The 5 Sneakiest Ways Work Stress Invades Your Personal Life
Why work stress causes functional people to stop functioning at home.
Do you think you understand workplace stress pretty well? I do, yet despite being a colleague of Dr. Guy Winch, I still found Mind Over Grind full of fresh, laser-sharp insights and compelling client stories that make it a genuine page-turner.
The following five concepts help explain the mechanisms of why stress from work can feel like a pinball machine that shoots out and ricochets into every corner of your life.
As well as explaining these dynamics, the book provides practical tools that are specific to each of these mechanisms. I'll preview the tools after the explanations.
1. Muted Empathy and Emotional Drifting
The book discusses research that shows that when we're stressed, we under-perceive others' pain. The flow-on from this is that we start to perceive bids for connection from our family members as annoying intrusions rather than those bids activating our instinct to be compassionate.
When we perceive our loved ones as overreacting (because we're under-perceiving their stress), we start to slowly drift away from them.
2. Crossover Burnout
This line of research was one I was completely unfamiliar with before reading Mind Over Grind.
When individuals experience high stress over sustained periods, their partners can develop clinical symptoms of burnout alongside them, without any direct exposure to the work stress themselves.
The partners of physically and emotionally exhausted people start to show those same symptoms.
3. Systemic Self-Neglect
I think most of us realize that workplace stress can lead to us making worse choices across various domains of our lives, but we may not fully recognize our own "canaries in the coal mine" of self-neglect.
Self-neglect is when "functional people stop functioning" in their private lives, like skipping or delaying medical care and screenings, neglecting some aspects of hygiene, poor adulting around finances, or ignoring needed home maintenance.
I actually recognized some of these signs as I was reading, but even with my background, hadn't fully connected the dots.
Our brain can trick us into thinking we're prioritizing when we're engaging in self-neglect.
4. The Survival Priority Trap
You've probably felt this. Work stress has a way of elevating itself in our priorities.
While you consciously value your family, your unconscious mind believes work is your top priority because it pays for basic biological needs like food and shelter. Because it views any work threat as an existential danger, it will force work thoughts into your consciousness even when you are trying to be present with loved ones, effectively hijacking your mental real estate to "save" you.
This survival priority trap helps keep us thinking about work at all hours, and feeds into rumination and neglecting other aspects of ourselves, family, and broader lives.
5. Identity Amputation (The Two-Dimensional Self)
As work becomes more demanding, we slowly "amputate" aspects of our identity, including interests, hobbies, and personality traits, one by one, to conserve energy.
When we eventually go from being a multidimensional person to a two-dimensional version of ourselves whose existence revolves entirely around work, this further perpetuates all the other traps we've talked about so far.
This mechanism is particularly insidious because we're often too busy managing work pressure to notice that the things that once brought us joy and meaning have receded from our lives.
Targeted Strategies
Strategies work best when we know why we're using them and they target the specific mechanism at play.
For example, if you know you're suffering from muted empathy, then you might use a multisensory transition ritual to signal you're leaving the combat mindset you've been using to survive the workday. By multisensory, think: changing clothes, scents, or sounds. Give yourself plenty of consistent signals that you've left the combat zone.
You might also tune your empathy before you walk through the front door by anticipating what your partner might have been dealing with during the day and what they're potentially craving.
If you recognize that your work stress is sending lots of survival priority signals when you're off the clock, you probably need self-talk strategies to better label those alarms and turn them off.
If you're noticing identity amputation, then you can make a point to visit the identity lost and found department. Even 10 minutes spent on a nonwork passion can refill your mental batteries and help you reestablish connections with your broader self. This interrupts the negative flywheel of your sense of self becoming smaller and your work role taking up more and more of your identity.
There are many more strategies in the book.
Timing Matters
One of my favorite aspects of this book is that it follows the structure of a week starting on a Sunday night. It leads the reader through each day (based on a traditional work week, but easily adaptable), addressing the challenges and the most applicable strategies. That makes the process of unraveling your burnout feel a lot more approachable.
Work stress runs amok when we feel overwhelmed. If you've been feeling like work stress has taken over more than it should, this book will help you feel better equipped to take back your power.
If this article benefited you, I'd love to hear how. You can email [email protected].