image credit: Photo 25932610 © Anna Griessel | Dreamstime.com
By April Heath LMT
Why you shouldn’t always put your job ahead of your personal health
It’s perfectly normal to strive to hold onto our source of income. It’s also normal to derive some sense of identity from our work. Even as important as our career is, work can’t fill the void of emotional healing.
A couple true stories illustrate why it’s self-sabotage to always put work at the top of your life’s priority list. There are signs to be watchful for and reasons to integrate self-care into your routine. Sometimes you shouldn’t put job ahead of your personal health. Career has to come second, otherwise you risk losing the job that you’re so afraid of losing.
My Personal Story
In the mid-2000s, I was working in a support position at an investment bank in New York City. When my father passed away, I needed to take time off from work to grieve his passing, but I made a thoughtless decision: I took two days off instead of two weeks. I spent those measly two days moping around my apartment, angry at God and heartbroken.
The only two choices that I was aware of were to A) distract myself by continuing to do for others and get paid, or to B) sit home alone crying in agony over something that couldn’t be changed.
Work measured my performance in concrete terms. I didn’t know how to measure my worth apart from working, so I felt abnormally empty inside for those two days, and it was unbearable.
Without seeking counseling, I was alone with the grief weighing down on me like a suffocating blanket. I had no coping skills. I unconsciously chose to mask my overwhelming sorrow by throwing myself prematurely back into my job. I’d relied so heavily on work to define me that it seemed the only place I could hide.
While I thought I was hiding my emotions well and still performing to standard, reality decided to check me. Under the intense stress, I made some really bad decisions and promptly got fired.
“Shayna’s” Personal Story:
My friend suffered the most tragic loss you can imagine. A family member murdered his mother. Before the shock had even begun to wear off, Shayna experienced pain so bad, she called 9-1-1 and got taken to the ER. She was hospitalized for five days with an intestinal infection that would have killed her if she’d waited one day more to seek treatment. The day after she was released, Shayna returned to work. The day she went back, she had an exchange with a VIP customer who reported her to the manager. Shayna felt humiliated and got demoted to customer service training.
Not only had she been unable to deal with the murder, and her family member being in prison, she also didn’t have time to recover from her hospital stay. On top of that, there’s little way to save face at her job.
My suspicion is that her pride and identity were invested too much in her job, so when the going got tough, she tried to avoid the painful feelings by returning to work. But she wasn’t ready. All those painful emotions were bottled up inside and came roaring to the surface.
We are not our job-related activities
When we let our work define our human identity, we assign more value to it than it’s worth. We are not our job-related activities. We’re also thoughts and feelings. There’s probably a lot more to us than meets the eye, but many introductions begin with, “What do you do?” People answer that question with their job title. Ironically, by giving our job so much more value than it gives us, we risk putting that very job in jeopardy.
Unless you’re in the very rare situation of inventing something complex and specialized, chances are your position can be filled by other people with adequate training. This isn’t to demean or dismiss any work role. Right, wrong, or indifferent, it’s simply the way things are in modern Western society. If our self-image rests completely on our profession, our self-image can be upended, leaving us feeling inadequate and betrayed.
Imagine how different the situation might have been for me if I’d taken my need to grieve more seriously. If I’d taken time to get grief counseling or support, I would have learned how to give myself the grace to feel the loss and process it in a healthy and meaningful way. I wouldn’t have felt so alone. I might have been able to keep that job.
Consider how “Shayna” would have avoided the confrontation and humiliation if she’d honored her needs and stayed at home. She could have healed and returned to work fully recuperated. She wouldn’t have suffered a demotion.
Just in these two real life examples, if we’d simply let our job function drop down our priority list and let self-care take top billing, we’d have kept our jobs!
Graham Cochrane shares his personal transformation journey in a post. He says it’s a mistake to get our identity from work, and I agree. Although, it is an easy slip to make, since we spend 40 hours a week or more at the job.
Impact of Trauma on Work
A trauma is defined by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA) as an event or circumstance resulting in physical, emotional, and/or life-threatening harm.
As well, the event or circumstance has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s:
- mental health
- physical health
- emotional health
- social well-being
- and/or spiritual well-being
A loved one’s death is a trauma, and it stands to reason that “Shayna” and I lacked the skills to handle the stress of grief and loss. Since we both identified so closely with our livelihood, we sought refuge in the workplace, only to get exactly the opposite.
According to Robert Choi, SHRM-SCP, and his article Complex Personal Trauma and the Workplace, compassion and empathy are key elements for healing trauma. Seeking compassion and empathy from others requires it first from ourselves. Self-compassion doesn’t mean a pity party. It means acknowledging our need for grace, kindness, and empathy.
Maybe workplaces will never adequately address their employees’ complex traumas. Maybe they’ll never eliminate toxicity from the work environment. This is why we need to put our well-being at the top of our priority list when we suffer traumatic events.
The Fallacy of Putting Work First
It’s undeniable that work has to come first in a lot of situations. But do we need to show up at the risk of our own well-being? Do we really need to miss holidays with family for the sake of the job and customers? Do we need to go back to work the day after getting released from the hospital? When the most important person in our life dies, is it advisable to rush through grief in two days?
Some significant life events require us to be present. And present not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually, as well.
“Shayna’s” managers didn’t have her back in her time of need. That’s the point: employers don’t want to give employees anything more than a paycheck, because a compensation package is a contract. A shoulder to cry on simply isn’t part of the deal.
The question remains: Why give so much of yourself to an entity that doesn’t give more than required to you?
We interact with people at work, so we think our employer is “human,” but rest assured, an employer is a legal fiction that exists solely on paper. Managers and executives make decisions on the corporation’s behalf, but the corporation’s reason for existing is to make money. That’s fine. Money has its place in life. But catering to the staff’s emotional needs isn’t what drives financial performance.
Take the compassion you need into your own hands. Take the time off to address and heal whatever trauma you’ve suffered. There are signs that indicate when it’s time to call off and heal.
Signs of Trauma Show up in Work Performance
Rebecca Zucker interviewed The Body Keeps the Score author Bessel van der Kolk, M.D for her Forbes article Trauma: A Hidden Contributor To Overwhelm At Work. Major signs of trauma include:
- Difficulty regulating emotions
- Difficulty concentrating
- Diminished creativity
- Workaholism
These are the very characteristics that we need in order to perform at our best at work. Ignoring the effects of trauma on our mental, emotional, and physical well-being will set us up for failure.
Photo 31275441 © Iurii Sokolov | Dreamstime.com
The Importance of Self-Care
I can’t emphasize this enough. You’re number ONE. You don’t have to show up for everyone else if they’re not reciprocating. This is similar to flying a plane without ever landing for fuel and maintenance. It’s just not safe.
Also, it’s in your best interest to show up to someone deserving of your trust when you need healing on an emotional level. A pilot doesn’t take her aircraft to the supermarket for maintenance. Go where you’ll get the right attention.
Of course, I recommend a regular massage for stress relief and something physical like kickboxing to process the stress hormones out of your system. But there are lots of ways to target stress and trauma.
A relatively new way to heal from trauma is Somatic Experiencing Therapy. In the Oro House post by Dr. Kohane, we learn:
Human emotions require the participation of our entire body, and not just our brain or one part of it, as some people may think.
In terms of unpleasant emotions, we may attempt to not feel them as they are too difficult to bear. As a result, after “bottling up” our emotions for too long, we may have a more intense expression of them once we are willing to open them up.
In other times, we may feel as if we do not experience our feelings in full (e.g., dull feelings), or experience a different emotion than our expected reaction (i.e., sadness instead of fear) as a form of defense in order to cope.
However, we usually cannot “get rid” of these emotions by simply ignoring them. Instead, we just carry them with us everywhere we go. The healing process usually begins with curiosity, and slowly builds the capacity to hold these emotions for longer periods of time.
The first key is desire. Once your desire for a better experience of life exceeds your fear or the pain of your status quo, you can start searching for a new way forward. I can’t promise it’ll be easy, but I can promise your life will change. Your experience of yourself will improve.
Conclusion
The societal norm of putting career ahead of everything else in life has negative consequences when we put it ahead of our own mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Sometimes work has to sit in the backseat while we navigate through our healing process. Stress announces itself with signs and symptoms, and when we give them our attention rather than try escaping into work, we wind up better off.
Are there any instances when you prioritized your health over work? All comments are welcome.
email: april@joyfulrisingspa.com
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