What to Do When Feeling Anxious About Work? 10 Coaching Practices to Try

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For What to Do When Feeling Anxious About Work, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Practices that may help

1. Send proactive, brief status updates
   Update your manager on important work before they ask — in the format and frequency they actually want.
   Managing Up: Practical Skills for Working with Your Boss
2. Productive Problem-Solving vs. Worry
   Distinguish solvable worries — which need a plan — from hypothetical ones — which need acceptance or defusion.
   Worry Time: Containing Anxiety With Scheduled Worry
3. De-activation Strategies for Over-Arousal
   Use targeted techniques to reduce arousal when anxiety or over-activation is undermining performance.
   The Yerkes-Dodson Law: Finding Your Optimal Performance Zone
4. Use reflective simulation to convert anxiety into planning
   Mentally walk through what could go wrong — then convert each potential failure into a specific preparation action.
   Defensive Pessimism, Made Practical
5. Write about your worries before a high-stakes performance
   Offload performance anxiety by writing it out in full immediately before the event.
   Choking Under Pressure, Made Practical
6. Test worry predictions with small behavioural experiments
   Treat a feared outcome as a hypothesis and design a small real-world test.
   The Worry Tree
7. Run the full 5-4-3-2-1 sequence
   Work through all five senses in order: 5 things seen, 4 heard, 3 touched, 2 smelled, 1 tasted.
   The 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding Technique
8. Note the worry and defer it
   When a worry arises off-schedule, jot it down and postpone it to the window — don’t engage now.
   Worry Postponement, Made Practical
9. Engage with the present moment
   Once the edge comes off, redirect attention fully into an activity or your surroundings.
   The DARE Response to Anxiety, Made Practical
10. Contain worry with a scheduled worry period
    Assign worry a 20-minute daily window — and redirect it there the rest of the day.
    Accepting Uncertainty: The Core Skill in CBT for GAD

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• My boss keeps checking in and hovering over my work, and it makes me feel untrusted→
• I treat every single worry like a problem demanding a solution, so I build elaborate contingency plans for things that haven’t even happened and probably never will, and it leaves me wrung out→
• Right before I go on, my heart’s pounding, my hands are shaking, my mind’s gone tunnel-narrow and blank→
• Before anything important my mind floods with every way it could go wrong, and I keep trying to shove those thoughts down→
• Right before the test or the big moment, my head is so jammed with what-ifs and dread that there’s no room left to actually think→

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.