An elevated level of nervousness is perfectly normal when starting a new job. You’re suddenly spending the majority of your waking hours in a completely different work environment with, very likely, a completely different workplace culture that you’ll have to learn to navigate. You don’t even know the names of your coworkers yet, let alone their personalities. Then, there are the demands and quirks of a brand new boss to figure out. At the same time, you’ve got a whole new set of skills and responsibilities to master. It’s no wonder you’re nervous! Fortunately, most people find that this feeling diminishes gradually as they become more and more familiar with their new workplace and their role in it.
However, for some people, the nervousness associated with starting a new job far exceeds the norm. Instead of the typical “new job jitters” that diminish with time, they experience overwhelming, almost debilitating feelings of anxiety. These people tend to have certain symptoms in common, such as:
• An extreme sense of dread
• Panic, hyperventilation, and an intense urge to run away from the situation • Feelings of nausea or the urge to cry
• Intense fear of revealing inadequacies or being “exposed as a fraud”
• Mentally “blanking out” when receiving directions from a superior in the workplace. Grappling with these emotions, they often feel they’ve erred in taking the new job—even if they know logically that it is a good fit for them and they’re getting positive feedback from their boss and fellow employees. As a result, many experience a powerful urge to quit before really giving the new job a chance.
Making matters worse, these intensely negative feelings aren’t usually limited to time spent in the workplace. People with job-related anxiety often report insomnia and the inability to set aside their anxious feelings during non-working hours and over weekends. Sundays can be particularly anxiety-provoking 1 12/31/24 10:07 AM with the start of a new work week looming. Moreover, while the severity of this anxiety may taper off somewhat with time and job familiarity, it seldom diminishes completely and can easily re-intensify if major changes occur in the workplace, such as the introduction of new management or the shuffling of responsibilities. Job-related anxiety can be a serious problem for those who suffer with it—not just in the sense that it causes intensely unpleasant emotions, but also because it can virtually paralyze careers. Many people with this form of anxiety are classic “underachievers.” They’ll often avoid seeking career advancement through job change or taking on new responsibilities at an existing job because they fear the overwhelming emotions that always seem to accompany such changes in their lives. In essence, they have a hard time distinguishing between their toxic feelings and a genuinely toxic work environment, so they tend to avoid entering new work arrangements altogether. Of course, in cases where the work environment actually is bad for one reason or another, job-related anxiety makes the situation all the more intolerable.
The good news is, you don’t have to let job anxiety derail your career advancement. It’s a treatable condition that can be managed very effectively with the help of a skilled therapist— and the best time to seek that help is before starting a new job, ideally when you’re in the planning stage of a job or career change so you’ll have the tools necessary to manage those powerful emotions before they overwhelm you.
Therapy won’t magically transform you from “nervous wreck” to “cool cucumber” overnight, but in time, it will help you to not only identify destructive thought patterns but also to implement various strategies that will help you overcome them.
If job-related anxiety has been sabotaging your career advancement, it’s time to stop suffering in silence. Seek the help of a qualified therapist and put this stumbling block behind you.
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