The Modern Workplace as a Source of Stress, Symptoms, and Suffering

Toxic Cultures, Mis-Management, Workaholism, and More

Introduction

Recently my colleague and therapist,

Lilian Sjøberg

, wrote about modern jobs and workplaces as being a major activator of stress responses, especially of the fight instinct:

The Fight Instinct, and how it Influences Chronic diseases

This prompted me to finally write this article, which I have intended to write up for some time.

In agreement with Lilian, in my view the workplace, and work life, are indeed primary places to consider when doing a “stress audit”, such as taking Lilian’s Biological Stress Test, to see where our stressors, and hence sources of suffering, are arising from.

Here, I will attempt to identify and explore possible work, job, and career related sources of chronic stress. If you are willing and able to consider if these apply to yourself, I encourage you to not just think about it rationally, but also try to feel it: what feelings do each of these possible sources of stress bring up in you, what sensations in your body, and where in your body?

My Experiences with Work-Related Stress

For myself, looking back from my current vantage point, I can see now that all the work related stress I suffered from, including:

• perfectionism in my tasks;

• workaholism;

• the competitive and cut throat nature of academia and university life;

• the competing responsibilities of research, grant writing, teaching, student supervision, management and admin roles, how there was never enough time in the day for all this, and hence how everything was last minute and urgent;

• the office politics;

• the long commute;

• not being or feeling supported;

• not being able to be autonomous or authentic;

• the annual job evaluations and applications for promotions;

• taking on too much responsibility in order to gain power in the system as a way to have some control;

were primary factors in my rapid decline into a chronic disease, which quickly led to a medical diagnosis of Idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease.

As I look back now, I can:

• literally feel it in my bones and as heaviness of my limbs how relentless and exhausting it all was,

• feel the tension in my shoulder’s, tightness in the neck, and a sensation of being crushed to the ground, when thinking back on all the self-inflicted responsibility that I had put on to those shoulder’s,

• sense my breath catching and my eyes going out of focus in admitting to myself that I just could not cope with it all, and even wasn’t capable of some aspects of the job, which I could never have admitted to myself at the time.

After my diagnosis, I struggled on for a few more years, but realized my career related stress was rapidly progressing my condition, and was a source of abject suffering, due:

• to the stressful nature of the job itself;

• self-stressing behaviours exacerbated by being put on the dopamine agonist class of Parkinson’s drugs at the time, which greatly distorted my personality, perspective and judgement;

• not being supported in my career aims;

• having poor and antagonistic managers, generally.

In the end, I simply had to stop, because my body forced me to. Although I had to go through the stages of grief about this loss of “my beloved career”, I can see now that there was much body wisdom in my chronic disease symptoms. To a very large extent, this was my body saying “no” and “no more”, and forcing me stop, to listen, as to carry on regardless would have destroyed me.

It took several more years, and weaning myself of the dopamine agonists, to come to terms with this, to work it all out. Even now, this was a very difficult article for me to write, with a lot of triggers, and a lot of shame around my pharmaceutical drug induced behaviours at the time. However, I am now thoroughly grateful that my body forced me out of the rat race.

My hope for this article is that it will reach folks who are suffering due to work related stress before it is too late, at least to raise the issues to a level of awareness, and to encourage everyone to take stock of their stressors like this, before major symptoms arise.

Potential Sources of Work Related Stress

The Commute

One of the biggest sources of stress in modern, working life for many is the daily commute. Commuting by car can involve getting stuck and feeling trapped in traffic jams, narrowly avoiding or observing accidents, encountering road rage in others or the invocation of anger and rage in ourselves, a sense of unproductive boredom and time-wasting, and so forth, all of which will be major activators of stress.

Commuting by public transport can involve being jam packed in a crowded train or bus with strangers, resulting in major violations of healthy personal boundaries, and hence being subject to the strong effects of other people’s stressed people’s physiology.

Personal Boundaries and Their Violations

The stress of the commute can leave us exhausted and drained in the morning, before the work day even begins, and likewise to getting home very exhausted and stressed, which can negatively affect and bleed into homelife and family relationships. The commute may therefore represent bookends of major stress in the working day.

Dehumanizing Management Systems

I often highlight to folks with chronic conditions that avoiding and eliminating toxic people from our lives is as important for symptom reduction as eliminating toxic junk and processed foods, and as avoiding and eliminating toxic chemicals. Unfortunately, the modern work place can represent an environment in which toxic people cannot be avoided, but also which actually creates and amplifies them.

Indeed, we covered the concept of self-amplifying institutionalized trauma before, and some middle management cultures of the modern workplace are a primary example of this.

Trauma at the Institutional Level

I am particularly thinking of management cultures which create dehumanizing effects, both in managers, who begin to see their underlings as problems instead of as people, and also encourages employees, especially in sales and marketing, to dehumanize clients and customers, hold them in disdain and contempt, to be tricked in to signing contracts which disadvantage them, or into buying things they don’t want or need. Internally, the modern Human Resources department can encourage and enable the dehumanization. Indeed, this is explicit in the name itself: seeing humans as “resources”.

Both being on the receiving end of, and engaging in, dehumanization and othering is unhealthy, and stressful, due to the negative energies and emotions it creates in us, such as contempt, resentfulness, and unkindness, as well as diminishing our sense of safety in numbers.

Toxic Fear-Based Workplace Cultures

Many workplaces have managers, and management structures, again often enabled by HR departments, which have embedded cultures of fear, including bullying, intimidation, unfairness, injustice and cronyism. These types of culture can be very triggering of adverse childhood experiences, causing us to recapitulate our developmental traumas and body memories.

For example, this unfairness can include deserving people being passed over for promotion, which is instead given to toadies.

Again, not only being on the receiving end of this toxic culture, but even witnessing such injustices and intimidation being meted out, and then not being able to do or say anything about it, can be causes of significant chronic stress.  

Workaholism and Perfectionism

Work can become a crutch or a distraction from the stressors in our life, including from other stressors in the work place. When work reaches the level of addiction, or becomes obsessive-compulsive, this causes low dopamine states associated with chronic conditions.

Book Review: "Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence"

It also causes us to neglect other important areas of our lives, including family relationships and home life, and exiles us from getting enough rest and relaxation, so that toxins and inflammation build up in our systems.

The workplace is also an exacerbator of coping mechanism and trauma survival styles, such as perfectionism. This can also cause dopamine deficiency through disappointment when we fail to live up to the impossibly high standard we set for ourselves. It is also stressful when we are constantly resentful in noticing that other people are not living up to our high standards, not “pulling their weight”, and not taking the job as seriously as we do.

Evaluation

According to Dr Stephen Porges:

“… because evaluation is a trigger of defense, so our education model is a defensive model, when we go to the doctor's office we get evaluated, we get scared, we go to threat responses, when we deal with the other levels such as religious institutions, they are playing with threat and evaluation as well. so our whole word seems to be functioning around reactions to threat.”

The modern workplace can also be a place of constant evaluation, literally so with job performance evaluation, bids for promotion, and asking for pay rises, and hence this is another reason it can be a threatening and stressful place.

Job Insecurity, Appeasement and Fawning

Having someone else have the power to take away the means for getting our basic survival needs met, i.e. the threat of being made redundant, especially when there is a lack of trust in the managers, can be a source of constant background stress and worry. Indeed, lack of autonomy in the workplace, as well as the need to be inauthentic due to the power imbalance, can be another major trigger of the trauma survival styles we developed as children. It can result in us trying to climb corporate ladder just to regain some sense of locus of control.

Furthermore, having to tread carefully and not upset the boss or the managers, and being unable to fight or flee from this situation, can cause us to engage in the fawning or appeasing stress responses as the only viable response option. The inauthenticity associated with this strategy is toxic in the long term.

The Fawning and Appeasement Survival Responses

Take Lilian’s Stress Test to learn about your stress type, and discover more potential sources of suffering and risk factors in your modern life: