How to deal with stress at work?

Hi all,

Sorry if this isn’t formatted very well or doesn’t make a lot of sense , i don’t usually post much on reddit so am not really used to this😭 For background i’m a university student who works 2 days a week at sainsbury’s (tuesdays and saturdays) and ive struggled with my mental health and anxiety related issues for all my life, however it has got much worse recently and i am taking medication to try and combat this a little.

A week ago i had a panic attack while working and im not entirely sure why. My store is a small superstore, it has one small till at the back of the shop that is barely used, a kiosk and self checkouts. Given we don’t have many checkouts , we get a lot of traffic through the kiosk, and the store can get fairly busy as it is located on the high street. Not even 10 minutes into my shift i had to leave the kiosk and go sit upstairs in the break room as i was about to have a meltdown and start crying. Eventually i made my way to my managers office and made the excuse that i got a message that my aunt was in hospital, and they offered to send me home which i agreed. I’m now worried about going back in because thinking of working is causing me a lot of anxiety, i’m not good socially and standing there with no one to talk too on the kiosk is really depressing for 9 hours. I think this time of year is just particularly depressing as it’s cold and dark and no one i know is working so the shifts are starting to feel really lonely.

Anyway my point of this post is i was wondering if anyone has any advice for dealing with working when you find the environment a little depressing , and does anyone have any advice to deal with workplace anxiety? I’ve tried breathing techniques and mindfulness but it’s sort of hard to do when you’re meant to be working. I was also wondering if anyone has any methods to make the shift go by a little quicker, something to keep me going till the end.

Any advice at all would be really appreciated ❤️