Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Come As You Are (2015)

  So now you go into the next chamber, where the lights are off, it’s quiet and calm, and it smells like home. You love it here, it’s like a spa for rats. In this context, when the researcher zaps your top NAc, the same thing happens—approach behaviors. But this is where it gets interesting: When the researcher zaps your bottom NAc… approach behaviors! In a safe, relaxing environment, almost the entire NAc activates approach motivation! As soon as you move into the third chamber, ultrabright lights turn on and suddenly Iggy Pop is blaring—imagine Live at the King Biscuit Flower Hour playing at randomly varying volumes, so you can’t even get used to it. Everything about this environment stresses you out. You’re like an introverted bookworm at a bad nightclub. Now when the researchers zap your top NAc, it doesn’t activate curiosity or approach behaviors, as it has in the previous environments; no, in the new, stressful environment, zapping almost anywhere on the NAc generates avoidant, “What the hell is that?” behavior. When I say that perception of sensation is context dependent, this is the deepest sense in which I mean it. I mean that evolutionarily old parts of your brain (your “monkey brain”) can respond in opposite ways, approach or avoidance, depending on the circumstances in which they are functioning.14 In a safe, comfortable environment, it hardly matters where you stimulate; you’ll activate approach, curiosity, desire. And in a stressful, dangerous environment, it hardly matters where you stimulate; you’ll activate avoidance, anxiety, dread. “Context changes how your brain responds to sex” doesn’t just mean “Set the mood,” like with candles, corsets, and a locked bedroom door. It also means that when you’re in a great sex-positive context, almost everything can activate your curious “What’s this?” desirous approach to sex. And when you’re in a not-so-great context—either external circumstances or internal brain state—it doesn’t matter how sexy your partner is, how much you love them, or how fancy your under wear is, almost nothing will activate that curious, appreciative, desirous experience. It’s completely normal that context changes how you perceive sensations. It’s just how brains work. Here’s a puzzle: Merritt, with her sensitive brakes, struggled mightily with sex in real life. Yet she had an active sexual imagination and had been both a reader and author of erotic fiction for a decade. Her favorite stories to read and to write were gay male BDSM—she jokingly calls it “Fifty Shades of Gay.” There just seemed to be something about the idea of two men tangled in an intense power dynamic that really captured her erotic imagination. “Getting turned on by stories about two men having kinky sex, but being so easily shut down during sex with the woman I love? How does that make sense? A noise. A fingernail when I’m not expecting it. A stray thought, even. And yet I spend hours every day writing about men having sex in public or on a rack or tied to trees.”

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  “It definitely sounds like you need more opportunities to discharge more of your stress,” I said. “Especially since you don’t have much leeway for getting rid of your stressors. And Johnny is your attachment object, right? He’s where you turn when you’re stressed, and your body totally wants to give and receive affection with him, right?” “Right.” “So can I make a suggestion?” “Yes, please. Anything.” “Stop. Having. Sex. Make it a rule: no sex for… oh, like, a month? You clearly want to give and to receive affection with your attachment object, but the stress of your life is hitting the brakes, and the bonus worry about feeling like you should be having sex just makes it worse. So until you work out more effective strategies for managing your stress, make a rule against all genital touching.” “That doesn’t make sense. How am I helping our sex life by ending our sex life?” “You’re not ending it. You’re changing the context.” “Which still doesn’t make sense to me. We go away together and just get mad at each other; I cry all over Johnny and we get busy.” “Friend, I am not in charge of what context works for you—and neither are you. But the common denominator here is stress of all kinds, including—especially—stress about the fact that stress is hitting your brakes. So stop stressing about the fact that stress is hitting your brakes. Accept it. Welcome it. It’s completely normal. You’re just in a rotten context, so change the context and see what happens.” She sighed, then went home and talked to Johnny. They tried it. I’ll talk about what happened in chapter 5. For now, I’ll just say that one powerful way of changing the context is to take away the stress of performance anxiety that comes with feeling obligated to have sex. attachment styleWhom we attach to as adults and how we attach—our attachment “style”—is shaped by the way we were parented. At their broadest, we can describe attachment styles as either secure or insecure. Remember that infants’ lives literally depend on their adult caregivers, so effectively managing potential abandonment is a serious issue for babies. We attach securely when our adult caregivers (usually our parents) are pretty reliably there for us when we need them. We cry, they come. We turn around, they’re there. No adult caregiver is always there, unfailingly, no matter what, but when they’re there reliably enough, we attach securely. Under these conditions, our brains learn that our adult caregivers will come back when they leave; they will not abandon us. Kids who are securely attached to their adult caregivers will, as adults, most likely attach securely to their romantic partners, and kids who are insecurely attached to their adult caregivers will, as adults, mostly likely attach insecurely to their romantic partners.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Furthermore, that threefold escalation from Ruth through Jonah to Job is repeated within that last book all by itself. Job challenges first a part, then the whole, and finally the God of the biblical tradition. In summary, then, we will need all three books—and in that specific sequence—to see clearly that their challenge is not simply about biblical words against biblical words, but about the biblical Word against the biblical Word —as in the subtitle to this chapter. My second question concerns the common historical background of these three books. There is one very important but also rather obvious distinction necessary to understand that background. Indeed, without that background they are not challenge parables, but merely short stories. We all recognize the distinction between a story’s setting and a story’s writing, between the time in which a story is located and the time in which a story is composed . Margaret Mitchell’s famous novel Gone with the Wind, for example, was set in the 1860s and 1870s, during and after the American Civil War, but written during the 1920s and 1930s. This is a crucial distinction to remember when reading our three biblical challenge parables because each is set in a very different time but all were written in the same historical matrix. The book of Ruth is set during the time when Israel was still guided by charismatic leaders—the “judges”—rather than by the later royal and dynastic rulers. Imagine Ruth in the period of the book of Judges. The book of Jonah is set during the time of the Assyrian Empire and its great capital city of Nineveh. Imagine Jonah in the period of the book of Isaiah. The book of Job is set during the time of the most ancient ancestors of Israel. Imagine Job in the period of the book of Genesis. But it is not so much when the stories are set as when they are written that establishes their deliberate purpose as challenge parables. When is that common time period? Here is what we must know about the historical matrix within which our three parables were composed. First, between 597 and 587 BCE , the Babylonians destroyed the southern half of Israel, including Jerusalem and its Temple, and took the Jewish aristocracy into “Babylonian Exile.” Second, by the middle of that same century, however, the Persians, having conquered the Babylonians, sent those exiled Jews home to rebuild their Temple, city, and homeland as well as restore their laws, customs, and traditions—thereby enabling them to pay their taxes and establishing Israel as a buffer against Egypt. Think of it as the Persian version of the American Marshall Plan. Instead of simply looting their conquered—“liberated”—territories, the Persians restored the shattered peoples and economies in order to establish viable clients and allies rather than create future problems and rebellions. It was a very, very dangerous time for Israel.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  27 The Untuned Instrument Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. —Samuel Beckett On the appointed Thursday, I sit in a parking lot in the pissy, indifferent rain you get in New England autumns, versus the open-firehose storms the Gulf had once dragged over us back home. After what seems an eternity, I feel a pair of high beams arc over my face like prison searchlights, then this big silver ship of a car lunges into place. I climb out, holding a newspaper over my head. A few knocks on the side window, and the heavy door swings open. No sooner does the door slam shut than I inhale—through the cigarette smoke—the stinging juniper scent of gin. It brings me up short. Maybe somebody spilled gin in his car? You must be Mary, James says, We’re waiting for three other guys. He has a bald, remarkably flat head, which he’s combed a few russet strands across—plus a beaverish overbite. He asks how much time I have, and I confess it’s taken me a year to put together my first two months. Maybe not gin, I think, but shaving lotion. Or I have gin on the brain. Big accomplishment, he says, those first few months. Mind if I smoke? The automatic windows hum down an inch, and he pats around his pockets for a cigarette. His overbite makes him look very eager for it. That coming in and out of sobriety? Hard. He depresses the lighter in its socket. You detox over and over. You never get to the good part. I’m ready for the good part. The lighter pops, and he presses it to the end of his smoke. I have to admit, I say, I do feel better since I started taking Joan’s suggestions. As James goes to replug the cigarette lighter in the hole, you can see how—from his perspective—the hole keeps edging side to side to thwart him. His head sways a little as he jabs at the dashboard three or four times. Despite the lighter’s having gone cold, he presses it again to the end of his burning stogie, sending sparks all over his lap. Finally, he just drops the lighter in the ashtray like it belongs there. This, I think, is as drunk a motherfucker as I’ve ever seen, fixing to steer the car I’m in. As a kid, I was trained to give the shitfaced room. Small white droplets of rain tap on the windshield when a knock on the back car door makes me startle. In climbs big-footed David, red bandana around his head, along with a guy from our group named Jack. Jack of the red curly hair, skittery-eyed Jack, who—on being introduced to me first—explained that he had a little touch of the schizophrenia, as he held index finger one inch from thumb. Mostly he stays medicated enough to hold down a job at the box factory.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  Write a description of a situation that you’re beating yourself up about—it can be anything from an aspect of your sexual functioning to your romantic relationship (or lack thereof) to your work to your body or anything else. Be sure to include the self-critical thoughts you’re battering yourself with. Then write the name of a good friend at the top of the page and imagine that that person is describing this problem. Imagine that she’s asking for your help, and write down what you would tell her. Imagine that you’re in your best, most empathic, calmest, most supportive state of mind, and tell her all the things she needs to hear. Now reread what you wrote. It’s for you. The shorthand version of this exercise is: Never say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t want to say to your best friend or your daughter. Olivia told me this story about how she figured out how to stop hitting the accelerator when she got stressed out. One night during finals week, Olivia tried initiating sex at bedtime. Patrick, predictably, was too tired, and said so. In the wake of his gentle refusal, self-doubt flooded through Olivia like a fast-rising river. What if her high sex drive wasn’t cool or sexy or fun or empowered? What if she was just trying desperately—pathetically—to get attention the only way she could? What if actually she was just trying to control people with her sexuality? What if—Her heart was racing and she felt like she couldn’t breathe. Into the darkness, she reached out to her partner. “Patrick?” “Yeah.” “I’m having a meltdown.” “It’s finals week. It happens. Deep breaths.” “No, I’m having a meltdown about sex.” “Babe, I’m so tired…” “No, I know, I’m not saying that!” She explained in a breathless panic about the flood of self-doubt, adding her sudden recollection that her theory about testosterone and her genitals and her sexuality was wrong. “What if all the things I’ve told myself about my sexuality are just an invention to mask the truth that actually I’m totally just this bully using my sexuality to manipulate you? What if I’m out of control and, like, a danger to myself and others?” Patrick turned on the light and looked at her. “Wow, I had no idea you had so much of this cultural brainwashing still buried in your brain. It’s like the anxious part of your brain seriously believes all the women-who-like-sex-are-evil stuff, and when you’re stressed out, all those beliefs come with the stress—even though the calm version of your brain totally knows how awesome you are. Keep breathing, babe, you’re holding your breath.” And there it was. When she was happy and relaxed, she had one set of opinions about herself: self-confident and self-compassionate. When she was overwhelmed, she had an entirely different set of opinions about herself: self-critical and even self-abusive.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I’ve dreaded telling her because I think she might stop taking my calls. On the phone, I blurt out, Warren and I got the separate apartment. We’re gonna try it for a few months this summer. Dev will stay at home. We’ll go back and forth. I don’t recommend— —I know, that I make any changes before I’ve been sober awhile. At least a year, Joan says. Before you make any major decision, take a year for a cold look at all you’ve done wrong in it. Just chronicle the resentments that are really chewing you up. Get it down on paper. I’ve been looking at myself in therapy off and on since age nineteen, I say. A lot of therapy is looking through a child’s eyes, she says. This is looking through an adult’s. You have some nutty ongoing resentments about loads of people. Like about my writing group? I say, for I’d told her at some point I feared my writing group looked at me like I was stupid. Any chance that’s from your head alone? Joan asks. Maybe, I say, but it’s terrifying to think I might not be able to trust my instincts. Joan sighs over the receiver. I can relieve your mind right now: You can’t trust your instincts. What makes you think they think you’re dumb? Just how they look at me . Aren’t these, like, the smartest people—in literary terms—on the planet? They are. Doctors of this and that, translators from many languages. Joan says, Let’s just assume, then, that you’re the dumbest person in the room— Ouch, I inwardly say, for her sentence sang with truth, reverberating like the bronze of a bell. —all things considered, that’s not so dumb. I mean, in terms of the general population. Which is true. I actually feel relief at that. If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There’s an initial uprush of relief at first, then—for me, anyway—a profound dislocation. My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones aren’t yet operational. There’s been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible. You don’t have to be Christian for the metaphor to make sense, psychologically speaking. My weight drops back to the double digits. I’ll be walking down a street, and I suddenly feel panicked, as if the earth beneath me has caved in and I’m free-falling. My head buzzes constantly, as if an electric shaver’s running over it, some tugging metal teeth traveling over my scalp. I can hardly sit still. Crazy. What I’ve always feared the most—that I’d go cuckoo, like my mother—seems to be happening. I don’t hallucinate. I lack any grandiose Napoleonic fantasy. But every aspect of my existence has canted me deeper in a dark space.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  I held him, remained calm, kept telling him I loved him and that I was keeping him safe, and eventually he calmed down enough to put his clothes on (he’d literally torn them off) and leave with me. By the time we were walking into the parking garage, he was calmly telling me that he loved me very much, and when we got home, he collapsed into sleep. He moved through the cycle and got to the relaxation at the end—affection and sleep. Only rarely in our everyday lives does unlocking from freeze take such a dramatic form. But even in its smaller scale, that’s how the stress response cycle works, beginning, middle, and end, all innately built into the nervous system and fully functional—in the right context. stress and sexBy now it won’t strike you as revelatory when I say, “To have more and better sex, reduce your stress levels.” I might as well say, “Exercise is good for you” and “Sleep is important.” Of course. You know this. In fact, more than half of women report that stress, depression, and anxiety decrease their interest in sex; they also reduce sexual arousal and can interfere with orgasm.3 Chronic stress also disrupts or suppresses the menstrual cycle, decreases fertility and lactation, and increases miscarriage, as well as reducing genital response and increasing both distractibility and pain with sex.4 How do the hormones and neurochemicals of stress interact with the hormones and neurochemicals of sexual response, to suppress or stimulate sexual behavior? Nobody knows precisely—but we know some things. We know that stressed-out humans more readily interpret all stimuli as threats, just like the rats being blasted with bright lights and Iggy Pop. We also know that the brain can handle only a limited amount of information at a time; at its simplest, we can think of stress as information overload, so when there’s too much happening, the brain starts to triage, prioritizing, simplifying, and even plain old ignoring some things. And we know that the brain prioritizes based on survival needs: breathing, escaping from predators, maintaining the right temperature, staying hydrated and nourished, and remaining with your social group are all first-order-of-business priorities—and of course these priorities sort themselves based on context. If you’re starving, you’ll be more willing to steal bread from your neighbor, even if it risks your membership in a social group. If you can’t breathe, then it doesn’t matter how long it’s been since you’ve eaten, you will not feel hungry. And if you’re generally overwhelmed by twenty-first-century life, practically everything else takes priority over sex; as far as your brain is concerned everything is a charging lion. And if you’re being chased by a lion, is that a good time to have sex? To sum up: Worry, anxiety, fear, and terror are stress—“There’s a lion! Run!” Irritation, annoyance, frustration, anger, and rage are stress—“There’s a lion! Kill it!” Emotional numbness, shutdown, depression, and despair are stress—“There’s a lion! Play dead!”

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  There’s another level, too, to the risks that can accompany a sensitive accelerator. Because she sometimes feels like her own sexuality is bossing her around, Olivia finds herself worried that she, in turn, is bossing her partner around, being too pushy, too demanding, too sexual, just plain too much. “I have to wield my powerful sexuality carefully, for the betterment of humanity,” she announced—mostly kidding. Mostly. your sexual temperamentAccording to the dual control model, sexual arousal is really two processes: activating the accelerator and deactivating the brakes. So your level of sexual arousal at any given moment is the product of how much stimulation the accelerator is getting and how little stimulation the brakes are getting. But it’s also a product of how sensitive your brakes and accelerator are to that stimulation. The brakes and accelerator are traits. We all have them and they’re more or less stable over time, but, like introversion/extroversion, they vary from individual to individual.5 Just as we all have phalluses and urethras, as we saw in chapter 1, we all have a sexual accelerator and sexual brakes in our central nervous systems (we’re all the same!). But we all have different sensitivities of brakes and accelerator (we’re all different!), which leads to different sexual temperaments or personalities. Some people are high on both brakes and accelerator, others are low on both, some have high brakes but low accelerator, and some have high accelerator but low brakes. And most of us are average. The variation is distributed on a nice bell curve; the majority of people are heaped up in the middle and a few people are at the extreme ends. Let’s take a look at what happens if brakes or accelerator is especially sensitive (or not). Suppose you’re high on SE and low on SI—sensitive accelerator and hardly any brakes. What kind of sexual response do you have? You respond readily to sex-related stimuli but not to potential threats, so you’re easily turned on and have a difficult time turning off. Which isn’t always as fun as it might sound, and it can, under some circumstances, be related to inconsistent condom use, more partners, more one-night stands, and feeling “out of control” of your sexuality, which are higher risk for unwanted consequences.6 The sensitive accelerator plus not-so-sensitive brakes combination describes between roughly 2 and 6 percent of women, and it’s associated with sexual risk-taking and compulsivity.7 Because the brain mechanism responsible for noticing sex-related stimuli is very sensitive, you’re highly motivated to pursue sex, and because the brain mechanism responsible for stopping you from doing higher-risk things is less responsive, you may sometimes feel “out of control” of your sexuality, especially when you’re stressed. You’re likely to have more partners, use less protection, and feel less “in control.” You might also be more likely to want sex when you are stressed (“redliners”), whereas other folks are likely to find that their interest in sex plummets when they’re stressed (“flatliners”).

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  People with anxious attachment styles are the most likely to engage in anxiety-driven “solace sex”—that is, using sex as an attachment behavior— which can make sex intense without making it pleasurable. Anxious attachers worry more about sex, and yet they also equate the quality of sex with the quality of a relationship. They’re more likely to experience pain with sex, particularly in low-intimacy relationships. It shows up, too, as difficulties with safer sex practices—they’re less likely to use condoms, more likely to use alcohol or other drugs before sex, and, unsurprisingly, have higher rates of STIs and unwanted pregnancy. Anxious attachers experience more pain, anxiety, and health risks. People with insecure attachment styles, anxious or avoidant, are more likely to be involved on either side of a coercive sexual relationship. People with avoidant attachment start having sex later in life, have sex less often, with fewer noncoital behaviors. They have more positive attitudes toward sex outside committed relationships, have more one-night stands, and are more likely to have sex just to fit into a social expectation rather than because they really want to. Avoidant attachers experience sex as less connected with their lives and their relationships. In the end, insecure attachment hits the brakes. We can’t understand sexual wellbeing without understanding attachment, and we can’t maximize our own sexual wellbeing without learning how to manage attachment in our relationships. managing attachment: your feels as a sleepy hedgehogAttachment style is an inescapable factor in sexual response and relationship satisfaction—and it varies not just from person to person but also from relationship to relationship.27 And it can change.28 Yet these deep emotional patterns are not always very tractable and sometimes require therapy. Many people, though, can make a great deal of progress by increasing their nonjudgmental awareness of their own emotional responses and by reading excellent books on the subject. For example, Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships by Sue Johnson, who developed Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, directly addresses attachment as it relates to sex. But couples seem to struggle with discussing sexual difficulties in specific ways. We are all so tender around this topic, so afraid both of hurting our partner’s feelings and of not meeting our partner’s expectations, that we need a special set of skills to help us be as gentle and kind with each other as that tenderness requires. I’ve come to think of communicating about sex and love in terms of a “sleepy hedgehog” model of emotion management. It goes like this: Think of your difficult feelings about sex as sleepy hedgehogs that you discover in inconvenient places around your home. If you find a sleepy hedgehog in the chair you were about to sit in, you should: Find Out the Hedgehog’s Name. “Right now I feel… jealous/angry/hurt/etc.” Simple, though there are usually multiple feelings involved at the same time. That’s normal.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Leaders can help them understand that their work is going just fine and uncover procrastination or wrong turns, if that’s the case. A great example of creating a system for checking on progress is that of managers at SpaceX, who found a way to make faster decisions for their biggest client—NASA. Until recently, NASA sent a fax (seriously) whenever they had a query, and once a week SpaceX brought together a fifty-person team to address each question before sending responses back. Using collaborative technology, SpaceX has now given NASA direct visibility into each project so they can identify the SpaceX engineers who are working on which components. NASA can directly talk with those engineers and make decisions in real time. This collaboration has allowed SpaceX to cut its average wait time for defining product requirements by 50 percent and eliminate the costly weekly four-hour status meeting. The key in making check-ins less anxiety-inducing is to put more control of these conversations in the hands of employees. Ambiguity creates anxiety, so instead of subjective measures, use individual and team roadmaps to evaluate how people are coming on hitting their goals. Also, make check-ins regular. When they become an expected part of work life, versus surprise inspections, anxiety about reporting in is reduced substantially. Finally, when managers go out of their way to offer up support with problems or missed deadlines during check-ins—and they come from a place of understanding—it can help create a relationship where people know they will be held accountable, but in positive ways. And their manager is there to help them succeed. Method 5: Team Them Up Another method for helping perfectionists recognize their tendencies and work to change is to pair them up with employees who don’t have the problem. We heard a terrific example of this from a manager we spoke with. Liz told us one of her sales reps, Sara, was driving her mad with an attention to detail that was not necessary. For example, when it came to her monthly sales reports, Sara’s were far more elaborate than Liz needed—including pages of graphs and charts of her sales mix. Liz sat Sara down on several occasions to explain that kind of detail wasn’t necessary and was more than any manager could process. Liz wanted her charge to spend her extra time doing more prospecting calls; Sara’s cold calls were below average for the team. The months went by, however, and Sara kept turning in reports that way. When challenged, she would say, “I don’t mind. It helps me to look at things in this way.” In truth, Sara couldn’t help herself. Having realized she would need to take a different approach, Liz applied a strategy that proved more effective. When she found Sara bogged down on unnecessary activities in her work, she paired her with less detail-oriented partners so she would be forced to accept “good enough” results to get the task done by deadline.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  In just about any company, long before news reports emerge of product failures, layoffs, mergers, or downturns, most employees clue in that the firm is facing challenges. In uncertain times, anxiety (and often apathy) is amped up when managers don’t talk transparently about issues and what the company is doing about them. Take General Electric as another unfortunate case during the tenure of CEO Jeffrey Immelt. Employees began to understand the company was facing serious issues long before the public was aware of them. And yet a “success theater” masked challenges for years at the multinational. Sources on the inside told the Wall Street Journal their topmost leader didn’t want to hear any bad news, and executives continued to project an optimism that didn’t always match the reality of their operations or market. In May 2017, in front of a room of Wall Street analysts, Immelt said, “This is a strong, very strong company,” and then defended GE’s profit goals. “It’s not crap. It’s pretty good really. . . . Today, when I think about where the stock is compared to what the company is, it’s a mismatch.” It was . But not in the direction he was talking about. While GE shares were trading near $28 that day, less than two years later they would drop below $6. We have watched as new CEO Larry Culp has instilled a revitalized culture at GE where internal and external stakeholders clearly understand the strategy, and where employees can raise tough issues and know they will be addressed honestly and directly. Six months into the job, we were heartened to hear Culp explain, “What we’re going to try to do is to share with people, in as transparent a way as we possibly can, what the issues are and the plan that we have. But it will take time. And we don’t want to sugarcoat this.” Like Culp, other leaders around the world are trying to involve employees as partners in this process of working through uncertainty. For instance, by 2013, executives at AT&T had concluded that 100,000 of their 280,000 workers were in jobs that would most likely not be relevant in as little as a decade. Like many companies in the technology sector, AT&T faced a future in which its legacy businesses were quickly becoming obsolete. With an industry moving from cables and hardware to the internet, cloud, and data science, AT&T leaders knew the company had to reinvent itself.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Psychological safety represents an absence of interpersonal anxiety—the ‘What do you think of me?’ anxiety, which is so prevalent in the human experience and can get in the way of people doing the right thing, from offering up an idea to averting a crisis by speaking up.” Clarity from managers in one-on-one settings gives workers a sense of what’s allowable and what’s not, and what kind of actions are necessary in the moment. It also helps employees take on new projects or oversee tasks, because they understand the parameters of their new responsibilities and what freedoms in decision-making they do and don’t have. Here’s an illustration. We once visited with Brett Fischer, who was director of merchandising for Major League Soccer’s Real Salt Lake, the day after his team had hosted a playoff match. Fischer had assigned a friendly, outgoing worker named Lisa to tend one of the cash registers in the team store. Fischer had been busy, and in giving Lisa the assignment he simply said, “Work your magic,” and off he ran to other matters. Lisa began chatting with each customer in line, asking them a question, telling a funny story here and there. On this huge game day, her friendly conversations were slowing the line to a crawl. Fischer pulled Lisa aside and said, “I wasn’t clear. This is on me. Normally it’s great that you talk with customers. But today, we need a sense of urgency at the register. Here are our options: We can put someone else up front and allow you to engage with customers on the floor, or you need to focus on getting that till to go a hundred miles an hour.” At first, he said, Lisa was defensive and hurt. “She thought I was criticizing her as a person,” he said. Her anxiety was ratcheted up. But Fischer clarified to Lisa that speed was what their clients needed on this very busy day. She eventually said, “I want to stay on the register.” Fischer checked on Lisa several times in the hours that followed, and her line was humming. “By the end of the game, she left feeling like a million bucks,” he said. This was, admittedly, a modest interaction. But aren’t most in a team? Fischer had created ambiguity and was big enough to admit his mistake. He attempted to diffuse a potentially anxiety-charged situation by providing a business focus, gave honest but kind feedback, and helped Lisa see what customers needed instead of making her feel she had failed. He learned that by giving clear guidance about what’s expected up front, employees can start the race in a much more effective gear.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  We’ve found this type of attitude can greatly enhance inclusion efforts and help alleviate the worries of some people who may feel threatened by diversity initiatives because they think spots are being taken away from them. Organizations that do this effectively create a culture where one person’s growth doesn’t have to come at the expense of someone else’s. When we coach leaders, we encourage them to follow a simple process to develop new skills in their team members. It follows our Skill Development Model. In using this method, leaders can help people trying to progress on the wall chart their own way. And, best of all, the process allows managers to align the company or team vision with the vision of their people, reducing anxiety that can arise if team members feel they aren’t getting the growth they need. First, either the employee suggests a skill to get better at, or the manager suggests it. If it’s something that might benefit the team or organization, and the employee is on board to try, the employee begins to learn. If the skill is suggested by the employee and it’s determined that it’s not needed by the organization at this time, then it might be something the worker would pursue on personal time. An employee of ours once said she wanted to become an audiologist working with children. While we thought it was a noble goal, we couldn’t find a way to fit her training on that skill into our company needs. She ended up going to school in the evenings, and our support came in the form of giving her time off early a few days a week. Next, after an employee starts to learn and acquires enough proficiency in the new skill to potentially help the team, a manager will find avenues to apply it. The employee will then contribute the new skill to helping the organization. Next, if the employee is making an effort and the skill is starting to make the team better, it’s necessary for the manager to reward the behavior through gratitude and encourage continued learning. The manager will also provide coaching to ensure alignment with the company and team needs, and to offer any further help that’s needed to grow and remove obstacles. Finally, it comes time to realign and consider what’s next. If the skill has been of benefit to the employee and the team, the employee may continue utilizing it and gaining more knowledge. If the manager or employee come to realize the skill is not a good fit, they may stop and try something new, or the employee may work on the skill on personal time. If the worker hasn’t quite mastered the skill yet, the manager and employee may work together to continue progressing.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I look at my watch. Fewer than ten minutes have elapsed since we sat down, and the night yawns before me. I slip off to the pay phone to call Joan the Bone—no answer. Ditto Deb. Coming back to face a full wineglass, I see Lux isn’t in his seat. I stare around at Toby, his agent, his editor—their faces are at the pinched end of a telescope. At one point, I think, What if somebody says something to me? The next instant, What if somebody doesn’t? In the bathroom, I splash some water on my neck and study how pasty I’ve gone. Plus, my nose has grown gargantuan pores—I never exfoliated! And boy am I shiny. I shift the pins at the back of my head around, but a tendril keeps springing loose on one side. I try slicking it down with a few flecks of water. The hair spray in it enlivens it to jut out. Eventually, I latch myself into a stall, heart thumping, dizzy. It occurs to me I actually need to brace my hands on either side of the walls. My insides are ricocheting around when the old advice burbles up. Pray. Get on your knees and get still. So I kneel down, my bony knees in a puddle of Lord knows what. None of the promised quiet comes to me. Breathe, Joan tells me all the time. If you don’t believe in God, you know there’s scientific evidence about the psychological benefits of meditation, even among nonbelievers. Breathe deeply to calm yourself. Then count your breaths to ten, over and over. But when I start counting breaths—slow, deep inhalations—I almost hyperventilate. Correcting for it, I speed up my breathing till I’m panting like a pooch. After a lifetime of effortless breathing, I’ve forgotten how. For a few minutes, it feels like gasping underwater. I try to detach from the scattered thoughts that float up in me, and they start to drift away from the small damp spot I’m kneeling in. Silently, I say one of the few prayers I know, the serenity prayer—maybe my second or third truly desperate prayer. I clasp my hands together before my chest, and where my head has been jabbering, I find unusual space. Please keep me away from a drink. I know I haven’t been really asking, but I really need it. Please please please. Starting to get up, I kneel again. And keep me from feeling like such an asshole. Those of you who’ve never prayed before will cackle like crows and scoff at the change I claim has overtaken me. But the focus of my attention has been yanked from the pinballing in my head to south of my neck, where some solidity holds me together. I feel like a calmer human than the one who’d knelt a few minutes before. The primal chattering in my skull has dissipated as if some wizard conjured it away.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Sometime after that—maybe even the next day—I stopped smoking pot, stopped going to the beach. Sam had spooked from me the notion that the hippies I’d once revered were benevolent characters identifiable by roach clips and tie dye. Plus, the crash pad my friends and I had rented had gotten too raggedy for any girl to stand. The sink stayed piled with scabby dishes from when I’d cooked everybody spaghetti a month before. When you hit the light switch at night, the roaches didn’t even run anymore. Yet night after night the guys lazed around puffing weed and telling dick jokes. When they headed to the beach, I’d lose myself down the valley of a book or scribble longhand on loose pages that I stashed under my sleeping bag. College was the thing. I’d scammed my way into that small midwestern school too good for me, but then I’d put it on hold as too square. Now it looked like an escape from flagging down another satanic hobo, or it was suddenly an excuse to read nonstop. I longed for its library walled with books, a desk with gooseneck lamp, a bulletin board. Taking my collect call, Mother agreed—her life’s goal being college for perpetuity. She phoned the school’s financial officer, who promised as much in work and loans as I needed. I was sweltering inside the open accordion door of a phone booth. You’ve tried it your daddy’s way, Mother said. How is this Daddy’s way? Daddy wants me to stay home and hone my pool game. Yeah, but the T-shirt factory job, the whole working-class-hero pose. Who knows, maybe you’ll meet some suave intellectual…. I told her the phone was making my face sweat, but she’d already relaunched into her plan to auction off my unemployable ass to some husband as if I were chattel. She sketched for me an artsy, wire-rimmed guy with a wardrobe of turtlenecks, a shiny car unmarred by the blurring circle of the sanding machine. Which hunk of whimsy failed to account for the fact that I’d bolt like a startled cheetah before such a man—a beast of an unknown phylum. On my last day, dropping an armload of ratty cutoffs and salt-crusted bikinis into the apartment complex’s garbage cans, I spied a thrown-out notebook and nicked it for my disheveled pages—for some reason, all unlined typing paper. I used a pen to poke holes into every margin, which seemed to take a long time, hole by hole. It was dusk when the sheets slid bumpily together and the notebook’s silver claws snapped shut. There was sweat on my upper lip.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Beats me what it would be a metaphor for. Carla thought it was about how living with the bomb fucks us up. I still think it was about football. I’m almost a college sophomore in terms of credits. I hope to be one by the time I graduate. They don’t let you take premed courses by mail, so I’m getting some other basic stuff out of the way. I finished my high school biology, chemistry, physics, and calculus last year. Each morning during my two study halls, if I don’t go for a workout, I read Dr. Ralph Besson’s Obstetrics and Gynecology . So far I only understand the conjunctions. Dr. Besson is down at the University of Oregon, but I didn’t get to meet him when I was invited down there. About all I ever get to talk to when I’m invited to a college is the athletes and occasionally a sorority girl. I feel spacy now, light-headed. My hunger is out of control. I’m a little nervous to read anatomy, so I sit here on the employees’ toilet with a good story. I’m just to the part in Styron where Nat is given to the Reverend Eppes, who, as Styron says, “gropes malodorously” after Nat’s “virgin bum.” * * * Elmo has the order ready. I take it on a cart rather than a tray, thinking I want to have my hands free. The guy is nude again, I know. I can hear the shower running. He is. He stands shivering and toweling, his stubby cock flapping. I push the cart past him, in front of the mirror. In the mirror I see him come up behind me. He’s a round man. Young, maybe thirty, but getting bald. He’s hairy as hell—like me. He takes care of himself, and that’s not easy for an endomorph. I see myself staring at him. He’s smiling. His cock cranks up. He drops the towel at my feet. I’m sweating, and I don’t sweat much anymore. My hands shake on the edge of the cart. Softly he knocks me into it. The dishes clank. The tea spills a little. The lemon pie quakes. He’s shorter than I am, almost resting his head on my shoulder. He brings his hands around and cups my cock. He sighs. His head rests on my shoulder. “Would you like me to blow you?” he asks. I look in the mirror. I look scared and he sees it. But I’m not scared of him. I breathe deep. We sometimes get four thousand people in our gym for a match. I hear them roar, chant for a takedown, a reversal, a pin. I breathe deep again and stop shaking. If I ever experiment with this stuff, it won’t be now. “No, thanks,” I reply. He backs off, looking at me in the mirror. “Don’t be nervous,” he says. “Would you like to look at some pictures?” “No, thanks,” I say at the door.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Method 4: Advocate Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, says addressing imbalances requires those who have power and influence to extend their privilege. For instance, she says, “In every organization, there are many people—from senior leaders to first-time managers—who have the power to elevate women in the workplace.” One of those who advocated for Wojcicki was Bill Campbell, executive coach to a who’s-who of tech superstars. “I learned about an important invitation-only conference convening most of the top leaders in tech and media, yet my name was left off the guest list,” she said. “Many of the invitees were my peers [other tech CEOs], meaning that YouTube wouldn’t be represented while deals were cut and plans were made. I started to question whether I even belonged at the conference. But rather than let it go, I turned to Bill, someone I knew had a lot of influence. He immediately recognized I had a rightful place at the event, and within a day he worked his magic and I received my invitation.” When allies assume the role of advocates, they use their influence to bring peers from underrepresented groups into new circles. They hold their leadership peers accountable for including qualified colleagues of all genders, races and ethnicities, abilities, ages, body shapes and sizes, religions, and sexual orientations; and they actively mentor those from underrepresented groups and introduce them to people in their network. This means they aren’t just behind- the-scenes mentors, but public advocates for those they are mentoring. They find terrific satisfaction in identifying high-potential diverse talent, providing them stretch roles, and helping them overcome obstacles. They find this kind of mentoring behavior is good not only for the protégé, but for the leader and the organization. SUMMARY Become an Ally There has been a historic pattern of anxiety in particular groups within the workplace—those too often made to feel like “others.” Of particular concern are women, people of color, those on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, members of religious minorities, and those with disabilities. Many in these communities must hide their true identities. But when managers create cultures where people feel comfortable being themselves, dramatic performance gains can be unlocked as everyone is able to focus all their attention on work. Many leaders do not understand the level of implicit bias that occurs in our work cultures.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  That’s why the best leaders we see keep an open-door policy as much as possible, making sure their team members know they are really okay with them coming in to talk about issues or ask questions. Naturally there are times leaders have to restrict access, but too often in our surveys we hear employees complain something to the effect of, “My boss comes in at nine and leaves at six, but I have no idea what he’s doing all day. I don’t see him, and he’s never around when I need help.” An open door means limiting meetings as much as possible and announcing to your team times every day that are “office hours.” Keep in mind that according to a Gallup report, employees who have a manager who’s willing to listen to their work-related problems are 62 percent less likely to be burned out. Method 5: Help People Prioritize We have found that too often, employees are left to figure out entirely on their own how to prioritize their work, and that can be an anxiety accelerator. Even a quick discussion with a boss, or with colleagues, would be a great assist. At first, this can be a daily custom with a manager and new employee, not to be overly controlling but to offer help and guidance as they get settled. Managers may ask each morning: What do you have going on today? Okay, let’s now organize those tasks by level of priority to the team. We recommend using clear criteria to grade the work to be done, such as Critical, Important, Moderate, and Low, and then to link each project to a business need. Manager and employee can then discuss what might be able to wait until tomorrow. In this way, less experienced people can learn to bite off chunks of the elephant every day and feel good about their accomplishments. As employees get more experience, a boss may move this sort of prioritization planning to a weekly or even monthly process. Project management software can help as well, ensuring goals and timelines are available for everyone to see. Dr. Rita McGrath of Columbia Business School offered a metaphor for prioritizing: “Your day is a truck, and each hour is a box on the truck. When someone delegates to you, you have to be clear to them that a box will have to come off the truck to fit the new one. There are consequences. When it comes to overload, we are not terrific at articulating to each other what our priorities are and what we are working on.”

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  In interviews with thousands of employees over the past twenty years, we can attest that many feel a considerable amount of anxiety about how they’re doing in their jobs. They want to know how their managers perceive the quality of their work. In fact, the highest-performing employees can often perceive lack of attention from a manager as a sign that things are not good at all. Silence can cause worry to creep up on even the best of workers. When we advise managers to offer more positive feedback, they can push back with a litany of concerns. They say it would be nice, but they don’t have the time to express more appreciation, or that their people are only interested in financial rewards. Others don’t want to coddle their workers, especially during times of crisis when there are so many other demands on their time. A few leaders have shared the view that praising their people all the time for just doing their job will come across as condescending or fake. “Who am I,” they ask, “a praise-giving robot?” Well, first, it’s not nonstop praise that’s called for, it is gratitude expressed in the right way and at the right time. Managers need employees who are motivated to achieve. And one of the simplest and most effective ways to motivate people to achieve is by regularly expressing gratitude. Our research shows unequivocally that offering such positive reinforcement produces impressive boosts in team performance. Here’s some of that evidence: Research conducted for us by Willis Towers Watson found that when employee engagement is in the bottom quartile of national rankings, customer satisfaction is 20 percentage points lower than when employee engagement is in the top quartile. And of the people who report the highest level of engagement at work, a whopping 94 percent agree that their managers are effective at recognizing them when they go above and beyond. That shows an extremely strong link between gratitude and employee engagement, and engagement and customer satisfaction. All of this is made more startling when we add morale into the mix. Some 56 percent of employees who say they have low morale at work give their managers a failing grade on gratitude, while only 2 percent of people who have low morale say they have a boss who is great at appreciating their work. How Gratitude Affects Anxiety More than two thousand years ago, Cicero called gratitude “not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” Yet gratitude receives little attention as an area of research in the business world. That is unfortunate. Expressions of gratitude, when done regularly, can produce profound effects. In a world filled with uncertainty, when managers frequently offer up their thanks for great work —and are specific in how an achievement has helped the team—they can significantly reduce anxiety levels. Such acts are like regular deposits in the Bank of Engagement. They build up reserves for when an employee’s work does have to be corrected.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  It is used to pause —to take a breath—but another phrase always follows, one that can stand alone and independent of the first. For Parrie, and many more, that punctuation mark has become a symbol of the fight to continue writing their story with anxiety or any other mental health issue. She talks about a daily struggle to overcome the duality of her carefully crafted outward appearance of success versus her inward battle against perceived failure. Today, the semicolon has become one of the most popular tattoos in ink shops from Peoria to Paris. It symbolizes the concept of “before and after.” For those who suffer from anxiety overload, and for those leaders who watch over teams of human beings, the semicolon might symbolize a next step in all our progression. We aren’t suggesting any of us run to the closest ink shop and roll up our sleeves, but we are hoping that we all consider what entrenched behaviors we might be holding on to as leaders that are negatively affecting us, and those around us; then, we should take a breath and consider a new path using a few of the ideas we’ve shared in this book. In the world before, discussing subjects like anxiety was taboo, including and accommodating those who didn’t fit the mold too much work, biases and judgment all too common. In the world after, individualism will be valued; needless, harmful anxiety lessened; and those who struggle accepted with compassion. We hope you agree that it’s time to punctuate. Acknowledgments We thank our agent Jim Levine, who grasped how important this topic could be and supported us from day one. Similarly, we were touched by the enthusiasm for the work of our editors Hollis Heimbouch and Rebecca Raskin of Harper Business. We owe a debt of gratitude to our critical reader Emily Loose, and we thank Christy Lawrence, who arranged many of the interviews and spent countless hours transcribing. Appreciation goes to our team at FindMojo.com: Paul Yoachum, Lance Garvin, Brianna Bateman, Bryce Morgan, Tanner Smith, Asher Gunsay, Garrett Elton, Mark Durham, and Jaren Durham. We thank Mark Fortier and Norbert Beatty, our publicists, and Brian Perrin and his team at Harper Business marketing. And we appreciate all those who are quoted herein; we were enriched by your wisdom. Finally, we are so thankful to our families for their support: to Jennifer, who has kept this project moving with her enthusiasm and profound insights. And to Heidi and to Cassi and Braeden; Carter, Luisa, Lucas Chester, and Clara Iris; Brinden; and Garrett and Maile. Notes Sources quoted in Anxiety at Work are from firsthand interviews with the authors unless noted below. Chapter 1: The Duck Syndrome In a 2018 survey, 34 percent of workers: The citation is from an American Psychological Association survey of 3,458 adults, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, “The Most Anxious Generation Goes to Work,” by Sue Shellenbarger, May 9, 2019.