5 Tips for Staying Calm (When You’re Stressed)

Focus is essential to productivity. But it’s tough to stay focused when you’re anxious.

This is a dilemma I’ve faced quite a bit in my own work. As I’ve written before, I’m a somewhat anxious person by nature — and that can wreak havoc when I’m worried about the things I need to work on.

Worries deal a double whammy for our success with difficult cognitive work:

1. Anxiety encourages avoidance. If you’re afraid of doing badly on a test, bombing a presentation, or getting your submission rejected, one strategy to avoid those negative feelings is simply to avoid working on the project that is causing you to feel anxious. This avoidance itself, however, can perpetuate anxiety by preventing you from experiencing that those worries were most likely overblown.
2. Anxiety uses up mental bandwidth. Worried, intrusive thoughts are distracting. More technically, they use up your working memory capacity, leaving you less capacity for your tasks. This can be disastrous for deep work or intensive learning as we need every bit of working memory capacity we can muster.

Below are a few strategies, culled from psychotherapeutic approaches for dealing with stress, that have helped me:

1. Apply Socratic questioning to your reflexive thoughts

Cognitive behavioral therapy (which I review in-depth here) is the gold standard for psychotherapy for anxiety disorders. A…