How to show up at work when your life is falling apart

I sat in my car staring at the front door of the community mental health center, questioning if I could walk in. If anyone saw me, they might have assumed I was a patient struggling to face my mental health issues head-on in treatment. But I wasn’t. I was the therapist who was struggling to find the courage to walk in the door.

My husband had passed away unexpectedly just two months before, at the age of 26. After my three days of bereavement time, I wasn’t in any shape to return to work. Fortunately, my doctor diagnosed me with “acute stress disorder” and bought me two months of short-term disability. I still didn’t feel ready to go back to work but my mortgage bill didn’t care how I felt.

As I sat there in my car, I gave myself the same advice I’d given my therapy clients for decades, “You don’t have to feel strong to be strong. You just need to focus on what to do right now.” And with that, I got out of the car and walked into the office to face my workday.

My situation isn’t unique though. At some point, most of us have to show up at work when our lives are falling apart. In fact, it’s during the hardest times in life that we often need the money and the benefits the most. Yet, we rarely talk about how to stay professional when you’ve got pressing personal problems.

As a therapist who’s been there, I assure you that you can hold down your job even when you’re dealing with stressful personal circumstances as long as you have reliable strategies to get you through each day. Just like a good coach walks into the game with a playbook, you need workplace plays that will help you stay mentally strong when you aren’t sure how to get through the moment.

Here are three mental strength plays that got me through that day—and that I still use now.

1. Schedule Time to Worry

I had a lot to worry about after being widowed. How would I pay the bills this month? When would I find time to get an oil change? What if that noise the furnace is making means it’s on the fritz? 

So I scheduled time to worry every day as a proactive play—and once I gave my brain permission to worry, the anxious thoughts stopped interrupting my focus. 

Our natural instinct to push worrisome thoughts aside backfires. Research shows the more we try to suppress thoughts, the more frequent and intrusive they become. 

Instead of fighting the worry, schedule it.

Set aside 15 minutes a day—same time, same place—and put it on your calendar. When your worry window rolls around, sit down and let your brain go wherever it wants. 

When your 15 minutes are up, you’re done. Get up and go do something else. 

If a worry surfaces outside of your scheduled worry time, tell yourself It’s not time to worry about that yet. I’ll worry about that later. With practice, you can train your brain to contain worrying to that single window of time—which means you’ll have more cognitive bandwidth the rest of the day. 

2. Flip the Script

Scheduling time to worry handled the background noise. But sometimes anxiety strikes in the moment—right before a meeting, mid-presentation, when you can’t wait for your worry window. That’s when I’d flip the script.

When my brain jumped to worst case scenarios like, “I’m probably about to get fired,” I reminded myself of the best case scenarios like, “Maybe I’ll get a raise.” 

While getting a random raise felt unlikely, it reminded me that randomly getting fired was equally unlikely. Flipping the script helped me see that my catastrophic predictions weren’t inevitable.

When you’re anxious about your personal life, that anxiety can easily spill into your work life and trick you into believing every outcome will be catastrophic. 

Whether you’re convinced your mind is going to go blank and you’re going to embarrass yourself during your afternoon presentation or your brain is trying to convince you that you’re not going to be able to finish your sales report, flipping the script is a fast way to interrupt the anxious spiral. 

Then, once your anxiety decreases to a more manageable level, you can keep your head in the game and stop entertaining all the “what if…” scenarios.

3. Put on a Half Smile

The last thing I felt like doing was smiling. I was grieving. I was exhausted. I was terrified I was about to fall apart in front of a client. But I knew that sitting with a frown on my face all day would make everything harder.

So whenever my uncomfortable emotions started to rise, I turned up the corners of my mouth just enough to initiate some positive feedback to my brain. As soon as my brain got the messages I was smiling, my nervous system calmed down and I felt just a little happier—which helped me get through the moment.

We tend to think we smile because we’re happy. But the brain-body connection runs both ways. Research shows deliberately adopting a smile can actually initiate feelings of happiness. One study found that individuals who smiled experienced lower heart rates during stress recovery than those with neutral expressions—even when they didn’t know they were smiling.

You don’t need to paste on a smile to prove you’re happy to coworkers. In fact, when you run this play right, someone else isn’t going to describe what they see as a smile. Instead, it may just look like your expression has softened a bit. 

Just turn the corners of your lips up slightly—enough that your brain gets the signal that it’s safe to relax. Whether you’re stressed out in a meeting or struggling to tackle a long to-do list, the half smile is a discreet way to get stress relief when you need it the most.

Run the Best Play

Sitting in that parking lot the day I had to return to work, I made a decision. I wasn’t going to worry about how I was going to get through the next few months or how I’d fix my life. Instead, I’d just focus on what to do right now. 

That gave me the courage to walk through the door. I made it through the day one play at a time. 

You don’t have to feel ready to show up at work when your life is falling apart and you don’t need to wait until your life is better to be productive. You just need the next play to run to get through the day, moment by moment.

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