Worry and anxiety among the American workforce is at an all-time high. As a nation, people are concerned about wildfires and climate change, political and racial unrest, mass shootings and the Russia-Ukraine war. In the workplace, employees and employers face tight budgets, inflation woes, the aftereffects of Covid and heated debates over remote versus in-office work. Suggested antidotes to the worry-anxiety burnout epidemic have been counseling, mindfulness meditation at your desk, deep breathing exercises and awe walks on your lunch hour. Now, there’s another new tool bringing relief to stressed-out workers. It’s known as the Triple-A process, and it unhooks us from worry, anxiety and other unpleasant thoughts and feelings such as anger or judgment when they hijack us during the workday.
The Triple-A strategy is based on clinical and empirical research and has been shown to bring workers a sense of calm, clarity and confidence when worry woes and job stress hit home. You can practice this technique anywhere, anytime, and it only takes a few minutes to unhook from feelings of worry or anxiety before they accumulate over time, leading to burnout. This three-step strategy is the on-ramp to your stabilizing central command center, where you take the wheel, and worry and anxiety take the passenger seats.
Step 1: Aware
The starting point is to become aware when you are worrying or feeling anxious. Most of us get so used to these unpleasant feelings that we have learned not to pay attention to them. As a result, we don’t see the water we’re swimming in during the workday. And some of us have become so accustomed to worry and anxiety that we believe we need them to be productive. After years of living with these unpleasant emotions, we’re unaware that they have an ongoing running monologue with us. And we lose sight of the fact that we have allowed them to take the wheel, relegating us to the backseat. But science has shown that we are neither our worry nor our anxiety. And anxiety and worry are not us. But it takes some practice to develop that muscle memory of noticing the moment they pop up to realize they’re separate from us. The first step is to get curious like a private detective then watch when you notice either worry or anxiety present.
Step 2: Acknowledge
Once you’re aware of either worry or anxiety, the second step is to acknowledge the emotion silently on the inside—just like it’s a person who just walked into the room. Focus on it for a few seconds—much like you would observe a blemish on your hand. Talk to it like you would a friend or family member with something such as, “Hello anxiety. I see you’re stirred up.” In these silent conversations, it’s important to use third-party words to speak to the emotions as separate entities. In the old days, people who talked to themselves were considered “crazy.” Now, experts consider self-talk to be one of the most effective tools to deal with worry and anxiety. Research shows silently referring to ourselves by name or as “you,” instead as “I,” gives us psychological distance from the emotions, allowing us to talk to ourselves the way we might speak to someone else or they might speak to us. You can even tell the worry or anxiety to pull up a chair and have a cup of tea and ask it to tell you what its concerns are. Then, you just listen and observe. Science-backed studies show that this practice lowers anxiety, gives us self-control, cultivates wisdom over time and puts the brakes on the negative voices that restrict possibilities.
Step 3: Allow
The third step is to allow worry or anxiety to be present when it shows up—especially if you don’t like it—without trying to change, fix, fight, debate, combat, resist, steamroll, ignore, or try to tame or conquer it. All of us have worry and anxiety from time to time. Clinical data shows that ignoring or fighting our emotions strengthens them. In some ways, this is the most difficult step of all. But You can’t change something if you refuse to allow it. Once you allow the worry or anxiety, you can befriend them with kind and compassionate self-talk, and they will relax. Science-backed research, for example, shows that positive affirmations function as “cognitive expanders,” bringing a broader perspective to diffuse the brain’s tunnel vision of self-threats. Befriending and self-affirmations help us transcend the mind’s zoom-lens mode by engaging the wide-angle lens and cultivating a long-distance relationship with the worried or anxious voices to see ourselves fully from an enlarged self-view.
Case In Point
One night I got caught in a harrowing blizzard in a remote area of the North Carolina Mountains without snow tires or four-wheel drive. I couldn’t stop or pull off the road, and my car was skidding on ice. Clutching the steering wheel, I had to drive another thirty miles up steep treacherous mountain curves. At first, I heard my judgment’s reprimands, “I hope you’re satisfied, dummy. You’ve done it now,” followed by a surge of anxiety tangling with me like a ball of yarn. Aware of the anxiety, I took a deep breath and moved into coaching myself with the Triple-A. I acknowledged the anxiety and allowed it to be there instead of fighting or ignoring it. I used third party compassionate self-talk with the anxiety: “Okay Bryan, easy does it. You’ve got this. You’re going to be fine. Just breathe. That’s right, Bryan, just keep it on the road. Awesome job!” The Triple-A process mitigated the anxiety, allowing me to focus totally on my driving, and I made it home without a scratch. But I shudder to think what might have happened if I didn’t have the three-step practice in my pocket.
The Triple-A tool can be used at work, home or socially when things go south. Practicing self-distancing, compassion and positive self-talk, as I did in the snowstorm, helps us perform stronger at job tasks, interact better with co-workers and recover more quickly from setbacks at work. The Triple-A zooms out your perspective, giving you psychological distance from worry or anxiety so you see the bigger picture of what’s happening. Self-talk provides an objective perspective—a bird’s eye view, if you will—of your worry or anxiety, as if it’s happening to someone else. It enables you to make connections and see possibilities and solutions beyond your worry or anxiety’s restrictive myopic lens. The more you practice this tool to notice, understand and get to know your worry or anxiety, the more you develop a wide-angle lens, plus muscle memory that automatically shifts you into C-Mode where you feel calm, clarity and confidence even in the heat of the moment.
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