Dealing with Anxiousness at Work

I work retail and my anxiety at work is always high. I like to step back into the stockroom for a second to compose myself, play with my beads for a second, take a deep breath and go out and face the music. The best thing to do, if you can, is to go in to work with a positive mindset if you can. That is a commitment that I made to myself not long ago and it's really, REALLY helping. By constantly having positive thoughts, I harbor a move positive attitude. When I feel like the anxiety and stress is getting to be to much, I'll do what I said in the beginning of this paragraph. If I am unable to step away (like if I'm on register and there is a line), I slow down a bit. In retail, the faster you go, the more money you make but sometimes, you have to take it a notch down for your own mentality. Because being at register is so mind numbing sometimes, I tend to kinda meditate while I do it. As I'm scanning the items, I focus on the beeping (it also helps to count and make sure I scanned all the items). As I bag, I focus on the feeling of opening the bag and putting the items inside. After wards, I thank the customer and they are on their way...then, it begins again, another cycle.

Everyone handles it differently, but I agree with what everyone has said so far. If you can get a pair of beads, the baoiding balls, a stress ball, heck, even a fidget spinner, it will help (I keep a fidget spinner in my pocket, my co-workers know my level of anxiety by how fast I'm spinning it). I think anxiety and stress is something that we will never be able to escape 100%, but we can learn to keep it at ease, at lease.

Hope our thoughts have helped you

Thank you so much everyone! I'm definitely going to try some of these techniques.

Just wanted to let you all know that some of these techniques are already helping me. Thank you so much!

I found a large part of the trouble with manning the phones is the repetitive nature of the work: phone rings, answer, listen to problem, offer solutions (hopefully achieve some level of satisfaction), end call, rinse, repeat. When you are in customer service you have no control of the frequency or the nature of the calls either, so anxiety levels can naturally rise as you subconsciously prepare for the worst case scenario each time you pick up a call.

For me, I found developing personal rituals, involving multiple senses, to reinforce a separation between calls helped me to retain some clarity and deal with each call individually rather than letting anxiety/stress from previous calls mount throughout the day. I loved (still do really) exaggerating the physical action required to press the receiver button down rather than just replacing the handset to end the call whilst at the same time (probably a microsecond after so the caller wouldn't hear) verbalising "And... click!" to signify that call was ended and I didn't need to be involved with it further. I found audio cues to be especially effective.

Additionally, as I was a receptionist, I also had to contend with face to face interactions which present a different set of challenges of their own. I had a ritual where I would touch a certain part of a wooden desk before and after attending a counter enquiry and visualised leaving my worries "there" so I could attend each customer without baggage. I know some people who have a "worry plant" on their desk for the same reason and hang their worries on the leaves (I can't promise the plant will be happy with that though).

Frequent movement helps too. If you can walk to the end of your row of cubicles and back once or twice on the hour, great. If you can't leave your phone, then finding a series of stretches you can do whilst seated can help (particularly neck and shoulders as that's where we tend to carry tension when we're stressed or anxious).

Beyond that, everyone else has already suggested the other things that worked for me.

Keep at it and all the best.

Thank you so much for your response! I'll try your suggestions tomorrow to see if they help!