Harness your brain to feel calm and in control.  

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Why should you spend 3 minutes reading this blog?

• You’ll learn how to prevent anxiety and stress-driven responses to work challenges and boost productivity. 
• It’s written by someone with 20+ years’ experience in employee performance and resilience building.
• You deserve to enjoy your workday! 

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Many of us don’t know how to stay calm under pressure. Between mounting to-do lists, impending deadlines, competing priorities, internal politics and other anxiety triggers - it’s easy for the heart rate to start pounding on any given work day. 

That physical sensation occurs when our body enters ‘fight, flight, freeze or faint’ mode - as the brain perceives those events to be a threat to our survival. The key to becoming calmer is to help your body return to a more relaxed, wakeful state. The reality is, stressful and anxiety triggers are inevitable. It’s how fast you can help your body recover that will make you more resilient. 

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There are many techniques that you can use to bring calm to your body, and you’ll probably find that you prefer some over others depending on the situation at hand. Just as important, is working on reducing the impact of triggers and how you react to them in the long-term.

If you find yourself in a stressful situation at work, what you really want is a way to reduce your emotional and irrational responses so you can be more effective with your problem-solving and decision making. Here’s how:

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1. Uncover your main stress triggers and how to minimise their impact: 

Think of the situations that have stirred a strong reaction in you; whether you’ve become angry, upset, anxious or even ‘paralysed’. What happened to cause that? Was it something someone said? A negative piece of feedback? Being asked to complete a certain task? Understanding the ‘why’ will help you learn how to pinpoint the specific emotional trigger. 

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2. Learn to regulate your emotions to those triggers:

Once you’ve uncovered your stress and anxiety triggers, you can learn how to manage your responses accordingly. From breathing exercises to sensory techniques, there are a number of ways to do this which can be tailored to your needs. 

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3. Changing your emotions by challenging negative beliefs and biases:

When you notice a reactive thought to a particular situation, try flipping it to tell yourself the opposite. We don’t realise just how patterned our thoughts are, but by introducing an opposition thought like this - we can interrupt the brain’s automatic response and start shifting our emotions.  

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4. Reappraise triggers to see them from another perspective:

When you’ve learned to detach from your initial ‘flight, flight, freeze or faint’ response, you’re in a position to see a triggering situation from a different perspective. For example, if a colleague snaps at you - rather than snapping back or feeling personally victimised, you can rationally consider that perhaps your colleague had been yelled at by their boss and was in reactive mode themselves. 

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Life can be unpredictable, but we can guarantee that we’ll all face further challenges. It’s part of the deal. The key is learning how to develop a deep sense of confidence that you will always be alright regardless of what comes your way. You can do this by building out a toolkit of practical resilience methods that offer in-the-moment solutions and long-lasting results. Skills that are science-based, guaranteed and effective - and that nobody can take away from you.