Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
It starts on Sunday afternoon. By Monday morning your stomach’s in a knot before you’ve opened your laptop, and every notification makes your heart jump. Your manager writes “quick call?” and your whole body goes cold. Nothing terrible has actually happened. Your reviews are fine. And still you spend every working day braced, as if one wrong move will undo everything.
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I know that knot. Teale, my wife, and I record podcasts together. You’d think a man who’s sat with couples for two decades would be at ease talking into a microphone. Most of the time, I’m scared during recordings. Scared it’s not going well. Scared I’ll be seen as not enough.
There’s a grip in my stomach. A tightening in my chest. And then the part of me I call the Bull takes the wheel. I repeat what Teale says. I cut her off. I take control. I drive the episode like a man trying to outrun annihilation. And in doing it, I hurt her. She feels unseen and dominated, her disappointment rises, which wakes the Bull even more, and round it goes.
I’m learning to contain him. To name the fear underneath. I get a little better every day. The knot isn’t proof you’re in the wrong job or the wrong life. It’s a sign of something older, and it can be worked with.
Before I explain any of it, try something. Read the next sentence slowly, let the out-breath go, and notice what happens in your body as you read it. You are enough before the work is done. Don’t argue with it and don’t agree with it. Just notice where it lands, stomach, chest, jaw, and whether something in you loosens or reaches for the to-do list. Stay with that one more breath. That’s the place we’ll work from.
What’s really going on
If something in your shoulders dropped a notch, notice that. If a voice said “not until I’ve cleared my inbox,” notice that too. That voice is the anxiety, talking.
Most work anxiety isn’t about the work. Most of the time we’re not really working for money. We’re working against shame, against the old feeling that we’re not enough, and every email is a chance to be found out. Most of the working world runs on what I call fiat work: work cut loose from the truth inside you, where worth is never established, only re-earned from zero every morning. You can be busy but never settled. Exhausted but never finished.
When I was twenty-three, I was a stockbroker, surrounded by people making more money in a year than all my aunts and uncles made in their lifetimes. You’d think they were floating in confidence. They weren’t. They were terrified. Of missing the next move, of not being smart enough, that their manager would be disappointed. Everyone was pretending. Everyone was bracing.
There are three ways a nervous system answers that. The Relentless one works harder and harder, trying to be better liked by the manager, striving to get to a future where it’s finally enough. The Reluctant one feels like a disappointment already, so it goes quiet, gets defensive, withdraws. The Relentless-Reluctant one swings between the two. All three are anxious. None of them is a character flaw.
And underneath all three there’s a simpler truth. Anxiety is an unconfirmed transaction. Something in your past hurt and never got completed, and now whenever your present-moment self meets anything that rhymes with it, a tone in a message, a raised eyebrow in a meeting, your body feels that old fear all over again, right now. Your nervous system isn’t malfunctioning. It’s doing what an honest record-keeper does. You make sense.
The loop, on your situation
I don’t get people out of work anxiety with breathing tricks alone. I use a practice I learned from my teacher Aftab Omer, reflexive participation. At its simplest: what am I noticing now, how am I affected, and what creative action is being called for? Here’s how it runs on your Monday.
Get ground in your body first
Feel your feet on the floor. Let one breath out slower than it came in. Look around the room and name three things you can see. The inbox will still be there in thirty seconds.
What happened
Pick the last spike. Say it in the present tense, just the facts. “My manager messages ‘quick call?’ My chest tightens. I start rehearsing my defence.” Leave out the forecast of what the call is about. The forecast is the anxiety’s story, not the event.
Where it lands in the body
Where does it live? A knot in the stomach? Shallow breath high in the chest? Your body is the first ledger. It records the truth of what’s happened to you, not the narrative. Find the sensation and stay with it for one breath, without trying to make it go away.
Who’s driving
Notice which one of the three is at the wheel. Is it the Relentless one, firing off a reply in ninety seconds? The Reluctant one, leaving the message unopened for an hour? Then listen for the voice underneath. Omer called that voice the Gatekeeper. In my book I call these protector parts. They’re absolutely sure that whatever this costs, it’s better than the vulnerable part of you getting hurt again. Most of the time the math is wrong.
Scoreboards feed them. From my earliest days as a therapist, I’ve tracked my average session fee per week. It helped me value my work. And I still got it into my head that the number should only ever go up. The same man who once watched his daily ranking every morning, now watching a new number. Ask yourself which number your protector is watching.
Trace it
When did someone else’s mood first decide whether you were safe? Years ago I worked as head of business development under a volatile leader whose moods set the weather for everyone underneath him. The more threatened he felt, the smaller I became. It was the same dance I’d learned as a boy, with a father who made the house feel smaller whenever he was home.
Most people live their whole working lives reenacting their childhood without realizing it. They think they have a job problem. They have a ground problem. Find your version: the parent you had to read, the teacher you couldn’t predict. Then widen it to a culture that ranks you every quarter.
Feel it and tell someone
Under the anxiety there’s often fear, and under the fear, grief. For how long you’ve been bracing. Feel it for one breath. Then say the true sentence to someone safe, out loud: “I’m scared at work every single day, and nothing’s even wrong.” The anxiety gets smaller the moment it isn’t carried alone.
One creative action
Ask what this work is backed by. Is today’s task backed by fear, or by something true in you? Then do one thing from the second place. Answer the message after one full breath, not before. Say “Let me look at that and come back to you this afternoon.” Ask your manager one clarifying question instead of guessing at the worst. Small, true, and on your own timing. That’s thriving action, not survival action: “I can do this properly, because tomorrow exists.”
One thing to do tonight
Before bed, put one hand on the place the anxiety lived today, and ask it a single question: what does the future feel like in my body? Don’t fix the answer. Just hear it. When the future feels unreliable, rushing and bracing aren’t flaws. They’re intelligence under pressure. Your body is telling you what it believes. Tonight you’re just listening.
Would therapy help with this?
For a lot of people, coaching is the right size. Coaching is how we go from where you are now to where you want to go, and we only address the past when it emerges in the present.
But if you’re having panic you can’t come down from, if you can’t get yourself through the door some mornings, or the dread has spread into everything outside work too, that’s more than coaching can hold. Please talk to a licensed therapist where you live. And anything physical, like chest pain or a racing heart that won’t settle, goes to a doctor first.
The path
What I’ve just walked you through is the Empathi Method. For an individual, it’s built on my Proof of Work of Being Human protocol: building sovereign ground inside yourself, so that a message from your manager is just a message.
There are two ways to keep going. Or you can get on the list for the book and the live program with me, where we do this work together over several weeks.
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Get help now
Figlet is an AI coach, there at 2 in the morning or right now. It runs this loop with you on your actual situation, as often as you need. It’s coaching, not therapy. The list hears first about the book and the next live program with me.
Proof of Work, Greenleaf Book Group Press, February 2027. Not sure which ground is hurting? Take the two-minute Ground Check.
Back in the knot next Sunday? That’s part of it. You begin again. I do too.
I go deeper into this in my book, Proof of Work (Greenleaf Book Group Press, February 2027).
Common questions
Why do I feel anxious every day before work?
Usually because your body is anticipating a judgment, not a task. If your worth feels re-earned from zero every morning, every workday starts with something at stake, and Sunday night becomes the warning bell. It makes sense, and it can soften.
How do I stop feeling anxious at work?
Not by forcing calm. Ground your body first, name what just happened in plain facts, and notice which protective part is driving. Then take one small action from what’s true rather than from fear. Repeat it daily. The anxiety settles as your body learns the ground is holding.
Should I quit if work gives me anxiety?
That’s not a call I’d make for anyone, and it’s not one to make from inside the dread. First work out whether it’s a job problem or a ground problem, because a ground problem follows you to the next job. If you’re weighing a move, talk it through with the people who know your situation and your finances.
Reflexive participation and the Gatekeeper come from the teaching of Aftab Omer at the Institute of Imaginal Studies, where I trained.
