Just had two months off work with depression and anxiety attacks and returned to work this week.
Yes, I was anxious about returning – not so much in regard to workload as I knew that people had been coping and this was reassuring (although proof that I wasn’t indispensable. Damn!). My ‘return to work’ anxiety was mainly about the questions “how are you?” and “are you better?”. The best answer to both at the moment is “I’ll let you know”, as most of my anxiety triggers are in the workplace.
Why would I walk back into these conditions? Well, for one thing I’m two weeks into a cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) course on coping with anxiety. Put simply, you rate the stages of your key anxiety on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being very mild and 10 being “OMG, I’m going to have a heart attack right now”. Then you start with your mildest trigger situation and purposefully expose yourself to it for a week. As the weeks go by, you progress through the various stages of your anxiety in sequence, and by confronting them, subdue them.
My number 10 ‘OMG’ scenario is very hostile business meetings, so stage 1 – the least challenging version – would be meeting with familiar colleagues one at a time. That’s what I’ve been doing this week.
I’m really fascinated by this approach, and hopeful that it will work for me, because if it does, it could be a versatile psychological tool to deal with other real life challenges such as procrastination.
Work in progress…will let you know how it goes.
