Overcoming Anxiety at Work

Anxiety is a defining feature of the modern professional experience. It shows up in boardrooms and on building sites, at early morning check-ins and during late-night laptop sessions. It lingers behind confident emails and polished presentations, and increasingly, it determines not just how people feel at work but whether they stay.

In Ireland, anxiety is now the most cited condition affecting employee wellbeing. According to Laya Healthcare’s 2025 Workplace Wellbeing Index, one in two Irish workers report living with a health condition or mental wellbeing issue, with anxiety topping the list. Half of those respondents said they would feel embarrassed to discuss their condition with their employer, and just as many feared being treated differently if they did [1]. Despite this, we continue to operate in many professional environments as if mental wellbeing were separate from performance, as if anxiety were something to be “fixed” outside office hours rather than understood, supported and worked with.

Yet the evidence tells a different story. From absenteeism to presenteeism, from strained team dynamics to rising attrition rates, the impact of anxiety is everywhere. And the challenge for employers and employees alike is to recognise it, demystify it and manage it with intention.

The normalisation of a crisis

A recent study from the UK’s Health and Safety Executive found that between 2021 and 2022, over 1.8 million workers suffered from work-related illnesses, and half of these were linked to stress, depression, or anxiety [2]. In high-pressure sectors such as healthcare, finance, education and technology, the numbers are even higher. Erik Pham, founder of health platform Health Canal, points to research from the American Psychological Association which shows that 76% of employees in toxic workplaces say their environment directly harms their mental health [3].

In Ireland, Laya’s research shows that intense anxiety, while decreasing slightly in 2025 compared to previous years, remains a powerful undercurrent across industries. Financial insecurity remains a core driver, particularly for younger employees, driven by concerns around the housing market, mortgage approval and cost-of-living pressures [4].

But anxiety does not always emerge in a dramatic or visible form. It is just as often found in overachievement, perfectionism and burnout, or in avoidance, low self-esteem and social fears. There is no one form of anxiety, nor is its arrival necessarily trackable to some linear cause and effect. Sometimes it’s just there and you don’t know why.

Many people may be suffering from anxiety without even realising it. As Morra Aarons-Mele writes in The Anxious Achiever, “Do you ever find yourself micromanaging, or redoing others’ work because it’s not up to your standards? Do you feel like you’re in over your head and any day now others will discover you’re faking it?” If so, she suggests, anxiety may be playing a more active role in your professional life than you realise [5].

Psychologist Margaret Forde, who regularly works with executives and early-career professionals, notes that anxiety affects people across the employment spectrum. It doesn’t matter where you sit on the corporate ladder or how many zeros are on your pay packet. The question is less who it impacts, but how it affects them. “People can function with anxiety,” Forde says, “but if it’s the dominant theme in their lives, they will not be at their best. It will affect them in areas such as decision-making and mental focus. You end up staring at a screen or a document, but nothing is going in” [6].

Causes

There is no single cause of workplace anxiety but common threads emerge across studies. According to wellbeing coach Vanessa Green, four triggers show up most frequently: poor work-life balance, poor communication, excessive workload, and toxic interpersonal dynamics such as bullying or exclusion [7]. These triggers often combine to create a feedback loop in which chronic stress becomes internalised as personal failure.

Green describes how many professionals struggle to disconnect from their work even after hours. “They feel guilty for taking time off, or anxious that stepping away will be interpreted as weakness or lack of commitment,” she explains [8]. Poor communication can amplify this, particularly a lack of clarity around expectations. When employees do not know what their manager wants, or do not feel safe enough to ask, anxiety tends to fill the silence. As Chester Elton, co-author of Anxiety at Work, puts it: “In the absence of information, our instinct is to assume the worst — and then work ourselves to the bone to make sure it never happens” [9].

High workloads remain a persistent driver of stress. While some leaders assume that pressure will drive performance, the opposite is often true. “We don’t eat an elephant in one bite,” says Elton. “You have to break work into digestible parts. Managers who support their teams to do that effectively can reduce anxiety more than they realise” [10].

The emotional culture of a workplace matters too. One of the most toxic (and least visible) contributors to workplace anxiety is social exclusion. “Ostracism in the workplace can have long-term psychological implications,” Elton warns. “It is often just as damaging as direct bullying” [11]. Employees who feel excluded, belittled, or overlooked often feel psychologically unsafe, which contributes to higher stress and lower self-esteem. Under such circumstances, working at a high-level becomes extremely difficult.

Why it matters

The costs of anxiety go far beyond the individual. When anxiety becomes entrenched, businesses suffer too. Chronic anxiety impairs cognitive performance, weakens memory, and reduces the ability to regulate emotion, leading to reactive decision-making or analysis paralysis. According to research cited by Laya Healthcare, anxiety increases both absenteeism and presenteeism, damages concentration, and raises the risk of secondary mental health issues such as depression, substance abuse and burnout [12].

Anxiety also erodes retention. A growing number of employees, particularly those in their twenties and thirties, cite mental health as a driving factor in their decision to leave jobs. “Seventy-five per cent of millennials and Gen Z said they left a job recently because of a mental health issue,” says Elton. “You’re losing incredibly talented people because they don’t feel safe talking about their anxiety” [13].

Given this, ignoring anxiety is not just wrongheaded from a moral standpoint but is an outright business risk. And yet, even where support is available, stigma still prevents many employees from reaching out. A 2023 study showed that 90 per cent of workers with anxiety feared disclosing it to their managers [14]. The perception that anxiety and leadership are incompatible is deeply entrenched, and it is holding organisations back.

Managing anxiety

So what can be done? The most effective responses to anxiety are not flashy wellness campaigns or one-off mental health days but long-term cultural shifts that integrate psychological safety into the fabric of an organisation.

At the core of this shift is leadership. As Elton emphasises, “If you can’t talk to your immediate supervisor about a mental health issue, what’s the result? The result is attrition. The result is burnout” [15]. Managers need to recognise that supporting mental wellbeing is a driver of high performance, not a distraction from it. That begins with empathy and emotional literacy. It means actively constructing an environment that makes talking about mental health easy from both an emotional and practical standpoint. Leaders need to communicate to their teams that it’s okay to be going through a hard time and let them know the parameters in place to help them if they are.

Leaders who are willing to be vulnerable and share their own anxieties or challenges help create environments where others feel safe to do the same. As Elton notes, “Trying too hard to appear perfectly in control makes you seem unrelatable. Disclosing that you, too, have struggles can bring all sides together” [16]. Leaders need to be fostering open dialogue, establishing clear expectations, and offering support without judgement.

To help both employees and leaders alike, the available support should be structural, with clear practices available to those who feel they need help. Practical interventions include flexible working hours, workload reviews, mental health training for managers, and accessible resources such as Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs), therapy, and digital wellbeing platforms. Some Irish employers now offer 24/7 mental wellbeing support, including financial counselling and CBT-based interventions for anxiety management [17]. These practices may not outright curtail anxiety, but they can help make it manageable. As Aarons-Mele writes, “When you understand your anxiety and learn to leverage it, you develop a leadership superpower. Unmanaged anxiety keeps you stuck imagining a scary future. But managed anxiety can give you foresight, drive, and empathy” [18].

These strategies can be helpful, but none of them will work unless the culture supports them. That means tackling the stigma head-on.

Building resilience

While organisations must lead, individuals also need tools to manage their own anxiety. Vanessa Green outlines daily practices that many high-achieving professionals use to stay grounded under pressure. These include physical self-care (exercise, sleep, diet), mindfulness, time management, and clear boundary-setting [19].

Other strategies involve building psychological resilience. Reframing anxious thoughts, focusing on problem-solving and practising self-compassion can all help to break the anxiety loop. To sceptics, these approaches can sound wishy-washy, but there’s a logic behind them that can make all the difference, even and especially for workers who are accustomed to guarding their struggles internally. “Self-compassion is not about letting yourself off the hook,” says Forde. “It’s about treating yourself with the kindness you’d extend to someone else in a difficult situation” [20].

It is also important to acknowledge that not all anxiety is bad. In fact, under the right conditions, anxiety can improve performance. The Yerkes-Dodson Law, a century-old psychological model, shows that moderate levels of arousal can boost motivation and focus. Meanwhile, too little leads to apathy and too much leads to paralysis [21]. One useful practice is to reframe anxiety as excitement. While not a guaranteed solution, this approach can be particularly effective in high-stress situations such as job interviews, performance reviews, or public speaking. Recognising that nerves are a normal response that can be channelled into a more positive, energising mindset can make these moments easier to navigate.

Overcoming anxiety at work

Overcoming workplace anxiety is not about striving for serenity in all situations, nor is it about creating perfectly calm workplaces. It is about creating environments where people feel seen, supported and psychologically safe enough to do their best work. That means recognising that anxiety is not a private flaw. It is a shared human experience that when properly understood can become a source of insight rather than isolation. If leaders commit to empathy, if organisations invest in mental health as they do in strategy, and if individuals are given the tools to manage their inner worlds then we can turn anxiety from something feared and silenced into something acknowledged, supported and ultimately transformed.