The Mental Impact Of Losing Your Job
Sadly, this post is relevant to far more people than it would've been twelve months ago. To say we've had a tough year would be an understatement! Things haven't gone according to plan, and you've probably ended up with complications in your personal and professional lives. As a result, many of you find yourselves without a job anymore. For whatever reason, your company couldn't afford to keep you on, so you've been let go. Of course, this can happen at any point in your life, but it's been more common in the last year or so.
Losing your job is a very tough event that can impact your life in many different ways. Clearly, there's a financial burden bearing down on you, but you should also consider the mental impact of losing a job. How will this new situation affect your mental health?
Losing confidence
Mentally, you feel less and less confident the longer you go without a job. Sitting at home with nothing to do will make you feel quite useless. Thus, you start believing those thoughts and your confidence slips away. This makes it even harder to find a new job because you have so many self-doubts.
This can be fixed in a couple of ways. The first is to get some sort of part-time work that fills up your time. You can easily find work as a delivery driver, earning money while delivering packages or food. That's an obvious example, other ones include finding freelance work online. Secondly, you can aim to do something new every day. It doesn't need to be a major change, but try something different. Your confidence builds as you learn new skills and discover more about yourself. As for the part-time work, it teaches you that you are definitely competent and keeps your confidence up.
Developing anxiety and depression
Losing your job often gives you a one-way ticket to anxiety. You start to worry about so many things - like paying your bills, having money for food, finding a new job. This causes so much mental distress, which can lead to more serious problems, like depression.
If you're not careful, you can be stuck in a dark place for a very long time. You start feeling like a failure, and the anxiety of where your life is going can weigh down on you. A good way to address this is to remind yourself that your previous job didn't define you. It was merely a part of your life that has now ended. What comes after the end? That's right, new beginnings! Get yourself into the mindset that you will find another job and it could be better than this one. When you remind yourself that losing a job isn't the end of the world, it's much easier to avoid these mental struggles.
It won't be easy, but you can battle your mental demons after losing a job. You feel like your life has been turned upside down, but there'll always be a light at the end of the tunnel. Don't let yourself fall victim to the mental health trauma that comes after being let go - think of it as a new opportunity to try something different in life.
