When you go to work early, stay late or check your work emails at weekends and still worry about your performance. When you feel exhausted a lot of the time and are avoiding non-work activities you normally enjoy, such as phoning/seeing friends. When you get irritable, tearful or fearful a lot. When you find it harder to concentrate than you used to. When you have long imaginary assertive conversations with difficult colleagues or managers but feel helpless when you are faced with them.
Sadly, many people with work-related stress don’t notice the slow increase in pressure they are under and think they just need to try harder, feeling ashamed and telling no one – until one day it all gets too much and they are signed off work by their GP.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in London may be the answer …
A professsional Cognitive Behavioural Therapist in London will help you identify the triggers and warning signs – how to listen to your own mind’s and body’s way of communicating that you need to redress the balance. And how to redress it!
You may need assertiveness skills – how to say no, how to leave the office at 6pm even if other people are still at their desks. You may be prone to perfectionism, which you always thought was a good thing – the only way you could avert being lazy or below par. You may have experienced loss that you haven’t had time to grieve or other big life events you were too busy with work to process appropriately. You may not have a great support network and need to build up a more balanced life from scratch. You will almost certainly need to find a new way of managing difficult and distressing thoughts and feelings. And someone to tell you that it’s very understandable that your brain and body are reacting the way they have been – you are human, not a robot. Your feelings of exhaustion, dread and shame are normal when you think about what you’ve been putting yourself through.
And you can recover. You will learn something from it and life may well be better afterwards.