Ask Our Therapists - CBT Tools to Address Work Misery

CBT Tools to Address Work Misery with Angela Krumm, Ph.D. 

In this video, Angela Krumm addresses the dilemma of feeling stuck in a job for financial reasons or what to do when you hate your job. While external solutions like changing job responsibilities, setting boundaries, or quitting may help, they aren't always feasible and may contribute to more work stress. Instead, the speaker advocates for using cognitive therapy principles to address the issue internally.

This involves identifying and examining the thoughts and feelings associated with the job. By recognizing and correcting cognitive distortions, individuals can alter their self-talk and perception of the situation and learn how to enjoy a job they hate. This internal approach can lead to feeling better despite the unchanged external circumstances. Angela encourages reaching out to the Feeling Good Institute for support in learning these tools.

Dear FGI therapist, 

I have what others would define as a “good job.”  I’m paid well and should be grateful.  However, I despise the work, and constant expectations for more hours, and sometimes feel like the stress is sucking the life out of me. I feel trapped by the need for a good paycheck and so can’t just walk away. Do I have to be miserable forever? 

IN THIS VIDEO

Angela Krumm: Today I address the question of a person wondering if they have to be miserable forever, feeling stuck in a job that they can't just walk away from because of the necessity of receiving a good paycheck. What do we do in these circumstances?

External Solutions:

Most folks that I talk with first think of external solutions they can consider. For example, you might try to rearrange the job responsibilities. You might try to set more boundaries with work, or you might even rage quit, look for a new job, find a way to walk away from it. All of those are attempts to change the circumstances and in some circumstances can be effective, but many people end up feeling trapped when those aren't options available to them. They may have to work at this job for various reasons. What are we left with? In that case, we want to use the principles that cognitive therapy makes available to us that focus on the internal solution. This is the idea that if we work on our self-talk or our thoughts about a situation, we may begin to feel different despite the situation being exactly the same.

Internal Solutions:

In the case of a job that's making you feel miserable, or as this person said, even feels like it's sucking the life out of you, we'd want you to start by listing what are the feelings you have around work, and what are the specific thoughts that accompany those feelings. If you're feeling down or depressed, maybe you're telling yourself things like, this will always be miserable. Or if you're feeling really stressed, maybe you have thoughts like, I have to get this perfect or no one will approve. We want to identify those thoughts and then work on using David Burns's list of distortions to see are there any errors in those thoughts? Are there ways that we're making our circumstances feel worse because of the common errors that occur in how we're talking to ourselves about this situation?

Guess what? It's great news if you find some distortions in those thoughts because it means that they're not entirely true. They might be a bit off base or a bit exaggerated and we can learn how to talk back to those thoughts and find more realistic ways to look at a situation, ones that take the distortions out of the thought. This is the internal solution because we start to feel better about a circumstance even if we can't change it externally.

Seeking Help:

Feel free to reach out to the Feeling Good Institute if you need help learning these tools.