Responding not reacting: How mindfulness can help with anxiety at work

As I open my Zoom window to lead a meeting with 10 experts I have never met, on a topic I know nothing about, I notice my pulse has quickened, my palms are sweating, and I feel a familiar clenching in my chest. 

As a Book Sprint facilitator, it’s my job to lead groups of often very high-powered, smart people through intensive collaborative writing processes. After eight years, I am confident and know what to expect. But still I’m feeling anxious. 

Before I started practicing mindfulness and meditation, I would have tried to ignore the anxiety or talk myself out of it. This never really worked but I believed I had the power to make it disappear. 

This changed when I heard a talk by a meditation teacher who had spent years diligently practicing meditation at a monastery. Despite his years of practice, he said he would probably experience anxiety every day for the rest of his life. 

“Well, if he hasn’t cracked it, how will I?” I wondered.

The difference between experiencing anxiety and being anxious

Through mindfulness practice, I realised the meditation teacher had pointed to an important distinction. There is a difference between experiencing anxiety and being anxious.

When we are anxious we are caught in the grip of anxiety. We identify with it and tend to go wherever it drives us. 

When we mindfully experience anxiety, on the other hand, we are aware of it and can identify what is happening. The experience of anxiety becomes less overwhelming, and we can gain some perspective on how we are reacting.

Photo by Michelle Lemen, Pezels.

How can mindfulness help?

Mindfulness involves “maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment, through a gentle, nurturing lens,” according to Berkeley University’s Greater Good Science Center. 

Mindfulness teaches us to track what’s happening in our bodies, ground in our present-moment experience, and shift out of the overwhelming mental experience of anxiety. This changes how we might usually relate to anxiety. 

When I’m anxious, I feel as if something is very wrong because that’s how my mind interprets what’s happening in my body. In my situation, leading an important meeting, there is a torrent of fear-based thoughts like “Will they take me seriously? What if I mess this up?” These thoughts are part of the mind’s normal reactivity in this kind of scenario. 

If I shift my attention to my body, I notice the physical experience of anxiety: heart beating fast, heat in the palms, short and shallow breathing. This present-moment awareness brings my mind out of the content of my thoughts. 

I can then also open my awareness a little more to notice the feeling of my feet on the ground and the sound of the fridge humming nearby. Doing so helps my mind relax, while remaining awake and alert. 

In this calm yet focused state, I can proceed with facilitating the meeting, calling on the skills and experience I have gained over the years. If anything does go wrong, I will be much better equipped to deal with it.

Mindfulness teaches us to cultivate the capacity to respond instead of react. 

Reacting in anxiety-inducing situations means hurtling into a meeting without taking a moment to check in with ourselves or blasting off an email without a second read. 

Responding involves slowing down and noticing our internal experience before saying or doing anything.    

Work can be a major source of anxiety. When we’re anxious at work, we might behave in ways we don’t want to – like procrastinating or being irritable with colleagues. Work-related issues might keep us up at night, stressing about tomorrow, or keep us distracted when we want to be present with our loved ones. 

There are numerous reasons to feel anxious at work. These are different for everyone, depending on their unique psychological make-up and life experiences. 

Mindfulness techniques for dealing with anxiety at work

The most common approach to anxiety might be to treat it as a problem that needs to be fixed by eliminating the cause, usually by avoiding the trigger.

Mindfulness offers an alternative view: perhaps there is nothing wrong with anxiety.* It is part of the spectrum of human emotions. We can’t eradicate it, but with training and practice we can turn down the dial of anxiety so we’re able to respond from a calmer place.

There are two things to practice when we feel anxiety arising or when entering a situation that we know will cause stress:

Slowing down: Anxiety causes us to go faster – in our movements and thoughts. Mindfulness invites us to slow down, for even just a few seconds, before moving on to the next task or conversation.

Paying attention: Anxiety causes us to have tunnel vision (we focus on the worst-case scenario for example), or it makes our attention scattered. Mindfulness invites us to broaden the scope of our awareness so that we sense what’s happening in our bodies and all around us.

By slowing down and paying attention while we go about our work days it’s possible to turn down the dial on anxiety and operate from an increased place of calm.

If anxiety is here to stay, there is no point in fighting it. Let’s try changing our relationship with it instead.