Do you experience overwhelming stress and anxiety while you’re at work? Do you worry about work even after work hours? Living with overwhelming anxiety can pinpoint to an underlying mental health condition like an anxiety disorder. The symptoms of anxiety disorders can be debilitating and negatively affect every area of life including relationships, physical well-being, and work performance. Impaired work performance can lead to a number of other issues including financial struggles. So, if you’re experiencing anxiety in the workplace, it may signify that you’re struggling with an anxiety disorder. In this case, it’s important to seek out what to do and how to get help for managing anxiety.

Educating Yourself About Anxiety

If you’re struggling with anxiety, one of the first helpful things you can do is to learn more about anxiety disorders so you can better identify if you’re living with one of these conditions. Some examples of anxiety disorders include:

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD): This anxiety disorder is characterized by general feelings of overwhelming stress and anxiety. People with GAD experience symptoms including rapid heart rate, sweating, inability to manage sleep schedules, trouble concentrating, and chest pains.

Social Anxiety Disorder: People living with this type of anxiety disorder may experience similar symptoms of GAD but specifically when they are in social situations and settings.

Phobias: Phobias are anxiety disorders that centralize around fears of specific objects, situations, and living things. Phobias are more than fears – these fears are debilitating enough to keep people from doing the things they need to do to survive and enjoy life.

Panic Disorder: This type of anxiety disorder is characterized by episodes of intense fear brought on by immense levels of stress that can bring about symptoms that resemble a heart attack. Individuals who experience panic attacks may develop panic disorder due to intense fears of having another panic attack.

How Does Anxiety in the Workplace Affect Performance?

There are a number of ways that anxiety can negatively affect a person in the workplace including:

• Not having enough focus to perform and execute tasks
• Experiencing mood swings that can put your career relationships and reputation at risk
• Not getting enough sleep leads to a lack of awareness at work and exhaustion which can lead to poor performance
• Feeling self-doubt to perform daily tasks as stress and anxiety can lead you to worry about whether or not you can actually do the job at hand

Getting Help for Managing Anxiety in the Workplace

If you feel that your stress and anxiety are negatively affecting your work performance and nothing you try is helping, reaching out for help is the next step. Professional mental health specialists can provide you with the tools you need to learn how to better manage anxiety. Traditional treatments, medications, and counseling therapies can all be used in congruence to provide you with the support you need to get back to feeling yourself at work so you can thrive and be the best version of yourself you can be at work.

Delray Center for Healing offers outpatient treatments for people who are struggling with the symptoms of anxiety disorders. Find out more about how we can help on our website.