Surviving a Long Job Transition with your Mental Health Intact

As a therapist who works with women in STEM and corporate settings, I've been noticing a trend recently. A significant number of my clients are feeling ready—sometimes, way beyond ready—to leave their current position, but are anticipating being stuck there still for some time. With a tough job market amid waves of layoffs, it's not surprising. Years ago, clients might have chosen to take some time off to regroup and focus on job hunting. Now they're increasingly feeling like they can't risk leaving without having somewhere to land lined up.

It's hard on our mental health to feel a loss of control over our lives and livelihoods. And for professionals feeling stuck in a toxic or harmful work environment, it's doubly painful. So what can we do to keep ourselves mentally and emotionally afloat when our options are limited?

Look for ways to improve your daily work life now

You know your life will improve when you get out of this position, and you are imagining the light at the end of the tunnel when you can finally turn in that resignation. Many of my clients, once they make the internal decision to leave a job, stop looking for ways to improve their work life. 

There are a lot of reasons people stop trying to improve their daily work life: They don't want to invest any more time or energy on trying to ‘fix’ a hopeless situation. Or they worry that they'll feel guilty (or look ungrateful) for asking for something—more support, a raise, an accommodation—only to leave soon after receiving it. Sometimes, they're concerned that anything that makes them less miserable might demotivate their job hunt.

It makes sense! But the reality is that they're still suffering now, and it may take a long time to land another job. That misery doesn't just hurt to go through, it can actually make the job hunt harder. If you're more tired, burned out, and stressed, you're not going to show up at your best in your search. You may find yourself procrastinating more, or just too exhausted to work on applications at the end of the day. Worst case scenario, desperation leads you to take a job that's just as bad or even worse than the one you're leaving.

All that means that it's to your advantage to keep seeking ways to improve your daily life now, even as you look towards the future. I don't mean to keep banging your head against the same wall that's been giving you headaches for the past two years. But check in with what will make your daily life 10% better immediately. Maybe that's drawing a hard boundary around the end of your work day. Or working on a project that you might enjoy even if it's not a career driver. It could even be getting a more comfortable chair for your desk. 

Whatever it is, focusing on the things you can influence even as you're preparing to leave helps you access your agency and power. You might even find that the period between deciding to leave and being ready to go can be an especially fruitful, lower-stakes time to practice skills—like building a self-care routine at work, or setting boundaries with coworkers—that you can take with you to your next position.

Pace Yourself

Applying for jobs right now can be a marathon. That means you need to approach it in a way that's sustainable for a long haul. Focus on the quality of your efforts, and the likelihood of them moving you in the right direction, rather than doing the most for the sake of it.

Part of that process might be working to clarify your needs and wants when it comes to that next step, allowing yourself to approach this task with discernment. You'll avoid wasting energy on tasks that don't actually support your longer-term goals. A therapist or career coach can be helpful with this process. 

Resist unnecessary comparison

It is always tempting to compare ourselves to our peers when we're in the midst of a job transition. After all, job seeking is by nature a competitive process. We want to know how we stack up. 

The issue isn't objectively looking at our strengths and weaknesses relative to our competition for the sake of self-improvement. It's the fact that we tend to compare ourselves to others in ways that are full of cognitive biases and distortions. (Yes, even those of us who consider ourselves "highly self-aware" or "brutally honest".) We're often left with feelings of inadequacy and resentment. One moment we're feeling confident that we're at least as talented as our colleague who just got tapped for a new, director level position. The next we're left despairing at the third rejection this month and wondering what's wrong with us that we're being left behind. 

Part of our struggle with comparison is due to the "fundamental attribution error", a cognitive bias that leads us to underestimate contextual factors and overestimate internal factors in others. We feel bad about ourselves when we see people doing better or having more success, without recognizing that luck, timing, privilege, or other factors outside of our control have almost certainly played a role.

Compounding that is the fact that we're all doing impression management in our professional lives. Our peers and colleagues are letting us see a polished version of themselves, which we're comparing to our own messy, complex internal experience. We don't see the 45 other jobs they've applied for, the interviews that went south, the sleepless nights or the bathroom stall breakdowns. We just see their excited announcement on LinkedIn. 

Get support

Shame and embarrassment about our professional struggles sometimes prevent us from reaching out for the support that we need. Sometimes we hesitate to reach out knowing that others are dealing with their own issues. But there are so many reasons why getting support is crucial. Isolation makes it seem like we're alone in our struggles, and somehow weird or deficient for going through them. Furthermore, we get more practical support, like introductions and recommendations, when we let people know we need them.

The support you need might come from your friends and family, your mentors and colleagues, and a therapist or career coach, each playing a different role in your support network. Growth and healing happen in community, but only if you let people in.