If you are a business owner, you have likely been urged to start paying attention to your workers’ mental health. It would come as no surprise, though. Mental health issues, including severe anxiety, are a growing problem for workers around the world, and they can significantly affect anyone’s performance and productivity.
If you would like your employees to stay happy and healthy, think about the causes of this issue. In general, it tends to be the atmosphere in the workplace, as well as stringent deadlines and huge workloads that are inadequate to the workers’ pay. Then, think about how each of the things listed above can be addressed and incorporate the ideas into how your company operates. If you do not know where to start, check out the rest of this article!
Below, you will find a detailed description of the causes of work anxiety, as well as a list of ways to deal with, such as organizing workshops on stress management, including mental health coverage in your health care plan, thoughtfully managing people’s workloads, and using communication to increase access to mental health resources and reduce stigma (not only concerning issues themselves but also ways people deal with them, e.g., according to https://www.ounceofhope.com/, there’s still a lot of prejudice and misconceptions concerning using CBD for anxiety).
What Is Work Anxiety?
Anxiety is a widespread mental disorder characterized by excessive feelings of worry and fear, as well as restlessness and insomnia. Anxiety disorders differ in severity. This article focuses on work-related anxiety, which can be defined as excessive worry over things related to work that causes stress. It often results in an inability to do one’s job and worsening performance.
What Are the Causes of Work Anxiety?
Individual Factors
Specific people are more prone to feeling anxious than others. In general, anxiety is a feature of the human brain, which has evolved to make humans more sensitive to danger. In modern times, where you no longer have to worry about wild animals and looking for shelter, but you are exposed to the abundance of information and news, it can lead to chronic anxiety. The following factors increase your risk of developing anxiety:
- Brain chemistry. Your genetic makeup can play a huge part in how anxious you feel about different situations.
- Negative experiences. If you have been exposed to traumatic events in your life, such as physical, emotional, and/or sexual abuse, you are more likely to develop anxiety later on in life.
- Psychological factors. Specific personality traits and coping strategies can make you more likely to develop work anxiety.
- Your lifestyle. Some habits cause anxiety, including bad eating habits, lack of exercise, smoking, and drinking alcohol excessively.
Organizational Factors
Anxiety can also be caused by organizational factors. If they are addressed promptly, the overall level of work anxiety in a given workplace will be reduced. Here are some of the most common organizational factors that are responsible for high levels of stress at work:
- Organizational structure. If your company lacks clear goals or fails to provide workers with opportunities to grow professionally, it will increase their level of worry.
- Lack of job security. If you are unsure if you will have a job tomorrow, you will undoubtedly start worrying about your future. This is one of the significant causes of anxiety in the workplace.
- Poor working conditions. If your workplace lacks appropriate lighting and fresh or you use poor work equipment, it will create undue pressure.
- If the workload is too large for one person to handle alone and deadlines are unrealistic, it becomes impossible for an employee to do their job properly. It will result in high stress levels and anxiety.
- Workplace culture. A hostile or non-inclusive culture is likely to make employees feel insecure and anxious at work. It can also prevent them from expressing their fears and concerns openly. This leads to hidden anxiety, which is often dealt with using unhealthy coping mechanisms instead of talking about the problems directly.
- Lack of social interaction. If workers don’t have a chance to connect with each other at work, they might feel lonely and isolated from their colleagues and superiors. This can cause a lot of stress and increase their anxiety levels significantly.
How Can You Deal With Work Anxiety?
The first step towards addressing work-related anxiety is identifying its causes and finding ways to fight it using your company policies and resources. Here are a few interesting ideas on how you can do that:
Organize Workshops on Stress Management
Organizing workshops on different ways to manage stress can help your employees get rid of work anxiety. You can talk about different relaxation techniques and give your employees the means to use them. For instance, if you want to talk about yoga classes, you can pay a yoga instructor to come to the office two times a week and hold yoga classes for your workers.
Promote Mental Health Coverage in Your Health Plan
Mental health coverage in your health plan can provide employees with easy access to therapists and psychologists who will help them deal with anxiety and other mental health issues. It is something that every business should provide in today’s fast-paced world.
Manage People’s Workloads in a Thoughtful Way
Thoughtfully managing people’s workloads can lower work anxiety in the workplace. You can achieve this by ensuring that people have enough time to complete the assigned tasks and preventing the management from making last-minute changes to existing deadlines.
In Conclusion
To sum up, the workplace environment plays a significant role in the development of anxiety issues. If you want your employees to stay happy and healthy and, thus, productive, think of creative ways to deal with the causes of work anxiety.
Remember to keep communication lines open! Communication plays a huge part in dealing with the problem healthily. You can also try talking to your colleagues about the signs and ways of addressing stress and anxiety. Discussing anxiety openly will reduce the stigma around it and encourage more workers to get help if they need it.