"CPR" For Times When Work Makes You Feel Sick
I’m not being dramatic. In my recent LinkedIn poll 87% of you said you’d gotten physically sick because of another person or situation at work (n=1228). It happens all the time, and while the easy advice is to find another job, that’s not realistic or even always advisable. Sometimes you can make a difficult situation better and sometimes you can’t. So I’m going to offer you tools to work through a difficult situation if you choose to stay at your job.
This is the first of two newsletters; I’m going to walk you through how I manage physical symptoms of stress or anxiety at work, with evidence-based, simple techniques I call the CPR method (for Connect, Protect, Resource). Today’s newsletter runs through how to begin to connect physical symptoms with what’s happening at work. Next week, we will cover the next two steps of CPR: protect and resource.
Work-related stress and anxiety affects our whole lives, including our physical health. Jaime-Alexis Fowler is the Founder of EmpowerWork, whose confidential text line offers peer counseling for people struggling at work. She says “We've seen just absolutely skyrocketing increases in anxiety, stress and physical manifestations through the text line. People are expressing how they can't sleep, how they're super nauseous going into a meeting, having heart palpitations, the full spectrum of physical components.” She reports that data from the text line shows such complaints increasing year over year since 2018.
If your job is making you feel sick all the time (and you've been medically cleared), I really recommend seeing a therapist or trusted mental health professional to help!
Connect the dots
If you’re consistently feeling physical symptoms related to work, connect the dots! The first step is to connect how you feel in your body and in your feelings with the instigator. Maybe you wake up every morning with a pit in your stomach, and an undefined sense of dread about starting the day.
Dr. Rebecca Harley, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, suggests we act like a detective who’s simply observing and gathering facts. Tune in to what is happening in the moment and see what you discover. Playing detective is a fact-finding mission. Your job isn’t to judge what’s happening, or do anything about it. It’s to observe impartially.
A physical experience is often the first tell for many people. This is because our body will register anxiety even if our conscious mind isn’t yet aware of it, or if we simply aren’t ready to admit our anxiety to ourselves.
Once you’ve observed what’s happening, see if you can put some language to the most prominent experience. It may be a thought (This presentation is going to be a disaster), a physical sensation (dizziness, nausea, dry mouth, racing heart, excessive sweating), or a behavior you automatically turned to (mindless scrolling or snacking, for example). Pay attention to how you feel before and after an incident.
Connect dots. Are sensations connected to an event, like a meeting or deadline? Are you feeling consistent symptoms at a certain time? On a certain day? With a person or even a set of words? A feeling, like perhaps one of guilt or shame or dread that might come up during a particular meeting or interaction? What do you feel, and when? You might want to keep notes, or set a reminder in your calendar to check in with your body. Patterns will emerge!
Connect: Is this a “me” problem or is this a “them” problem?
Once you've connected the physical sensations with the person or incident, it’s time to dig a level deeper and ask a really hard question: Is what’s happening something I can fix or control? And, is this about me, or is it about them?
When I was head of marketing at an international company, every Thursday I felt nauseous and developed a migraine, plus I was exhausted because I couldn’t sleep the night before. It took me a long time to realize that the lunchtime staff meeting I had to run on Thursdays triggered terrible feelings of performance anxiety, impostor syndrome, and social jitters (and these "Thursday" feelings went back decades). My body was broadcasting the news, but I hadn’t yet learned to connect my physical experiences to my emotional landscape. This was a “me” problem, because I felt unqualified for the job. I had to get over it, and I did eventually.
I think we always have to try to be honest with ourselves and ask if our anxious reactions lie in feelings we have about our own work or behavior. For example, there may be a project or regular sales meeting making you feel sick. I once spent months trying to avoid my sales director and all sales meetings because my own numbers weren't good. I didn’t know how to ask for help and instead everything got worse. This was a “me” problem. Sometimes people at work trigger us for reasons connected to our pasts. It’s worth playing detective here, too. Enlist a therapist or coach or friend. It’s so powerful to make the connection and discover the agency to make change yourself!
If the issue isn’t about your performance, your assumptions, or your anxiety, then it’s a “them” problem. And so, you can try to fix things.
For example, say that your client is making you terribly anxious because they’re reactionary, chaotic, and nasty in meetings. You dread these meetings. You’ve noticed a pattern where you feel symptoms before these meetings. This is your client, and you can control the flow of information they receive from you. When you have a messy, chaotic, reactionary person that you work with, chances are they are anxious themselves, and that’s why they can get nasty. Are there ways you can calm them down and thus make your life easier? Organize them? Be so together and so damn good at your job that hopefully they will calm down and you will feel better? It worth spending some time attempting a fix.
Similarly, if you are having a difficult interaction with someone at work, you can try to talk to them. Have a skillful, difficult conversation. Ask for what you need.
This may or may not work. As the saying goes, we can’t fix other people. But if it’s a job you like or a job you need, it’s worth giving it a shot.
If you have established that what’s making you feel sick is a them problem and you can’t fix it, you have two choices:
Quit.
Protect yourself so your health doesn’t suffer.
Next time I’ll share what to do when you can’t fix the problem…protect yourself!
Morra
PS: Here's a link to my poll
PPS: Listen to the podcast today for some skill building when things get overwhelming at work. My guest Matthew Cooke teaches the practice of trauma informed leadership. Trauma informed leadership takes into account all the ways trauma might have impacted - or might still be impacting - you or those you work with. It’s a way of thinking about leadership that can make us both more empathic and effective.