Keep Calm and Carry On – TPW309

"Keep calm" is easy to say but sometimes harder to do. The week we're looking at ways to cope with anxiety and stress during tough times. 



Keep calm--getting things done without stress and anxiety  

When the unexpected happens or when challenging circumstances occur, it’s easy to get anxious and stressed out. These days, with all that is going on, we may have extra responsibilities or larger workloads than usual, or decisions we need to make that we haven't had to make before. The anxiety that can result from stressful situations interferes with our productivity and can be harmful to our mental health. Learning to "keep calm and carry on" productively takes intentional practice.

What is anxiety?

It's important to distinguish anxiety from stress. Here are some resources that offer a good description of what anxiety is.

“When we talk about stress, we are talking about the external factors that are causing our anxiety. . . . When we talk about anxiety, we are talking about a physical response. Anxiety is our natural fear response that occurs when we are confronted with danger.” (from Is Anxiety/Stress Affecting Your Productivity?)

“Anxiety is emotional anticipation — it’s the thought of something going wrong in the future. Health professionals use the term ‘anxiety’ to describe a persistent fear or a chronic sense of worry, the sources of which seem unclear. . . . Anxiety is not an emotion but an experience— it harms our ability to be in control making us feel paralyzed. Anxiety clouds our judgment — it’s a disorienting experience when facing a threat we can’t understand. On the contrary, fear is an emotional response to a danger that we are aware of.” (from Why Anxiety is the Number One Productivity Killer) 

According to several sources, the National Institutes of Health estimates that approximately 40 million adults in the U.S. alone are affected by anxiety.

What causes anxiety?

Anxiety can be caused by a variety of different factors and things going on in our lives. For instance, stress is one of the biggest causes. One writer warns us that “prolonged periods of stress can often turn into more persistent periods of anxiety.”  

In Anxiety and Productivity, one counselor notes that “Anxiety is frequently a mixture of biological causes and environmental habits.”