12 Tips for Managing New Job Anxiety

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If Nicolas Cage can still get work, you can do anything. You already know the reasons you were hired and are competent to do this job. But we are evolutionarily hardwired to respond with anxiety to new situations. This feeling of heightened alertness is to protect us.

Harness Your Physics

Both confidence and insecurity reside in the brain and within the body. You can concurrently build up your mental and physical resiliency to handle challenges like a new job. Consider how your body often holds itself when you are lacking confidence and feeling scared or overwhelmed. Oftentimes we “turtle” and shrink in and withdraw into ourselves, which signals back to us that we are as timid and helpless as we feel. Now consider the confidence-exuding poses of the Power Rangers. Proceed accordingly.

It’s Important to Define What Job Satisfaction Means

Though job satisfaction tends to increase as earnings increase, those with higher earnings are not necessarily happier at work. The increased job satisfaction that follows a pay increase is temporary, and the effect fades over time.¹

According to behavioral economic theory, workers do not evaluate their income in absolute terms, but against their previous income. And people adjust to their new income level over time, so a salary increase becomes the new benchmark of comparison. The American dream has left my body.

Job satisfaction is largely about your attitude toward a particular job. Beyond salary increases and free bagels, it doesn’t appear that many corporate leaders strive to ensure their companies are truly great places to work. So what does that mean? Job satisfaction and your overall happiness regarding a new or existing job are up to you.

12 Tips for Handling Anxiety About a New Job

1. Risk is scary. Regret is scarier. Be willing to sit with the anxiety caused by the thought you may not be committing to the ideal job if it wasn’t your first choice. All work is noble. Once you stop pursuing a futile quest for certainty, you can move forward. Seeking assurances is a compulsion that increases obsessive thinking patterns. Nothing is permanent, except income tax.
2. Thoughts and feelings don’t equal facts. Remind yourself that all anxiety is rooted in irrational fears and that anxiety lies to you with baseless thoughts, feelings, and ruminations. Just because you think it or feel it, doesn’t mean it’s true. And if you have experienced past anxiety symptoms, a new job can easily become its focus. Anxiety can lie dormant and flare like gout.
3. Meet with your supervisor on the first day. Ensure you’re clear about what’s expected of you, while conveying your own learning goals for the job, even if you embellished your resume. Ask questions, make mistakes, and play the “new” card as needed.
4. Nurture with nature. A Stanford study found quantifiable evidence that walking in nature can reduce stress and lead to a lower risk of depression.² Nature is the antidote to imposter syndrome and “can everyone see my screen?”
5. Give yourself the present of presence. Mindfulness is a skill that is practiced and perfected little by little—like using chopsticks. Mindfulness meditation encourages the practitioner to observe wandering thoughts as they drift through the mind. With practice, an inner balance and peacefulness develop until you become the spitting image of Siddhartha Gautama (aka, Buddha).
6. You're never stuck. Your new gig is not indentured servitude, and you always have options. Even if it doesn’t feel that way.
7. Avoid common mental filters related to starting a new job. Turn on your mental “spam” filter to avoid mindsets like negative predicting, underestimating your abilities, overthinking, unrelenting standards, or catastrophizing regarding your new role.
8. Practice self-care. This includes simply taking time for yourself. From a mental health perspective, anxiety and stress are exhausting. So, honor your intuition and feelings. If you don’t want to attend a happy hour with new colleagues because you’re not “feeling it” and won’t be on your “A-game,” then heed that instinct. You gotta nourish to flourish.
9. Build your mental and physical resiliency to handle this challenge via strength training. You don’t need abs of iron or to become “Quadzilla.” A simple but regular strength training regimen helps to work worries away.
10. As far as your body is concerned, excitement and anxiety are fundamentally the same thing.³ Instead of trying to turn off any anxiety, think of the emotions as signs that you’re genuinely excited. Channel it, repurpose it, and use it as positive energy.
11. In many situations, you need some stress to keep your performance edge. The Yerkes–Dodson law (aka, stress curve), states that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal; but only up to a point. Strive for a 60% to 80% physiological stress arousal rate for optimal performance. It sounds like physics, but let’s not use labels. Stress just enough to impress.
12. Don’t forget to send a “sorry for your loss” card to your old boss.