Overwhelmed At Work? Your EQ Might Be Sending You a Message
If work has been feeling like a never-ending rollercoaster of stress and panic lately, it could be a sign that you’re neglecting something important. Specifically, yourself and your true emotional needs.
This is the territory covered by emotional intelligence. When to-do lists, task-juggling and fire-fighting take over, it’s often a nudge that your EQ deserves a little more care and consideration. So before you chalk it up to ‘my boss is a jerk’ or ‘just another bad week,’ it might be time to listen to what your EQ is whispering.
Emotional Intelligence on the Job
Emotional intelligence refers to a person’s capacity to recognize, understand and control their own emotional states and reactions, and also to relate to the emotions of others. This panorama of emotional wisdom is reflected in the five facets of EQ:
- Self-awareness
- Social awareness
- Emotional control
- Empathy
- Emotional wellbeing
Truity’s evidence-based Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Test can tell you how you rank in each of these facets right now. If your results are underwhelming, the good news is that your EQ is not fixed, but can always be improved.
We often think of EQ as something soft or secondary in the workplace, but it’s actually the foundation that keeps us steady when pressures mount. In fact, emotional intelligence is often what stands between persistent overwhelm and the ability to calmly navigate the toughest clients, the toughest coworkers, the toughest workplaces and the toughest days.
Self-Awareness: Understand What’s Driving Your Overwhelm
Self-awareness is the ability to notice and understand your own feelings and reactions as they happen. It helps you recognize when you’re getting stressed and why.
When overwhelm strikes at work, it’s common to have runaway thoughts like,
- “This is too hard!”
- “I’m falling behind!”
- “I’m not prepared to handle this, I don’t have enough training!”
- “My boss is judging me, they can see I don’t know what I’m doing!”
- “It’s too much all at once, I don’t have time to get everything done!”
These thoughts can weigh down your confidence and pile onto your stress. If you’re experiencing this kind of inner dialogue, you’re ratcheting up the anxiety and making things harder than they needed to be.
Improving self-awareness interrupts this cycle. You begin to notice these patterns in real time, and this gives you the chance to intentionally reject negative ideas about yourself and replace them with positive affirmations, or simply approach challenges with a calm, clear mind. As your self-awareness grows, you’ll start to recognize the ways you may have been sabotaging yourself before by letting doubts and imposter syndrome undermine your effectiveness. With this clearer perspective, you can begin to control your feelings, to make them work for you rather than against you.
Emotional Control: Stop Stress from Taking Over Your Reactions
Emotional control is the ability to manage your emotional responses so they remain appropriate to the situation, even when you’re feeling so overwhelmed you could cry. In practice, it means choosing how and when to act on your feelings so they don't interfere with your work—not by flying off the handle when another project lands on your desk or snapping at a coworker because you’re under pressure. This skill is essential at work because it lets you think clearly and maintain professionalism even during conflicts.
Emotional control is a powerful counterbalance to overwhelm because it acts as a “pause” button between what you feel and how you respond. Instead of letting stress dictate your actions, emotional control allows you to step back, take a breath, and choose your next move thoughtfully. That might look like asking your manager for a temporary reduction in your workload while you catch up, or calmly suggesting a new way to divide tasks with your team. It could mean deciding to take a quick break before answering a difficult email, or taking a vacation if your energy is low. Either way, emotional control means you’re responding to stress with intention rather than impulse.
Other Awareness and Empathy: Better People Skills for a Better Working Environment
As you start figuring out why you’re feeling so on edge, you may discover that certain co-workers or managers trigger your anxiety. It’s a rare workplace where there isn’t someone looking over your shoulder or offering “well-intentioned” feedback that sends your stress levels soaring! Tempting as it is to write these interactions off as just other people’s bad behavior—or the sign of a toxic workplace—people with high EQ will try to understand where colleagues are coming from before letting their words and actions get under their skin.
In the context of emotional intelligence, social awareness describes your ability to understand the emotions of others, while empathy means being able to relate to their feelings as if they were your own. Everyone has the potential to develop these important aspects of EQ and it’s well worth the effort. If you cannot read people’s cues, then you may project your own worst fears onto others and see hostile intent that doesn’t actually exist.
The easiest way to improve your people skills is by becoming a genuinely good listener. Start conversations and ask questions to draw them out. Pay attention to what people are saying and notice the subtle clues that reveal the true intent behind their words, actions and attitudes. Maybe there’s a lingering issue that can be brought out in the open and resolved. Maybe they’re as overwhelmed as you are and you could help each other out.
Developing your emotional intelligence sometimes requires you to reflect on your own thoughts and feelings. But other times, it requires you to remain quiet and shift your focus to others with sincere interest and an open heart. This type of approach is essential for building a strong team dynamic where everyone is pulling together and no single person will have to feel overburdened or overwhelmed.
Emotional Wellbeing: Staying Grounded and Resilient Under Stress
Emotional wellbeing is the fifth dimension of emotional intelligence, and it is also a measurement of your progress in improving your EQ overall. When you become more self-aware, socially aware and empathetic, and have achieved an advanced level of emotional control, your sense of emotional wellbeing will soar. This is the trait of sound emotional health, where you feel in control of your own fate and ready to tackle challenges with greater stability and confidence.
So, next time work starts to feel like too much, remember that your sense of overwhelm is actually a helpful signal. It’s a reminder to check in with yourself and take practical steps to improve your emotional intelligence. Your job will always throw curveballs your way. It’s how you respond that determines whether stress takes over, or you stay steady and keep moving forward.
