What to do when anxiety affects your job?

Anxiety at work does not always burst into the room with a dramatic scene. It slips in quietly and rearranges your day. You notice it in the pause before you answer a tough message, in the draft you keep tweaking, and in the meeting you reschedule for a reason that sounds reasonable. If you lead a small team, these tiny hesitations create ripples that others feel long before you name them. The team starts guessing. Priorities drift. Trust thins. By the end of the week, you feel exhausted and yet strangely underproductive, as if the engine ran all day without moving the car.

What looks like procrastination is often fear in a tidy outfit. Anxiety tells a convincing story that sounds like wisdom. It says you should do one more round of research. It says the deck deserves one more polish. It says delegation will slow things down, so you should personally shepherd the important tasks. Inside your head this sounds like diligence. To the business it sounds like a new rule. Speed is unsafe. Initiative is risky. Everyone waits for your final word, and the company pays for that waiting with time first and trust second.

Founders and managers in Southeast Asia carry pressures that rarely fit into a tidy calendar. There is family pride to honor, investor expectations to navigate, and the unspoken comparison to leaders in louder markets. The weight of those expectations can turn clarity into fog. Decisions take longer and feel worse. Feedback becomes sharper and less helpful. Your calendar fills with meetings you requested because being in the room feels safer than being surprised by what happens in that room. Your sleep grows shorter and shallower. You scroll at midnight to feel informed and wake up with a head full of noise and a body that wants to hide.

The first step is not heroic. It is honest labeling. Anxiety is not a personal failure. It is a signal that your operating system is running too hot. You can see it in patterns, not moments. Items roll forward from one day to the next. You keep touching work that belongs to someone else. You bounce between messages every few minutes and mistake movement for momentum. If you keep pushing through by adding more sprints, more reviews, and more late nights, you simply increase the surface area where things can go wrong. The problem is not effort. The problem is ownership and energy.

Ambiguity is where anxiety multiplies. When stakes are high and roles are fuzzy, the brain searches for control and finds it in rework. The solution is not to do more. It is to narrow the aperture. Choose the smallest unit of meaningful progress and make it real. One decision. One owner. One clear deadline. One definition of a good enough outcome for this stage. If the outcome is unclear, add a time box and a test. A short test turns a scary commitment into a data point. A data point quiets stories. Once you have a rhythm of time boxed proof, the company moves again, and your nervous system learns that progress does not require perfect certainty.

Boundaries help too, especially the boundary between owning and advising. You can play both roles, but not at once. If you own a decision, decide and accept the consequences. If you advise, ask hard questions and then leave the room so the owner can act without your shadow. Many teams in our region prize respect and harmony, which makes this boundary even more important. When the line blurs, people wait. When the line is clear, they ship.

Rebuild your week as if energy were a scarce resource to budget. Protect a daily block with no meetings so that real output can happen. Protect a regular block for one to ones that are forward looking and specific, not just status updates. Protect a weekly review block where you confront the truth about rolling items. A task that rolls is trying to tell you something. It is too big, too vague, or still yours because you do not trust anyone else with it. Break it down or hand it off. If you cannot hand it off, name the barrier. A skill gap can be closed with training. A trust gap can be closed with clarity and checkpoints. A control habit requires humility and practice.

Support also matters. Therapy is not an admission of weakness. It is a structured way to separate signal from story. Coaching is not a luxury reserved for later. It is a method for turning insight into repeatable behavior. If budgets are tight, start with simple moves that cost nothing. Take walking calls. Write the single decision you are avoiding and the real reason you are avoiding it. Call a friend who will tell you the truth without dressing it up. You do not need comfort that lets you stay stuck. You need courage that helps you move.

Leaders often ask how much to reveal to their teams. You do not have to narrate your inner life to be trustworthy. You do need to be legible. Say what you are doing to stabilize yourself and the business. Describe the next two weeks in clear terms. Assign ownership. Then keep your word. In a season where emotions run high, consistency is the clearest form of communication.

If your anxiety clusters around fundraising, turn hope into arithmetic. Know your cash runway in weeks. Name the specific proofs that reduce investor risk. Reduce each proof to the smallest version that changes the conversation. Build only that. In our markets, teams often burn cycles on enterprise polish that does not alter the core risk story. Make the product work for one real customer. Capture evidence. Package it cleanly. Move to the next proof. When the work is framed as sequential proofs instead of sweeping narratives, your brain has fewer places to hide.

If your anxiety clusters around team performance, audit role design with care. Early teams blur function and role until no one can win. A person hired for marketing ends up splitting focus across partnerships, brand, growth experiments, and internal communications. That is not a role. That is a gratitude tax. Map the work. Assign single owners to specific outcomes. Define success for this quarter and clarify what you will not measure yet. When people know the rules of the game, they can choose how to win. Their energy returns, and the fog in your head starts to lift.

If your anxiety clusters around identity, be cautious with social media. Advice from another context can be inspiring and still mislead you. A thread written for a Bay Area company with deep capital reserves and a specific talent market will not transpose directly to Johor Bahru or Manila. Borrow principles. Do not import pressure. Ask a grounded question. What is the smallest version of success that works here with the team I already have and the money I actually control. Build that. Then grow from there.

Daily practice matters more than grand strategy in this phase. Send the hard message before lunch so it does not poison the afternoon. Ship the messy draft to the one person who can unblock it. Update your investors with the three truths you have, not the nine you wish you had. Protect the time block that keeps tomorrow sane. This is not a season for glorious scale. This is a season for solid footing. Stability is not the opposite of ambition. It is the platform that makes ambition safe.

None of this means shrinking your goals. It means channeling your drive into routines that survive pressure. The company you want will not be built on adrenaline stacked over more adrenaline. It will be built on trust that compounds. Trust in yourself to choose, to hand off, and to recover. Trust in your team to own outcomes without your daily rescue. Trust in a process that holds even when the market is quiet and the numbers feel stubborn.

There is no final victory over anxiety. There is only rhythm. The day you stop calling anxiety by another name, the business changes texture. Meetings get shorter because decisions have owners. Updates get clearer because success is defined. Shipping happens without your second guess because people know the boundary between your advice and their authority. Sleep improves not because the world is easier, but because you have a method for meeting it.

If you are reading this between calls in a busy café, start with one action. Choose the decision you have delayed the longest. Write the outcome you need in one sentence. Name the owner. Set a reasonable time box. Tell the people who need to know. Then do nothing clever. Keep that promise. Keep it once. Keep it twice. Let the rhythm take hold while your nervous system learns a new truth. You can carry real weight without crushing the people who carry it with you.

You are not late. You are learning a form of leadership that actually scales. It will not make your voice louder. It will make your presence steadier. Your team will notice the difference before you do, and the business will begin to move with a cleaner, calmer kind of speed.