Textbooks describe how trying hard to push a thought or feeling away often makes it come back more strongly.

Many traditions have a saying close to "do not cross the bridge before you come to it." The saying holds real wisdom, because so much anxiety is about bridges that we may never reach. But if the saying is used as an order, as in "stop worrying," it does not work any better than "just relax." The modern sources tend to suggest something different. Instead of fighting the alarm, they suggest working alongside it.

One way that public mental health guides often describe is grounding. Grounding means bringing your attention back into the present moment, through your body and your senses, instead of following your thoughts into the future. In a meeting, nobody needs to know you are doing it. You might press your feet flat on the floor and notice the feeling of the ground beneath them. You might feel the edge of the table under your fingers, or the weight of a pen in your hand. Some guides suggest silently naming a few things you can see, a few things you can hear and a few things you can touch. These small acts give the narrowed attention something solid and safe to hold.

Another way is the slow breath out that I described to the nurse. Breathing out slowly, a little longer than breathing in, sends a quiet signal to the body's calming system. You can do it while someone else is speaking, and nobody will notice. It does not switch the alarm off at once, but it can turn it down.

I think of a potter working at a wheel in a small family workshop. When a lump of clay wobbles as it spins, the potter does not fight it with force. She steadies her arms against her body, slows the wheel a little, and lets her hands find the centre of the clay slowly. Steadying yourself in a meeting can be like that. You do not need to stop the wobble by force. You only need to give yourself something steady to lean on while it passes.

You might also try a different attitude toward the shaking voice itself. Many people find it helps to stop fighting the symptoms and to allow them, saying silently, "My heart is racing, and that is all right. It is the alarm, and I can still speak." This is not the same as pretending to be calm. It is accepting that you can be nervous and still do the task. Many people who speak in front of others every day, from teachers to musicians to market sellers calling out their prices, still feel nervous. They have simply learned to carry the nerves with them.

On a ferry that crosses a wide river many times a day, a young deckhand has to read the safety instructions to the passengers over a loudspeaker before each crossing. In his first weeks, his hands shook so much that the paper rattled, and he was sure that every passenger could hear the fear in his voice. An older colleague told him that the nerves never fully disappear, but that they grow smaller each time you do the thing anyway. Months later, the young man still feels a small flutter before he presses the button. But now he notices it, takes a breath and begins, and by the second sentence the flutter has gone.

Preparing, and Talking It Over

Steadying yourself in the moment helps. Preparing beforehand helps too, as long as it is preparation and not endless rehearsal.

You might write down, on one small card, the three main points you want to report. Three points are easy to hold, even when the alarm is ringing. You might practise saying them aloud once or twice at home, which is different from rehearsing silently in bed at night. And you might prepare one simple sentence for the moment when your mind goes blank, such as, "Let me check that figure and send it to everyone after the meeting." Having that sentence ready can take away much of the fear of going blank, because you already know what you will do if it happens.

For your Wednesday nights, some public guides suggest an idea that is sometimes called worry time. You set aside a short, fixed time earlier in the evening, perhaps a quarter of an hour, to write down your worries about the meeting and anything you can do about them. When worries arrive later, in bed, you remind yourself that they have a time and a place, and that you have already looked at them. Not everyone finds this helpful, and the sources describe it as one tool among many, not a solution. But it may be worth a try.

For the replaying afterwards, you might give yourself a limit. Allow yourself a few minutes to think about the meeting, then write down one thing that went reasonably well, however small it seems, and one thing you might try next time. Then close the notebook and turn to something else. The aim is not to stop thinking about the meeting. The aim is to stop the thinking from taking over the whole day.

The basics I have mentioned in earlier letters matter here too. A tired body raises its alarm more easily, so the sleep you lose on Wednesday nights may make Thursday mornings harder. Many public guides also suggest physical activity, because moving the body gives the energy of the alarm somewhere to go. A brisk walk before work on a Thursday, or climbing the stairs instead of taking the lift before the meeting, may help your body use up some of the restless energy it has been storing since Monday. None of this removes anxiety, but it can lower the level from which the alarm starts.

Whether to talk with your manager is your choice. Some people find it a great relief to say, simply, "I find speaking in meetings hard, and I am working on it." A good manager may be able to help in small ways, such as sharing the order of the meeting in advance, or letting you send part of your report in writing. Other people prefer to keep this private, at least for now. Both choices are reasonable.

Finally, I want to come back to the question you asked at the start: is this ordinary nerves, or something more? Public guides suggest that it is a good idea to talk with a doctor or another qualified professional if anxiety lasts for weeks or months, if it is spreading into more and more parts of life, if you have sudden waves of intense fear that seem to come from nowhere, if you are avoiding things you want or need to do, or if it is affecting your sleep or your health. From your letter, some of those points may apply to you, especially the avoiding and the sleepless nights. A doctor or a qualified professional can help you understand what is happening and talk with you about what might help. Public guides describe anxiety as something that many people learn to manage, often with support, and they encourage people not to wait until it becomes overwhelming.

Talking to someone is not a sign that you have failed to cope. It is a way of coping. I will write more about asking for help in a later letter.

You find missing figures faster than anyone else. I hope that, with time and support, you will find your own steady voice just as surely. With warm wishes, Jiwoo

A Question to Think About

Leila, I would like to leave you and every reader with this question: what is one situation at work that your worry tells you to avoid, and what would the smallest possible step toward it look like? You do not have to take that step yet. For now, it is enough to picture it.

You might begin by noticing the moment when the worry first arrives. Is it days before, or only minutes before? What does it tell you will happen, and how often has that actually happened?

You might also think about what would make the situation a little less frightening: a small card with three points, a steady breath, one trusted person in the room, or a sentence ready for the moment your mind goes blank. Which one of these could you try first?