Stress and working life

Work stress rarely arrives as a crisis. It arrives as normalisation: the evening that stretches, the weekend that exists only to recover, the constant sense of being late for something. People inside it tend to say it is a phase. The phase has lasted three years.

The most reliable signal is not the number of hours. It is what is left when they end: whether there is still anyone there after work, or whether relationships have become the one variable that can be compressed.

What usually brings people here

• Cynicism about work that once genuinely interested them.
• Irritability discharged at home, where it is safer.
• Difficulty switching off: the phone checked in bed, mail opened on holiday.
• Physical symptoms — head, stomach, back — that appear on a Sunday evening.

What we can do with it

Not everything is solved inside the person: some organisations really are unsustainable, and pretending otherwise does not help. But there is usually a part that concerns you too: what keeps you there, what you are afraid of losing, what that role is holding up on your behalf. The work is there to tell the two apart, because they are different problems and are dealt with differently.