Fear of losing a job: coping strategies

Tips to follow to manage the fear of losing a job we want to keep.

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

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

That is why in this article we will look at a series of coping strategies to cope with the fear of losing one's jobwith indications on what to do to combat it.

Strategies of coping before the fear to lose the work.

What do we understand by fear to lose the work? It is an emotional state associated with anxiety and intrusive thoughts in which, in most cases, we foresee and imagine situations that we believe we will lose our job, 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 that we want to keep. we want to keep.

This type of prospective thoughts (i.e., projected into the future as a forecast of what will happen) are not experienced as simple pieces of information that can be verbalized, but have a great emotional charge that causes us discomfort. Thus, 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 to deal with the fear of losing your job, although remember that trying to apply them on a daily basis on your own is much less effective than going to a psychologist, and in some cases the latter option is the only one that will work.

1. Do not 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 eliminate it from the root.The latter is impossible, and a certain amount of anxiety or fear can be adaptive and useful. Ultimately, "unpleasant" emotions are one of the sources of motivation that allow us not to adopt a passive role in which we cannot prepare ourselves to act in time to danger signals.

Thus, one of the keys to avoid the fear of losing your job is to accept that this discomfort will be present to some extent in you, that you can neither block it completely nor make it go away at will. That way you will not become obsessed with its existence or inadvertently feed it.

2. Examine the sources of fear

One of the first actions to take is to 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 with you a small notebook in which you write down, at the moment when they cross your mind, the thoughts associated with that fear. At the end of the day (although preferably not a few hours before going to sleep), order them according to their degree in which they seem reasonable and adjusted to reality, and when a week has passed, review everything written down to detect patterns. In this way, you will detect thoughts that you have already recognized as clearly biased towards pessimism.

3. Use fear to detect priorities

What aspects of your work do you associate most with the fear of losing your job? This emotion can serve you as a compass to know which need is the first one you should attend to at any given moment, intervening in the aspects in which you feel most unprotected. Once you have started to channel that fear to make it translate into sequences of concrete actions and short-term goals, it will be very limited and you will stop paying attention to it, because you will have your mind occupied in the chain of tasks you have already started.

4. Include breaks and exercise sessions in your daily routine.

It is important to know how to disconnect from workTo do this, the best thing to do is to make our schedule "force" us to do so. That is to say, print a detailed schedule of everything you should do during the day and include breaks that you should not skip, as well as two or three sessions of moderate exercise of at least 40 minutes duration. In particular, aerobic exercise has a lot of de-stressing potential.

5. Use imagery to think of alternative lives.

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

Therefore, at specific, pre-established moments in your schedule, lasting about four or five minutes, go to a quiet place, close your eyes and imagine simple but satisfying lifestyles that you could aspire to if the responsibilities of your current job did not bind you. Not as what will happen, but as a thought experiment in which we see that even assuming that we will experience a crisis financially (something that doesn't have to happen even if we were to become unemployed tomorrow), we could surely be happy as well.

Looking for psychological help?

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

Bibliographical references:

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