Fear of losing your job: coping strategies

The work context is one of the areas of life that most easily becomes a source of stress and anxiety. And it is that the vast majority of people who work experience, to a lesser or lesser extent, friction between their abilities and knowledge, on the one hand, and the daily or weekly objectives to be achieved, on the one hand other.

But in addition, to this we must add another element that although it is not constantly expressed during the day-to-day of professionals, almost is always there, implicit: the fact that at some point you can lose the job you have, or at least the role you occupy in the organization. And it is that you do not work in an abstract world in which everything is static, but in a very changing environment because the economy is not always stable and the demands are changing.

Therefore, in this article we will see a series of coping strategies in the face of fear of losing your job, with instructions on what to do to combat it.

• Related article: "Types of Anxiety Disorders and their characteristics"

Coping strategies for fear of losing your job

What do we understand by fear of losing your job? It is an emotional state associated with anxiety and intrusive thoughts in which, in most cases, we foresee and imagine situations that we believe could occur in the medium or short term and that would lead to being left out of a professional position we want to keep.

These types of prospective thoughts (that is, projected into the future in the form of anticipation of what will happen) do not are experienced as simple pieces of verbalizable information, but rather have a great emotional charge that produces us discomfort. In this way, by dint of thinking about these things, a vicious circle of anxiety is generated... unless we do something to avoid it.

Below you will find several coping strategies in the face of the fear of losing your job, although yes, remember that the fact of trying applying them on your own day to day is much less effective than going to the psychologist, and in some cases this last option will be the only thing that it will work.

1. Don't try to totally eliminate fear

Remember that your goal is to prevent fear from taking control of you and significantly damaging your mental health, not to root it out; the latter is impossible, and furthermore, a certain amount of anxiety or fear can be adaptive and helpful. After all, “unpleasant” emotions are one of the sources of motivation that allow us to not adopt a passive role in which we cannot prepare ourselves to act in time before the signs of danger.

So, one of the keys to avoid fear of losing your job is to accept that this discomfort will be present to some extent in you, that you cannot completely block it or make it go away. Will. That way you won't be obsessed with his existence or inadvertently feeding him.

2. Examine the sources of fear

One of the first actions to take is distinguish between unfounded fears and those real vulnerabilities that could actually lead you to lose your job. To do this, it is advisable to carry a small notebook in which you write down the thoughts associated with that fear the moment they cross your mind. At the end of the day (although preferably not a few hours before going to sleep), order them according to the degree to which you They seem reasonable and accurate, and after a week has passed, go back and look for patterns. In this way, you will detect thoughts that you have already recognized as clearly being highly biased towards pessimism.

3. Use fear to detect priorities

What are the aspects of your job that you most associate with the fear of losing your job? This emotion can serve as a compass to know what need is the first that you must attend at all times, intervening in the aspects in which you feel most unprotected or unprotected. Once you have begun to channel that fear to make it translate into sequences of concrete actions and short goals deadline, it will be very limited and you will stop paying attention, because you will have your mind occupied in the chain of tasks that you have already initiated.

4. Include breaks and exercise sessions in your day to day

It is important to know how to disconnect from work, and for this, it is best to make our schedule "force" us to do so. That is, print a detailed schedule of everything you have to do in the day and that includes breaks that you should not skip, as well as two or three sessions of moderate exercise of at least 40 minutes in duration. In particular, aerobic exercise has a lot of stress-relieving potential.

• You may be interested in: "Rumination: the annoying vicious circle of thought"

5. Use imagery to think of alternative lives

Another key to combat the fear of losing your job is assume that even if that scenario occurred, that would not be the end of the world. Losing a professional position is not a sudden interruption, but opens the door to other possibilities; Scientific research shows that human beings have an extraordinary capacity for resilience, and we are capable to adapt and to be happy in situations that years before, seen "from the outside", we would have considered as the end of a lifetime.

Therefore, at specific and pre-established moments in your schedule, lasting about four or five minutes, go to a quiet place, close eyes and imagine simple but satisfying lifestyles that you could aspire to if the responsibilities of your current job don't tie up. Not as what will happen, but as a thought experiment in which it is seen that even assuming that economically we will experience a crisis (something that does not have to happen even if we go to unemployment tomorrow), surely we could also be happy So.

Are you looking for psychological help?

If you are thinking of turning to psychology professionals to overcome some form of discomfort that is affecting you, Get in touch with me. I am a psychologist with many years of experience offering my services to individuals and companies, and I I specialize in the cognitive-behavioral model, one of the most effective forms of psychological intervention and versatile. You can count on my professional support both in person at my office in Madrid, and online. On this page are my contact details.

Bibliographic references:

• American Psychiatric Association -APA- (2014). DSM-5. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Madrid: Panamericana.
• Arce, E.A. (2000). The man of the 21st century: anxiety or fullness? Buenos Aires: Editorial Argenta Sarlep.
• Kasper, S.; Boer, J.A. & Sitsen, J.M.A. (2003). Handbook of depression and anxiety. New York: M. Dekker.
• Otte, C. (2011). Cognitive behavioral therapy in anxiety disorders: current state of the evidence. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience. 13 (4): 413 - 421.
• Rynn, M.A.; Brawman-Mintzer, O. (2004). Generalized anxiety disorder: acute and chronic treatment. CNS Spectrums. 9 (10): pp. 716 - 723.
• Stephan WG, Stephan CW (1985). Intergroup Anxiety. Journal of Social Issues.