Anxiety at Work: When High Performance Is a Coping Mechanism

Most people with work anxiety do not think they have anxiety. They think they are thorough. They think they care. They think staying late, checking twice, and dreading their inbox is just what it takes to do a good job.

In Singapore's work culture, these behaviours are so normalised they have become markers of reliability. The anxious employee gets things done. They follow up. They never drop a ball. They get promoted.

That is not a skill. That is a survival mechanism that got reframed as a professional virtue.

Appropriate concern resolves when the threat is gone. You finish the presentation, the stress lifts. Anxiety moves immediately to the next thing. There is no relief. Just a brief pause before the next cycle begins. The deadline passes and instead of rest, there is the creeping awareness of everything else that could go wrong.

Neurologically, chronic work anxiety keeps the body in a low-level stress response that never fully deactivates. Research from the Karolinska Institute found that employees with high job strain had measurably elevated cortisol levels even on rest days. The body had stopped distinguishing between work and not-work.

Over time this creates a particular kind of exhaustion that sleep does not fix. You cannot switch off because your nervous system has learned that switching off is when things go wrong.

Singapore's work culture actively conflates anxiety with conscientiousness. Being first in, last out, always available gets rewarded as dedication. This makes it easy to stay convinced the anxiety is proportionate. The job keeps supplying reasons. But if you removed the job, the anxiety would find something else. That is the tell.

This week, keep a simple log. Each time you complete a task or resolve a worry, note one word: relief, or redirect. Do this for five working days. If the pattern is mostly redirect with no relief, the work is not the source. The source is a system that has learned to scan for threat constantly. That is what is worth addressing.