It’s easy to feel anxious these days. I hear a lot about workplace anxiety.
Bosses are unpredictable. Champions leave, and you have to start over finding advocates who will sing your praises in rooms that you’re not in yet. CEOs make sudden, unreasonable demands. Layoffs loom.
Meanwhile there’s the anxiety we cause ourselves — fretting over what we might want, whether somewhere else could offer us a better work environment or whether we’d be wasting our time. Are we doing enough, doing it well enough? Are we liked, by the right people? For the right reasons?
I’m not a therapist. There’s so much about anxiety that I don’t know.
But here’s a tool I’ve been thinking about since I first read the book “Emotional Equations” by Chip Conley. It’s an “emotional equation,” and it purports to offer a strategy for reducing the anxiety we feel.
The equation is this:
Anxiety = Uncertainty x Powerlessness.
If you buy the equation, it has some implications with what you can do. To reduce the product of two multipliers, you want to look at each factor, and work to reduce one or both.
Reducing your uncertainty is powerful. And reducing your feelings of powerlessness is powerful.
Your level of uncertainty is determined by the ratio of what you KNOW vs what you DON’T KNOW.
Your level of powerlessness is determined by the ratio of what you CONTROL vs. what you DON’T CONTROL.
Rational people realize that the things we don’t know are infinite; as are the things we don’t control. But what we’re really talking about is our attention and our action.
To reduce anxiety, we direct our attention to what we know — or turn our action to behaviors that increase what we know. Now you have a research project, not an undefined dread. You know how to do research projects!
And we allocate our attention and action to things we can control. What we think, what we do, what we say. You already have a track record of success and self-discipline. We’re going to turn that to the issues that are causing you anxiety. (And one of the things you can control is…. you have a research project to tackle.)
This isn’t rocket science, but it’s a reminder that might help if you detect yourself getting anxious at work.
