How To Manage Anger, Fear, and Anxiety-- And Still Show Up for Work

Maybe you feel like crumpling into a ball and hiding under the covers. Maybe you feel like getting drunk. Maybe you’re so angry you’re yelling at the dog. Maybe you are so anxious you can’t focus or even breathe right. And you have to go to work. Even worse, you have to be a leader.

Feeling our feelings actually allows us to move through tough emotions and do what we need to do. In our interview Tim Shriver says we all need the space to feel how we feel. When we do that, we can detach how we feel from what we're going to do about it. We give ourselves the choice to enact a behavior rather than just stuffing emotions down or acting them out in unhelpful ways.

Anger, fear, anxiety, sadness are necessary emotions that are hard to experience, especially during the work day. And so, I’m going to offer my 3 favorite ways to feel big, uncomfortable emotions without letting them derail my entire day. Although if you need a day under the covers, I endorse that too!

Get It Out- Have a Tantrum

Emotions are clues but usually we ignore them. Maybe you need action in your body. Maybe you need to let those emotions run through you and escape!

Yale’s Emma Sepp?l?, Ph.D. says, "Emotions are energy in motion." This sentence has changed my life! What if you had a tantrum? What if you stopped everything and screamed and yelled and cried for a bit? Maybe you’d feel better after.

When you're suppressing anger, you get angrier inside, and it hurts your mental health. It hurts your relationships and your physical health too. Sepp?l? explains this is when we're experiencing bound emotions. “You're bound to the emotion, right? It's still there. Let's think about little kids- they act out, things pass, they regulate. When you think about a child, a child who's angry is angry for one minute, two minutes max, it's feeling it real intensely, and then it's gone and they're best friends with the person they were just so angry with." Unlike adults, children fully experience the emotion and then the energy moves through them and out. As adults, we don't want to feel bad ever. So we push it down and then we try to compensate… And at the end of the day, the emotion is stuck within.

A sovereign relationship with our emotions, explains Sepp?l?, is allowing ourselves to feel the emotion and let the energy move through us and experience it fully. We don’t want to feel it, but at the end of the day, that is how we're going to be free.?

Lean Into Scary Emotions: Practice Expansion

Sounds counterintuitive, right? But taking time to sit and truly feel big emotions helps take the teeth out of them! Dr. Diana Hill offers several approaches to manage uncomfortable feelings effectively. First, grounding yourself is key. This might involve practicing soothing rhythm breathing or focusing on a distant, steady point on the horizon. These techniques can help activate parts of the brain associated with feeling connected and stable.

Next, Hill suggests expanding your distress tolerance. This involves welcoming your feelings instead of pushing them away, giving them a name, and identifying the values underlying your emotions. By doing so, you're not just tolerating distress, but expanding your capacity to handle it.

Let's walk through an example of an expansion practice to help feel the hard feelings, and take the teeth out of them.

Imagine your worst fear about the future. Read the scariest headline -- and try to really feel the emotions that arise. You might notice a tightness in your chest and your heart rate increasing. Instead of trying to change these sensations, create more space around them. Take deep breaths, relax your shoulders, and let your belly soften.

Now, ask yourself, "What do I care about that's making this painful?" You might realize it's a fear of safety, concern for other people, anger at others, or fear of what’s next. Maybe your emotion conflicts with the values you hold dear. This identification of underlying values is crucial.

You can talk to yourself as you try to lean into the feelings. Try to sit with them for a minute or so, without jumping to a to-do list or taking an action.

The key is leaning into the messy discomfort—which diminishes the need for immediate action like snapping or acting out!

Drop Anchor

When your anxiety hits it’s important to stop the spiral into negative thinking. The key here is to use your energy and put it to immediate work while not letting your brain cast into the future. Stay in the moment, focused on the task at hand. This is the difference between feeling anxious and working through it and going into catastrophic thinking and freezing.?

Say you’re facing some uncertain news and it’s making you very anxious. You’re in the middle of your workday, though you can feel the racing heart, sweaty palms, adrenaline rush, and racing thoughts of anxiety.

Psychotherapist Carolyn Glass suggests something called “dropping anchor.” It takes about a minute.

Pause what you’re doing. And tell yourself: I’m anxious. I’m really feeling anxious. This is hard. And take a breath. Give yourself a moment to settle.

We can get anxious about feeling anxious and that makes things worse. Try not to blame yourself for feeling anxious or worry about your anxiety. You’re anxious. It’s ok.

Plant your feet into the floor. Notice where your body is tense. Breathe into it and feel the gravity flowing from your head and into your feet on the floor.

• Look around and notice: what can I hear? What can I see??
• Are there people around me? Can I hear them??
• The goal is to “contact the present moment ,” as Dr. Russ Harris says.
• Do this for as long as you need to come back into your body, into the moment. Breathe.
• And then ask yourself: What do I need to do right now? What is the task at hand??

Hang in there,

Morra

P.S.: This week on the podcast I talk to Timothy Shriver - one of the most influential voices is promoting social emotional learning and emotional flexibility. He shares his journey to emotional fluency, the power of confession, and how we all give grace to each other in these times.