Stress is (sadly) part and parcel of management professions. While we can do our best to keep calm and carry on, there are days where our emotions get the better of us and we can slip into states of anxiety or depression.
Like many people out there, I suffer from anxiety. It’s something that I’ve had forever and while I’m great at keeping it under control, every now and then, it rears its ugly head. When it does, I’m left with two choices – sit back and let the anxiety demon take over, or take up mental arms and do glorious battle. While the first option always seems best when you’re in a bad place, as I’ve got older, I’ve learned that pushing back against unhelpful emotions is always the best path forward. To learn how to fight anxiety and depression, we must first understand what feeds these emotions.
So what causes anxiety and depression?
Well, that’s a complicated question, with a complicated answer. The exact cause of anxiety and depression is unknown. These emotions may be caused by genetic, biological, environmental, or psychological factors (or a combination of these). But mental health professionals agree that lurking behind these negative emotions are collections of negative thoughts and statements.
When we experience unhelpful emotions, such as anxiety and depression, they’re often kicked off by unhelpful self-statements and thoughts. These thoughts follow certain patterns and are classified into groups called ‘unhelpful thinking styles’. If these thinking styles aren’t challenged, they become unconscious habits which feed our anxiety and depression. The longer they go unchallenged, the harder these thoughts are to overcome.
To help you do battle against your mental demons, I’ve outlined five unhelpful thinking styles and what you can do to combat them!
1. Mental filter (aka tunnel vision)
A mental filter is a bit like tunnel vision. We allow some information to filter in, while filtering out other information. While this process can be helpful in some situations, especially when we need to pin down what’s important, it can become a hinderance if we rely on it too much. You’ll find yourself focusing on all the negative parts of situations and ignoring all the good parts.
For example, you might have a great meeting with a new client, but right at the end you catch a team member roll their eyes when you mention a deadline. Your brain will start to dwell on the eye roll rather than the super successful meeting you just had. The more you focus on the bad bit, the more likely it is that you'll keep experiencing the negative feelings that go along with it. So how do you control your mental filter?
Consider the whole picture
If you notice your brain accentuating the negative and eliminating the positive (rather then other way around) you need to ask yourself some questions. Am I taking all the information into account? What else happened that I’m ignoring?
2. Jumping to conclusions (aka mindreading and predictive thinking)
This one’s pretty self-explanatory. Jumping to conclusions is drawing conclusions or making assumptions without there being any evidence to support it. While we might feel intuitive or have a hunch about something, we aren’t always right. There are many times our brains jump to the wrong conclusions and more often than not, these conclusions are negative. There are two ways our brain jumps to conclusions – mind reading and predictive thinking.
Mind reading is when you assume what others are thinking, or we believe we know the reasoning behind other people’s behaviours. You might be chatting to someone in the office when they glance down at their watch, and you’ll find yourself thinking: ‘they must think I’m a bore’ or ‘they don’t want spend their time with me’. We jump to these conclusions without knowing the whole story. Perhaps they have an important meeting coming up they don’t want to miss. Often these thoughts reflect how we see ourselves: ‘I think I’m boring’ or ‘I’m not good enough’ and if we do this often it can really get us down.
Predictive thinking on the other hand is when we make predictions about what’s going to happen in the future (like we’re gazing into an all-knowing crystal ball). These predictions usually overestimate or exaggerate negative emotions or experiences you might encounter. For example, you’re asked to lead a meeting, and you start thinking: ‘I’m going to get in there and forget everything or stumble over my words. It’s going to be a disaster’. You may start to believe this, even though you’ve given many other successful presentations in the past.
Jumping to conclusions is never helpful and it can really amp up your stress and anxiety levels. So, how do you stop this thinking?
You know what they say about assuming…
It makes an ASS out of U and ME. If you find your brain jumping to conclusions, you need to question your thinking. How do I know these things for sure? If I was in a better mindset, would I still think this? What are some alternative explanations for this situation/behaviour?
3. Personalisation (aka carrying the weight of the world)
Personalisation is when you take something that hasn’t gone the way you’d hoped or planned and then you blame yourself completely for what’s happened. This one is super common in managerial roles. For instance, your team fails to meet a deadline and delivers a design a day late. You blame yourself because you’re the manager of the project, when you’re only partly responsible, or not responsible at all.
Over time you start to relate external negative events to something you have or haven’t done. It’s unhelpful to accept complete responsibility for events beyond your control, or to accept more that your share of responsibility. By personalising stuff, you’re essentially carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. It’s a massive burden to bear and over time it will leave you overwhelmed and exhausted. So how do you lighten the load?
Consider all the causes
When something goes wrong or doesn’t go to plan, don’t immediately assume the blame and burden. You need to ask yourself some serious questions. Was this entirely my responsibility, or do you share the responsibility with others? What other external factors might have affected this outcome?
4. Catastrophising (aka making mountains out of molehills)
Have you ever been told you're blowing things out of proportion, or making mountains out of molehills? Catastrophising is when you take a small problem and overemphasise or exaggerate its implications. Let’s say you submit a package to a client and afterwards while skimming through it you spot a small error. Your thoughts then spiral out of control, and you start to think: ‘I can’t believe I made that mistake. The client is going to hate this submission and I’m going to lose this account. I’ll probably lose my job’. While the issue started out small, you can see that with this kind of thinking, things can get very big, very quickly. Before we know it, we’re working up into a tizz and things seems totally beyond our control. So how do we stop the spiral?
Put things in perspective
When you start heading into a negative spiral, you need to stop yourself before you lose control. Start thinking and consider, what are the possible outcomes in this situation? Best case scenario, worst case scenario and then, what is most likely? Ask yourself, am I making too much of this? And how important is this situation in the grand scheme of things?
5. Black and white thinking (aka all or nothing)
The world is full of black and white thinking. Coaches might say, ‘there’s no prizes for second place’, or students may come home with school with one C grade and A grades for everything else but thinking, ‘I’m a failure’. At work you might not always see eye to eye with your boss and think: ‘If we don’t always agree, we have a bad relationship’ or ‘If I’m not the best at what I do, then I’m useless’.
This all-or-nothing thinking means you only see one extreme or another. Right or wrong or good or bad. There are no in-betweens, no shades of grey, and no middle ground. When we judge ourselves, others, or situations based on these extremes, it leads to feelings of disappointment, hopelessness, frustration and anger. So, how do how do you overcome black and white thinking?
Find the shades of grey
In a world of black and white you need to search for the grey. Ask yourself, am I being too extreme or harsh in my thinking? Can I find some middle ground and accept things might not be perfect, but they are not disaster?
Any of these thoughts worm into your head?
As we navigate our day to days, our minds are always interpreting the world around us. Sometimes we see things accurately, but sometimes our minds take shortcuts, and our thinking can become distorted. Once you identify your unhelpful thinking styles, you can stop them before they spiral and curb your anxiety and depression. It ain’t always easy, but it can save you a whole lot of distress in the long run.