It’s easy to feel anxious these days. And 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 about a month ago. 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 (which I’m still deciding whether I do), it has some implications with what you can do.
Reducing your uncertainty is powerful. And reducing your feelings of powerlessness is powerful.
Assume your level of uncertainty is determined by the ratio of what you KNOW vs what you DON’T KNOW.
Assume your level of powerlessness is determined by the ration 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 increase attention to what we know — or turn our action to behaviors that increase what we know. And we allocate our attention and action to things we can control.
This isn’t rocket science, but it’s a reminder that might help if you detect yourself getting anxious at work.
I’d love your thoughts about whether you buy this equation.
