WRITING
The writing covers work, relationships, ambition, decisions and the parts of professional life that are difficult to separate from the rest of life.
Stress is a response to demands. Burnout describes a pattern associated with prolonged workplace stress. Depression is a recognised clinical condition that can affect mood, interest and everyday functioning. Their symptoms overlap, and this article cannot diagnose which you are experiencing.
Some work needs exceptional care. The difficulty begins when extra checking, preparation or control keeps expanding without a clear improvement in what the work delivers.
Imposter feelings can affect how you prepare, delegate and respond to feedback. Understanding those behaviours helps you assess both your competence and the cost of trying to prove it.
Changing careers in your 40s can mean giving up things you genuinely value. A useful decision takes those losses seriously and examines how a different working life would fit the life you already have.
A career change can be worth considering and still carry serious risks. Understanding your anxiety helps you decide what to investigate, what to change and what you may have to accept.
Work can keep occupying your attention after hours for different reasons. Understanding what keeps it there helps you decide what to change.
How to assess what leaving could resolve, what might remain and which changes are worth testing.
Recognising burnout is only part of the problem. Recovery depends on understanding which demands, working conditions or personal patterns have left you exhausted.
Work anxiety can come from the job, from patterns that work brings out, or from both. Understanding the sequence helps you decide what needs to change.
Continued performance can conceal how much harder working has become. Understanding that cost helps you decide what needs attention.
What it means when time away helps for a few days and the same feeling returns as soon as work does.
On what happens when achievement has been supplying more identity than you realised.
On the strange problem of being surrounded by people while having very few places where speaking honestly has no operational consequence.
On the point where careful thinking stops improving a decision and starts keeping it open.
Not sure what is actually going on?
Four minutes. Five areas. A clearer view of where work is currently costing you most.
Writing on exhaustion, recovery, switching off and the point where work starts taking too much attention.
Writing on leaving good jobs, redundancy, career change and no longer wanting the career you spent years building.
Writing on overthinking, doubt, reassurance and the search for certainty.
Writing on comparison, perfectionism, fear of falling behind and what success ends up doing psychologically.
Writing on ownership, co-founders, isolation and what happens when the company enters the rest of life.
Writing on ambition, distance, conflict and what happens when one partner feels they are living around the other’s job.
Undisguised is my email newsletter. It includes essays and shorter ideas about work, relationships, identity and psychotherapy, including pieces that do not need to become permanent website articles.
If you have already spent a long time thinking about something and want to talk about it directly, get in touch.