Work Stress: When One Bad Workday Feels Like Your Whole Career

A Story For Modern Work Stress

0:27 Great story teaches us something about being human. I'm Cheryl Paris and this is Work Stress Anxiety. Together, let's borrow a little wisdom from a story to help us navigate a very modern world.

0:48 It's Sunday afternoon. Technically, you're not working. You might be making a cup of tea, putting some washing on, or you just come back from a walk and you're sitting with your family doing something completely ordinary. But part of you is already in Monday morning because there's a meeting tomorrow, and not even necessarily a huge career-defined meeting. Perhaps it's a conversation with your manager, or you know that you need to speak to a difficult colleague, or something you know needs addressing, something that maybe happened last week that you've been replaying ever since, and somehow, without you quite noticing when it happened, that meeting has taken up residence in your weekend.

1:45 That's where I want to start today because I know sometimes work stress isn't only about what happened, it's also about how much of the picture that one thing has been allowed to occupy. And I want to make it very clear here, and I'm saying this from love panning out doesn't mean pretending something wasn't difficult, it doesn't mean finding the positive, it doesn't mean excusing poor behavior, tolerating bullying or discrimination or talking yourself out of taking action when something genuinely needs addressing.

When Sunday Becomes Monday

2:27 It simply means making sure that you have enough of the picture to decide what the problem actually requires. So before we get into this, I just want to take a slightly broader listener thank you today. I want to say a big hello and thank you to everyone listening to Work Stress Anxiety from Hong Kong, and particularly to the expat community out there. I recently recorded some episodes with Edward Howard, who um was raised in the UK but now lives in Hong Kong, and it made me think about the people listening in to this very episode from that part of part of the world.

3:16 So wherever you happen to be listening, whether it's Hong Kong or maybe you've been there and I've been to Hong Kong and or you've recently arrived, or life has somehow carried you halfway across the world. Thank you for spending a little bit of your time with me. Okay, back to that meeting that somehow is eaten into our Sunday. Picture Marcia. Something happened at work on Friday. Maybe the senior manager was unusually abrupt with her. Maybe she presented something in the meeting that didn't particularly land well.

3:56 Maybe she made a mistake. We don't even need to know exactly what happened because the important thing is what happened next. By Saturday morning, Marcia isn't isn't only thinking that meeting was uncomfortable, she's beginning to think maybe I'm not very good at this anymore. By Saturday afternoon, what if I've lost my confidence in myself? By Sunday, perhaps I've completely misjudged my career. That escalation, right? That was quite quick, isn't it? One difficult afternoon has become some kind of referendum on the last 20 years of professional competency, and yet when you're anxious, that escalation can feel strangely convincing.

4:45 It's interesting, your your brain has taken something that may genuinely matter and move it so close to the lens that you can no longer see anything around it. And this is one of the problems with rumination. The more you turn something over, the more familiar the thoughts become. The familiarity can become, you know, something that's masqueraded as evidence.

Rumination Makes Thoughts Feel True

5:19 I keep thinking this is a disaster quietly becomes this must be a disaster. But those things are not the same. This is one of the reasons I've been talking about creating an evidence bank recently. Because when you're stressed or anxious, or you've, or even if you feel emotionally wounded by something that happened at work, memory can become a rather selective little archivist, right? It pulls out Friday's awful meeting, it forgets the Tuesday's compliment, it remembers the email where someone questioned your decision, it temporarily misplaces the 17 occasions when your judgment was absolutely sound.

6:10 It remembers the mistake, it forgets everything you did afterwards to put it right, and it doesn't mean that we don't get me wrong, we don't dismiss Friday. Friday still happen, but Friday is evidence, it's not necessarily the entire case.

Build An Evidence Bank

6:30 I think this is where perspective sometimes gets misunderstood. People sometimes hear the word perspective and think it means someone is about to tell me, well, at least you still have a job. Or other people have it worse. Which to me is not perspective, that's just minimizing something while pretending to be wise about it. What I mean by perspective is much more practical. I mean gathering missing information. Like what else is true? What happened before this? What happened afterwards? Were there any exceptions?

7:16 Was this a one-off thing? Is this part of a pattern? Or do I simply not have enough evidence yet to know? Those questions are very different from telling yourself everything is fine. Perhaps everything is fine, but if something needs changing, I would much rather you make that decision with the widest picture available to you. This kind of reminds me of one of the things I love to do with my clients, which is take them on a journey. I think about the peregrine falcon, right? Or do you even know what a peregrine falcon is?

The Peregrine Falcon Perspective

7:57 But imagine for a moment that you do for a moment, and as if we're standing on the ground besides a hedge, and that hedge could dominate its entire view, right? The peregrine falcon. It doesn't matter how enormous the surrounding landscape is. For that particular position, the hedge is what it can see. But when the falcon takes off, rises, something changes. Not the hedge. The head doesn't magically disappear. What changes is how much information becomes available. Now there's a field, now there's the edge of the woodland, there's the road, the buildings, the open spaces, the movement, possible directions.

8:49 The obstacle is still there. It simply isn't the entire landscape anymore. And sometimes that is what we need to happen with work stress. You don't need to make the problem smaller, you just need to make the frame that you are viewing bigger. Because when the frame becomes bigger, you may begin to see things you couldn't see while you were pressed right up against that problem. You might remember that this manager has been under unusual pressure all week. That doesn't excuse them speaking badly to you, but it might alter the meaning that you were given it.

9:37 You might notice that three other colleagues challenged the same decision. Suddenly, this is not necessarily about your personal competency.

Zoom Out Across A Month

9:47 Or perhaps you pan out and realize something more uncomfortable. There have been six incidents like that. That's a pattern. That wider view can confirm that you do need to act. And that matters because reframing should never become a clever psychological way of teaching yourself to tolerate things that should not be tolerated. Sometimes perspective reassures you, sometimes perspective confirms your concern. The thing is, both are useful. You know, one of the questions I particularly like, what would this look like across a month rather than one afternoon?

10:39 Because one of the things I've noticed is anxiety often has a very short lens. Sometimes uh something happens at two, two o'clock, and by half past two, your brain has already begun in writing a panorama documentary about it. The rise of all of my career, narrated presumably by some with someone with a far more serious voice than I have. But what happens if you put that afternoon beside the previous, I don't know, four weeks? What does the evidence say then? Maybe that difficult meeting sits inside a month where otherwise there's it's been trusted, your competency's there, and it's been fairly steady.

11:24 That matters. Or perhaps the month shows repeated exclusions, repeated criticisms, and repeated situations where expectations are being changed without explanation. That matters too. You are trying to build a case of accuracy, you're trying to build a case of optimism, okay? And actually, accuracy gives you more choices. Remember that reality first stuff? Because if one difficult conversation becomes my whole career is going wrong, the problem is enormous. Where do you begin? But if the problem becomes I had a very difficult conversation with my manager on Friday, and I need to understand whether this was an isolated incident or part of a wider pattern.

12:24 That is something you can actually investigate. You can think, you can observe, you can ask questions, you can document what happened, you can seek advice if appropriate. Guess what? You have options again, and that for me is the important part. The wider view is not there to make the problem smaller, it's there to make your choices bigger. So here's the tiny experiment I want you to try.

The Two Minute Question Exercise

12:52 You should only take a couple of minutes. Take one entry from your evidence bank. Yes, evidence bank. If you haven't got one, start creating one, right? Perhaps something you still have a little bit of emotional charge around, yeah? But not too much. If it was on a scale of one to ten, where ten was really charged and one was a little bit, it may be a two or a three, right? Underneath it, I want you to write three questions. What else is true? What happened before and after this? And is this a one-off, a pattern, or something I do not yet have enough evidence to decide?

13:40 And then stop. Yeah, stop. You don't need to solve it, you don't need to come up with the perfect interpretation. In fact, I don't know yet. To me, it's absolutely respectable, a respectable answer. Sometimes one of the most useful things you can do when you're anxious is stop demanding certainty from yourself before you have enough evidence. You may begin to notice that some of the conclusions you were carrying weren't conclusions. Some were, but not facts. And occasionally you may discover the opposite.

14:25 You may look at the evidence and realize, no, I'm actually I'm not exaggerating this. Something genuinely does need addressing here. Good, because now you have information rather than a simple feeling sitting in your stomach on Sunday afternoon, and there is another quiet benefit to keeping uh an evidence bank, I think, right? And this is what I mean. When I mean an evidence bank, I mean it's different from a journal, right? I journal all the time. In fact, in my journal, I am such a big baby, I'm so contrary, that's not what I'm talking about here.

15:05 An evidence bank is full of facts. Facts. And over time you begin to collect your own context, not someone else's telling you that you're brilliant, not some motivational quote telling you to believe in yourself, your own evidence. You begin to see patterns in what unsettles you, patterns in what you handle well, patterns in a situation that repeatedly drain you, perhaps even patterns in the times when you initially thought something was catastrophic and later realize it was just one of those difficult moments inside a much bigger, beautiful life.

Facts, Patterns, And Real Boundaries

15:51 That kind of evidence may help you trust your judgment differently. Not because you suddenly become certain about everything, but because you become a little less dependent on how something feels in its loudest moment. And if you're listening to this and thinking, yeah, Cheryl, but my workplace really is difficult, I want to underline this again. There are things that you should not reframe away, right? Bullying, discrimination, unsafe working practices, serious health concerns, repeated behavior that is damaging you or other people.

16:36 Perspective is not passivity. Sometimes the wider view is precisely what allows you to recognise that some thing needs escalating, documenting or changing. The point is to see what is actually there, not what fear says it is, and not what someone else would prefer you to pretend that it isn't. Now, if you've been building your evidence bank, keep going. And if this episode brings up something you'd like me to explore in a future episode, you can tell me at podcastfeedback.com forward slash work stressanxiety.

17:23 Because sometimes the questions you are quietly asking yourself at your desk, in the car, or at two in the morning are exactly the questions somebody else is quietly asking to. So today, when something at work begins expanding enough that it occupies the entire sky, notice it. You don't have to immediately argue with that thought, just give yourself another vantage point. Ask what else belongs in this picture, ask what the evidence looks like across a wider stretch of time. Ask whether you are looking at one moment, a genuine pattern, or a question that simply needs more information.

Feedback Link And Closing Reminder

18:13 Not because the problems disappeared, because the rest of the landscape came back. Okay. So choose one thing from your evidence bank. What else is true? Then let the evidence answer before your anxiety does. The wider view is not there to make the problem smaller, it is there to make your choices bigger. Remember every step you take, no matter how small, is a step towards a brighter, more balanced future. Trust your journey and remember, progress is progress no matter the pace. Bye for now.

18:58 I hope today's episode gave you something useful to carry into your week. Now finish your coffee, take a breath, and remember progress is progress no matter the pace. Until next time, bye for now.