Turning anxiety from a challenge into an ally

You wake up in the morning in a panic long before your alarm is due to go off and wake you up for work. You are filled with a deep sense of dread about the day ahead uncertain about the challenges that you will face and whether you can address them in an effective manner. Your palms start sweating on your morning commute to the office…even if it is from one room to another room in your house. These are some of the signs that you are suffering from anxiety.

A recent report points out that anxiety is one of the most underdiagnosed psychological challenges that modern corporate leaders face. Their world has been significantly disrupted over the past two years and the pace of change is so rapid that coping mechanisms that were developed a month ago may well be redundant. During some recent discussions with prominent turnaround professionals, they pointed out that anxiety is one of the leading causes of poor decision making. This ultimately leads to mismanagement which is a root cause of financial distress.

Is it possible to take anxiety and transform it from a stumbling block into an ally? I recently read an article on the McKinsey website where McKinsey Global Publishing’s Daniella Seiler chats with Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Hunter College and founder of Wise Therapeutics about this topic. The interview is replicated below.

What does a healthy mindset about anxiety look like?

It’s one in which we look at anxiety not as a problem to solve but as a feature of being human. Considering the difference between anxiety and fear helps us understand this. Fear is the present certainty; we’re absolutely certain that right now we’re in danger. But anxiety is not that; it is apprehension about the uncertain future. We know something’s coming around the bend and it could be bad, but it could also be good. A healthy mindset about anxiety acknowledges that there is real advantage to the experience, and it’s not the same as an anxiety disorder every single time.

A second aspect is considering anxiety as information, not a failure of happiness. It’s telling you that something could be dangerous or that there’s something you care about. We’re in it to win it when we’re anxious. A smoke alarm analogy is helpful: if one goes off at home, you wouldn’t put in earplugs and move to another part of the house where you can’t hear it. At the very least, you’d go check the batteries or go see if there really is a fire. When we think of anxiety this way, that changes everything about how we face anxious moments, whether they’re controllable or not.

A third aspect is thinking of anxiety not as something that overwhelms us when we face the uncertain world but rather that helps us navigate uncertainty. And of course, there’s nothing so certain in the human condition as uncertainty.

In practice, what effects can this mindset shift have?

When we listen to anxiety as information that’s energizing us, instead of frightening and depleting us, it helps us be more innovative and creative. A group at Harvard did a study in 2013: they brought people into the lab struggling with social-anxiety disorder and had them do something called the Trier social stress test. You get up in front of a panel of people who are frowning and looking negative on purpose, then prepare a public speech in just a few minutes, then do a difficult math problem—which is really hard for socially anxious people.

So they took half of this group and taught them something about anxiety. For example, when you feel butterflies in your stomach and your heart is racing, that’s not a bad thing. That’s your body preparing to do well. That’s your body marshaling its resources to be brave and persistent. With the other half, they gave general information about anxiety but didn’t teach them this new mindset. The folks who learned that anxiety could be helpful did better during the experiment and also had lower blood pressure and heart rates. Their bodies showed fewer signs of the wear and tear that is, over time, one of the reasons why stress can be problematic. This mindset shift is the way that we can start to use anxiety, even when we’re nervous, to be truly helpful.

How else does anxiety help you? To see possibilities. Anxiety is that feeling that there is a possibility of possibilities. When we think of anxiety that way, we realize that it can make us more persistent. It can make us more fluent in thinking outside the box and being innovative, because we see a possibility for something good to happen.

How can we work with anxiety to use it to our advantage?

I often talk about a three-part framework for this. One is that we remember that anxiety is information, and we need to listen to it. Two is that sometimes it’s not useful information. We can learn to tell the difference. And when we know it’s not useful anxiety, we use the tools we have to let go and immerse ourselves in the present moment, get help through therapy, do those things that help us scale back from the future. Three is to hitch that anxiety to purpose, to something that really matters to you.

Purpose doesn’t have to be some overwhelming mission. It doesn’t have to be running a company and crushing it at all times—which is a great purpose. But it can be something tiny, like wanting to increase your family’s social connections to the world. Maybe you’ve decided: I feel a little isolated after the pandemic. I want my partner, my kids, and I to get out there and find community. That can be purpose.

What role do managers and leaders play in fostering a healthier mindset about anxiety among their employees?

When I think about leaders and managers, there’s so much awareness now that it’s ok to not be ok—which has been great. That’s one lesson we all learned during the pandemic, and companies have come to the table to understand how to support their employees. So, one big step that I think a lot of companies are already taking is starting more open, destigmatizing conversations about mental health. Another is shifting the company culture toward an understanding that mental health is health.

At the same time, I think we’re ignoring the emotional labour that we now expect of leaders and managers. You’re a leader in your business and now you want to—and need to—have more open conversations about anxiety among your employees. But now that labour falls on you. Is it your job to monitor your employees or to remove all the obstacles that they face, so whenever you see them being anxious, you need to fix it right away?

I believe [that this is] unfair emotional labour to put only on leaders if there’s no real institutional support. Leaders need to realize that it can’t all be on them. That’s not what their job was meant to be and it’s not really what a company does. A company has to take care of its employees, but it also has a bottom line. And managers and leaders are right in between, where they’re trying to navigate these two often conflicting goals.

I think that having conversations about the emotional labour that’s happening in the workplace, and how we can take some of that burden away from individual leaders and make it more institutional—to have formalized approaches in place—is also an important step.

In discussions of mental health, how emotionally honest should the workplace be? (subhead)

When I think about anxiety and mental health in the workplace, I also think about safe spaces. We have this idea that there has to be emotional safety for people to share what they’re experiencing when it comes to mental health. But the problem is that a lot of leaders feel nervous about those safe spaces. That if they say the wrong thing or they take one wrong step, they’ll do more damage than help. Or that they’ll be cancelled.

I like to go back to the origin of safe spaces, which looked nothing like those of today. Kurt Lewin, a father of social psychology, created the first safe spaces after World War II. The goal was to improve awareness about racial and religious bigotry, so there were less of those prejudices in the workplace, and everyone could thrive. But these spaces were anything but emotionally safe. They were raw. They were honest. People were taught to communicate openly about their personal biases, with the assurance that there would be confidentiality and that they would not be judged. All of the research from that movement showed that those difficult conversations really allowed powerful change to happen in the workplace and beyond.

So when I think about navigating anxiety at work, I think about those difficult conversations. That we shouldn’t protect our employees from anxiety, from every uncomfortable emotion, but rather help them work through it. That these emotions we think of as dangerous are powerful, transformative, and crucial if we want to make things better internally, with our own mental health as well as within the workplace.

The role of turnaround professionals

This section was inserted by Turnaround Talk.

South Africans have gained a global reputation of being hard workers who will go the extra mile within their job. This reputation has been reinforced by the number of South Africans that lead major corporations globally. On the other end of spectrum, we have countries like France and Germany who take work-life balance very seriously. While it is common for a South African to answer work emails or take a work call outside of their contracted hours, this is unheard of (and actively discouraged) in France.

A prominent turnaround professional once told me that mental health is a leading cause of financial distress as burnout is a real thing. Executives are expected to lead their companies to profitability in a market where the environment is constantly changing and there is growing attrition when it comes to consumer behaviour. No wonder anxiety is something most executives have to actively manage. Turnaround professionals wear many hats, and this is an occasion where it is their duty to inform leaders of distressed companies that it is ok to take some personal time to attend to their mental health. At the end of the day, a revitalized and refreshed leader is an innovative leader.