When anxiety makes you question your ability

You’re submitting a piece of work late after having spent several working days, and long evenings trying to get it done.

You’re exhausted. All you can think about is letting your boss down by handing it in late and you’re worried that they’ll be annoyed. And, perhaps even more than that, you’re even more worried that it won’t be good enough.

You can’t shake the feeling that it’s not quite right, no matter how long you work on it for.

There’s a strong, deep down sense that you can’t be this anxious and good at your job at the same time. It’s as though the two things cannot co-exist together.

Or can they?

The shame of not feeling as capable as you look

At work, there can be a lot of pressure to be competent, capable and not let others in your team down. Sometimes this can come from ourselves and sometimes it might come from others, whether explicitly spoken or not.

Many of the people I work with feel that their sense of pervasive uncertainty or persistent anxiety is somehow a fundamental flaw.

As though, if anyone around them knew that this was their struggle, it would reveal them as incompetent, or somehow lacking compared to those around them. It becomes something hidden that no one else can discover.

And, in this way, there’s something else beyond the anxiety. A sense of shame.

It’s no longer only, ‘I’m struggling with this.’ It becomes, ‘What does feeling this way say about me?’

Anxiety doesn’t cancel out your abilities

Yes, two things can be true at the same time.

You can have a panic attack before work and still do an excellent job in the office, classroom, or wherever you work. You can doubt yourself and still be a team player who contributes a great deal to the people around them. You can question your qualifications and experience and still be the person who brings smiles to clients’ faces, seals deals or quietly gets on with things behind the scenes.

Living with anxiety doesn’t automatically make us incapable.

As people, we’re often complex. Our feelings can be strong, even overwhelming at times. And yet that doesn’t automatically mean that you’re incompetent. Many people who struggle with their mental health in all sorts of ways can still have wonderful strengths, talents and abilities, which don’t get cancelled out simply because you’re struggling.

What happens when you’re ashamed of how you feel?

When something feels too hard to say out loud, it doesn’t go away. Instead, you end up carrying it around with you.

You might doubt yourself every time the feeling bubbles up inside you. You might try to trample it down, tell yourself you shouldn’t feel that way or look at others who seem confident and wonder why you can’t be more like them.

And when nobody else is talking about feeling this way, it’s easy to believe that you’re the only one.

So you don’t mention it.

Something that people don’t often know who haven’t experienced much anxiety in their life is how exhausting it can be. It is exhausting, not only to carry around constant anxiety but also to camouflage how you feel every day in an attempt to fit in and seem capable to those around you.

And shame tends to grow when it stays hidden.

What if you could talk about it?

Sometimes beginning to put how you feel into words can make a really big difference.

It doesn’t magically make everything better, of course not. But you don’t have to keep carrying the weight of it around in quite the same way.

And that’s one of the things that can be really helpful about counselling.

You can talk about the thoughts and feelings that are hard to talk about with a friend, your partner or your parents.

There may not be a neat answer, and talking about it won’t necessarily make those feelings go away.

But perhaps they don’t need to disappear before you’re allowed to talk about them.

Perhaps you can start by allowing both things to be true.

You can live with anxiety and also be capable at work.

If some of this sounds familiar, you don’t have to have it all worked out before you talk to someone about it.

If you’d like to find out more about working with me, get in touch. We can have a chat about what’s been going on for you and whether I might be the right person to help.