Anxiety at work: how to calm down fast and get back to your work

Anxiety lives in your body

Anxiety is your body getting ready for a threat. Your heart speeds up. Your breathing gets short. Your attention locks onto what might go wrong.

That's useful if a car is coming at you. It's much less useful when the threat is a spreadsheet. You re-read the same line, check your phone, and feel worse about the time you're losing.

Because anxiety runs through your body, some of the fastest fixes go through your body too. Thinking your way out comes second.

Breathe out longer

In a month-long trial at Stanford, researchers compared three breathing exercises with mindfulness meditation. The winner was cyclic sighing: two breaths in through the nose, then one long breath out. It improved mood and lowered the body's stress response more than meditation did, at five minutes a day.

You can do a short version at your desk, in a meeting, or in the bathroom before a call. Nobody will notice. The key is the long, slow breath out.

Name it, or call it excitement

Once your body is a little calmer, use words. A UCLA team led by Matthew Lieberman found that putting a feeling into words calmed the brain's alarm response. So say it, even silently: "I'm anxious about the 3pm meeting." No story about why. Just the name.

Before a big moment, there's a stranger trick. Harvard researcher Alison Wood Brooks found that people who said "I am excited" before public speaking, maths tests and even karaoke did better than people who tried to calm down. Her paper names "meeting with a boss" as exactly this kind of moment.

Anxiety and excitement feel almost the same in the body. Calling it excitement is easier than switching it off.

Give the worry a plan

A worry that stays in your head keeps looping. Psychologists E.J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that unfinished goals kept intruding on people's thoughts, and that making a specific plan for them made those intrusions stop.

So write the worry down, and next to it, one thing you'll do and when. "Worried the client will push back on price. Plan: prepare two options by Thursday 10am." Then let your head move on.

If work worry follows you home, try Cal Newport's shutdown ritual. At the end of the day he checks his tasks, plans the rest of the week, and says "schedule shut down complete." He says that within a month, his urge to go over work at night had nearly disappeared.

When the next wave hits

When you're anxious, your phone looks like relief. But the worry doesn't go anywhere. It's waiting when you come back, with less time on the clock. That's why anxious scrolling so often ends in more anxiety, as we explain in why we doomscroll.

So use that moment instead. Breathe in through your nose, add a second small breath on top, then breathe out slowly, for one or two minutes. Name the feeling in one word. Then pick one small task, like the first slide's title, and start it.

In the moment, you won't remember all of this. That's why CatchScroll exists: tap "Anxious", and it talks you through a two-minute reset built for it, then puts you back into a focus block.

This is for the everyday anxious moments at work. If your anxiety is constant, or affects your sleep, health or life outside work, please talk to a doctor or a mental health professional.

So, what's your 3pm meeting, and what will your first long breath out be for?