5 Tips for Staying Calm (When You’re Stressed)

Focus is essential to productivity. But it’s tough to stay focused when you’re anxious.

This is a dilemma I’ve faced quite a bit in my own work. As I’ve written before, I’m a somewhat anxious person by nature — and that can wreak havoc when I’m worried about the things I need to work on.

Worries deal a double whammy for our success with difficult cognitive work:

1. Anxiety encourages avoidance. If you’re afraid of doing badly on a test, bombing a presentation, or getting your submission rejected, one strategy to avoid those negative feelings is simply to avoid working on the project that is causing you to feel anxious. This avoidance itself, however, can perpetuate anxiety by preventing you from experiencing that those worries were most likely overblown.
2. Anxiety uses up mental bandwidth. Worried, intrusive thoughts are distracting. More technically, they use up your working memory capacity, leaving you less capacity for your tasks. This can be disastrous for deep work or intensive learning as we need every bit of working memory capacity we can muster.

Below are a few strategies, culled from psychotherapeutic approaches for dealing with stress, that have helped me:

1. Apply Socratic questioning to your reflexive thoughts

Cognitive behavioral therapy (which I review in-depth here) is the gold standard for psychotherapy for anxiety disorders. A basic tenet of this therapeutic approach is that a combination of situational factors and our background beliefs triggers automatic thoughts. If you’re stressed, those thoughts often fixate on potential dangers that are out of proportion to the actual risks. For instance, a moment of frustration with a work task may lead immediately to the thought, “I’m no good at this,” or “I’m never going to get done in time.” Those automatic thoughts trigger anxiety and further worried thinking.

One way to break this cycle of anxiety spurred by reflexive thoughts is to question the content of those thoughts. Notice a thought you’re having, and give yourself some reasons it might be true and some reasons it may not be. Ask yourself if you think it’s 100% true, 0% true, or somewhere in-between.