World Health Organization says that on average we spend about a third of our lives at our jobs (and that’s more than 90,000 hours of work – an estimate based on the 40-hour work week). That’s a lot, isn’t it? Yes, it is. And if it’s so much, how can we make sense of it, how could we have the best possible experience with our minds while we are at work?
I don’t think is news if I tell you that part of the pressure you feel at work, besides managers and deadlines, is an internal pressure driven by your desire to always be top of your game, always highly performing. Most of us have such an unrelenting standard (there’s no way we can always highly perform), coupled with a terrible fear of failure, and this drives us into a spiral of thoughts and behaviors that exhaust us or take away any joy from our achievements.
An interesting discussion always arises in therapy when trying to understand this standard – how did it form and what stands behind it? What do we ask of ourselves, and at which point in our development have we learned about ourselves that we are not enough (smart, competent, beautiful, brave, etc.)? And when will we feel that we are enough? How did we come to define our self-worth in such a restrictive way? I know, a lot of questions, but it’s also what therapy is about, to question the things we take for granted.
Somewhere in our childhood and teenage interactions, most of us inferred that we were not allowed to be wrong, we are not allowed to not know, or there will be dire consequences. Maybe we made a mistake in calligraphy and our notebook pages were torn apart and we were made to rewrite everything from the beginning, tears and hiccups. Maybe an adult at school or at home constantly humiliated or teased us for our shortcomings. Somehow, we understood that making mistakes makes is unforgivable and it will make us feel small and helpless.
This distance between not feeling like we’re good enough and the almost absolute prohibition of failure triggers a tormenting feeling of imposture and behaviors that, along with the pressures of the job, lead us to burn out. Difficulties can be seen very well in crisis situations. Those are the situations in which we easily get destabilized, feel guilty for not being enough, we stop taking breaks and fail to keep things in perspective. Our brains are flooded with overwhelming emotions, we lose our sense of control and we isolate ourselves. When the storm passes, we calm down, but only until the next storm.
