What To Do When Anxiety Won’t Let You Work (Especially From Home)
By: Vivian T.
Tags: Life Lessons, Anxiety, Personal Growth, Work From Home, Self-awareness

What To Do When Anxiety Won’t Let You Work (Especially From Home)

In other words: Things I do that help me (and maybe you too)

Photo by Kasturi Roy on Unsplash

It takes some of us a while before we understand there are things we can do to better soothe and understand our often crippling anxiety (specifically GAD).

It’s not every day I wake up and tackle my day ‘successfully’. In fact, it’s the exception and not the norm lots of the time — a great portion of our day can often be lost in anxious rumination.

Obviously, getting treatment and therapy for it is paramount. Aside from that, with a year like this one, you’re bound to pick up coping mechanisms that help you through the anxiety day to day — some healthier than others.

Here are some of the healthier ones.

Start with internalizing this: your resistance makes it worse

For the longest time, I resisted resistance. Meaning I resisted anxiety (anxiety is a form of resistance). Don’t do that.

When you do that you fighting fire with more fire. Soon you end up with an anxiety shitshow that you have no idea how to put out.

To define it, anxiety —

“is the mind and body’s reaction to stressful, dangerous, or unfamiliar situations. It’s the sense of uneasiness, distr ess, or dread you feel before a significant event.”

If anxiety is a reaction, and your answer to it is another reaction, you quickly start to see where the problem is. Reacting to a reaction doesn’t make it better. Responding can.

Sometimes our reaction to it is pretending like it isn’t there. Don’t avoid your anxiety — don’t pretend like it’s not there. Be willing to feel everything it drags along with it. It is how YOU feel, after all. Not someone else. So it takes loving yourself enough to sit with that uncomfortable feeling of nervous system overwhelm.

Too much of the “self-help” that’s out there is about subjugation and control — which often comes in the form of reacting. While looking at things through a mindful lens makes it more about acceptance — a response — and simply feeling what you feel, even if it absolutely sucks. It empowers you in a completely different way.

You’re no longer pushing a boulder up a rocky hill.

It took me a while to learn this. I still am.

Soothe your nervous system with breath

Though it can seem futile, breathing exercises do help you calm an anxious state that has you running around in circles. Breathwork has been shown to help calm your parasympathetic nervous system.

At first glance, it might not seem as promising as popping a pill you’ve been sold, so it’s easy to dismiss it. I know I did when I came across it. But it’s a natural practice with many long term benefits you often start experiencing in real-time. I’ve written about it before, and it’s a practice I keep revisiting if other things aren’t working.

It can be as simple as steadily and slowly counting to five on each full inhale and exhale and doing this consecutively three to five times. Do this intentionally for a few days to a week and see how it makes you feel.

Practice it a few times before completely discarding the idea. The “secret” is following through.

Read a few pages of fiction if you can

Fiction is escapism. Fiction is worlds contained in words at your fingertips.

All it takes is reading to activate another ‘reality.’

Reading fiction doesn’t require you to “be productive” or “do work” — instead , the story carries you along like a calm but rapid river.

It’s a great way to take your mind off your present anxiety, while still enriching your life in subjective ways that don’t necessarily have quantitative results.

Remember, it can’t always be about numbers. Art exists for a reason — and that reason isn’t always calculated gains.

Keep a few books you find interesting handy. For this, it takes actually making the time to seek them out when you aren’t in an anxious state. It’s like you’re preparing a rainy day library — but with intention.

Get your hands wet

This might seem like a silly thing to do — but it’s helped me stay away from an anxious meltdown in a corner when I feel it creeping up.

We all know movement helps when you’re feeling depressed. It can also help when you’re anxiously stuck in your head — it can be as simple as rinsing your dirty dishes with warm water. Seriously.

It’s non-committal. Doesn’t take much to get started. It doesn’t have to be perfect. There is no deadline. It’s just something you’re doing as you feel the warm water envelope your hands.

You don’t even have to full-on wash them. You can just rinse them. It’s a no-pressure activity with movement and sensory pleasure. It’s about small things that help you self-soothe and moves you through feeling your anxiety instead of keeping you stuck or adding to it.

Read through a collection of valuable tidbits

This is a personal practice I started doing after I realized there were SO many small bits of valuable information I’d come across that were worth keeping and revisiting (and also: you couldn’t possibly remember them all).

I‘m a creative. I like making things and mostly writing things down as opposed to typing. So I DIY’d a section in my personal planner (a lifesaver) where I write them all.

They help me one way: They help me re-shape how I look at my present reality.

And that by itself can make a world of a difference.

These range from tidbits of stoic philosophy, to things my therapist said that were helpful, reminders of personal negative thought patterns and stories, or a sentence in a favorite book that puts it all in perspective.

Reading them often makes a difference in calming me and my state of mind. Especially in the mornings when the pressure to be productive is high, and maybe you’ve gotten off to a bad start.

There is no one size fits all solution to the myriad of anxieties out there

Needless to say, there is no wand that’ll magically take your personal type of anxiety completely away.

If we were to wrap coping with anxiety in a pretty red bow, the box containing everything would be “self-compassion.”

If you suffer from any of the five types of anxiety you’re better off making self-compassion and healthy coping mechanisms a constant practice in your everyday life.

As with many things in life that can be remedied or helped, it all starts with self-awareness.