Any advice for managing anxiety?

Yikes! Missing work totally unintentionally is the stuff that my worst anxiety nightmares used to be made of. that or showing up butt-naked!

If there is no one to call tonight then the best you can do is try and get some sleep so you don’t go in tomorrow looking like you were on a bender.

I find it helpful to drink a lot of water if I overdo the caffeine or sugar.

Hopefully you can get some sleep tonight…if you don’t have a sleep aid around I suggest an antihistamine like Benedryl to knock you out.

Hope it all works out for you in the morning. Good luck.

Walk it off, take a nice long walk around the block. That’s helps me but my anxiety is very physically based. Pacing, ants in my pants, that sort of thing. Or if that doesn’t work, I take a Valium. The end. And don’t eat chocolate late at night. I’m very sensitive to chocolate too. If I have it too late in the day, well I might as well had a double expresso.

Although anxiety is a rough one, I would recommend deep breathing, maybe some meditation if you know how. The sleep aid and/or antihistamine could backfire and you could actually look or feel like you’ve been “on a bender”. Have you ever tried either to relax? If so, then I say try. And lots of water never hurt anybody.

It appears that your anxiety is the kind based in reality, different from the kind of anxiety one thinks of as needing to be “managed.” Maybe what you can do is use the anxiety to work for you in some way, get the extra brain activity to figure out what you are doing in a job like this, or how to be helpful to your boss so he/she can be a better leader. Or a way to develop a fail-safe calendar so this situation won’t happen again to you or someone else.

Can you have a copy of the schedule that showed you not working handy when you go in? Sometimes bravado pays off. Also if you’re the type of employee who’s never late and rarely calls in, then you can pull off a dumbfounded, “What do you mean? The schedule showed me not working. I would never miss work intentionally.”

Ugh, I hate that type of sinking feeling when I am pretty sure I screwed up. I really get it. I would probably be freaked all night, so I don’t have any good remedies, just empathy. Many of the suggestions above sound good, but I would forget the drinking water one. If you can actually fall asleep, the last thing you want is to be awakened by the need to pee.

As @PandoraBoxx suggests, get prepared by having copies of the work schedules to show which schedule you were following, and I suggest you also come up with a plan to solve the problem, since you probably aren’t the only one who has it.

If you spend time now preparing a method to help your employer, you will feel better about yourself, and work off that anxiety while you are at it.

@PandoraBoxx – lol, yes peeing could be a side effect of flushing your system with water. But I’d rather be up peeing occasionally than up buzzing all night on caffeine. And Benedryl will help dry things out :)

valium here

I may be a bit late with this advice, but how about telling the truth just as you told it to us? If you have a copy of conflicting schedules, bring them all in. If you feel that you had good reason to be confused then just say so. Surely they can’t be so hard assed as to not understand.

Well? What happened? I hope it is good news.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation is a well established and effective way to reduce anxiety. It works because it is impossible to be anxious and physically relaxed simultaneously.

Good news and bad news, folks. Bad news is, I really did miss work. The good news is that it’s a three-infractions-then-penalty sort of rule, and it may not count at all since I simply wasn’t looking at the master schedule. I am still employed.

Thank you all for your help!

whew!..so glad to hear it

I think this is the most important part:

If your body reacts to anxiety in a particular situation don’t be afraid of this anxiety reaction. In your head tell yourself the symptoms will go away soon. Nothing is wrong with your heart or head. The fear of fear itself can trigger a vicious cycle sometimes ending in panic attacks.