Unsatisfied at work? You’re not alone. Here’s what to do next, according to one psychologist

The pandemic unleashed a wave of discontent in the workplace.

Employee engagement in the U.S. has sunk to an 11-year low, with a growing number of people feeling uninspired, stressed, and in some cases stuck, according to a recent Gallup survey. Author and New York University psychologist Tessa West is challenging workers to question what about their jobs is making them unhappy.

In her new book “Job Therapy: Finding Work that Works for You,” West interviews thousands of people who are thinking about or have recently changed jobs.

“If you are feeling disappointed, if you have anxious boredom, if you’re experiencing ennui in the workplace, just this kind of low-level malaise around your career or your job, you’re in good company,” West says. “A lot of us climbing out of the pandemic are in this place, and we’re really struggling to figure out what exactly is wrong with our job or career. Why is it we can’t get out of the slump?”

5 questions with Tessa West

Why are so many people’s identities so tied to their job and work?

“We often underestimate how impactful the workplace is and who we see ourselves as people. We think there should be some kind of separation between our personal selves and our work selves. But at the end of the day, most of us actually spend more time at work than we do at home.

“Aas a relationship psychologist, it doesn’t surprise me that our sense of self, how we define ourselves, where we get our sort of true sense of satisfaction in life, often comes down to our work life identity, and we tell ourselves we shouldn’t feel this way. We shouldn’t define ourselves in terms of our careers, our accomplishments, but I actually think it’s pretty normative to do this, to spend most of your time at the one thing that is going to end up defining you and I think we see a lot with people who are retiring, who are thinking of exiting that kind of existential crisis around losing that identity. So I do feel like we should just embrace this idea that it is very likely that this will happen to you if you work long enough at a career.”

If your bosses are okay with you doing various tasks that lead to a mediocre work product, but you yourself have higher standards and you want to do better, what is one to do?

“I love this question. What happens when your boss is okay with you being stretched too thin, but you aren’t?

“I think the first question you want to ask yourself is, ‘Is all the work I’m doing with these different roles, many of which I’ve learned are voluntary, we’re taking them on, but we’re not getting credit for the work that we do in them, are they actually helping me get ahead?’ And sort of the inconvenient truth is bosses and managers will often ask people to take on extra work that they don’t even have a system for granting them credit for. And their hard work certainly is never discussed in a promotion or end of the year quarterly promotion decision-making meeting.

“So the first step you want to do is actually ask your boss or manager, ‘Iis the work I’m doing in this going to actually count for something? Will it even be discussed when it comes time to actually making decisions about where you want to put me next?’”

How do you suggest people make sure that the right people see their work to gain appreciation?

“I think kind of one of the biggest mistakes we make is that we take on what are called high visibility roles that allow us to interface with bosses and managers running employee resource groups, things like that. But often these roles don’t give us credit for the work that actually counts for things like getting promotions and raises.

“So what you want to do is actually ask, ‘Is the work I’m doing in this role relevant to that decision?’ And I think often what you’ll find is just because you can hobnob or press the flush with a manager or the CEO of the company doesn’t mean that that’s going to translate to you moving ahead or you getting appreciated on the dimensions that you care about. So you kind of need to communicate openly about what those dimensions actually are.”

Can you walk me through the book’s stress test?

“As a social psychologist, I often study the stress people feel and how it shows up in their body and their physiology. And what I developed for this book is a simple test.

“In the morning, write down what you’re anticipating that you’re going to be the most stressed about that day. And then in the evening, write down what actually stressed you out. And what I found in my book is that there’s about 50% overlap. Half the time those morning things either never happened or they turned out to not be so stressful because you put steps in place to actually manage the stress.

“But the other half the time, the stressors that people are experiencing on a pretty regular basis at work, things like a commute or your boss putting a meeting on your schedule last minute, they don’t encode them as stressors in the moment, even though they can look back and think that was really stressful for me. So it’s important to keep track of these things, to collect data on yourself and your own stressors.”

How much should one base the decision to leave a job on their heart versus their head?

“I think both, but I think the lesson here is do not feel like you have to make any big scary leaps when you’re doing this. The advice I give in ‘Job Therapy’ is all about little baby steps you can take to align your head with your heart, to explore things to see if the practical are aligning with the emotional. And a lot of those steps you can take while you’re still employed, while you’re still in your old career, things like dating new identities, learning about, you know, what other careers look like.

“In fact, I don’t recommend anyone break up with any job or career until they start going through these steps. So baby steps, small steps you can take to really align the practical with those emotional needs that you’re looking for at work.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Ashley Locke produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Michael Scotto. Allison Hagan adapted it for the web.

Book excerpt: ‘Job Therapy’

By Tessa West

Most of us, at some point in our lives, will question whether we’re on the right career path. For some, that questioning comes after months or even years of going to work in a state of low-level malaise. Nothing dramatic happened at work; there was no “oh shit” moment when you woke up in a cold sweat, realizing that you had made a catastrophic mistake by throwing yourself into a high-stress job like corporate law or running your own restaurant. But one day, you realize that you don’t recognize the person you’ve become. The job has changed you, and not for the better.

For others, every day feels like a roller coaster; stressed and overwhelmed in one moment, calm and in control in the next. You’re standing on a bed of quicksand, and small things, like a snide remark from your boss, are sufficient to make you question your commitment to your profession. But your job is stable, and it took you forever to get here, so you spend your time passively checking out job advertisements rather than actually applying for anything.

Our feelings about our careers are as rich and complex as the feelings we have about our relationships with our loved ones. We experience jealousy and resentment, ambivalence and excitement. Yet when it comes to making life-altering choices about these careers, often our feelings aren’t what guide our decisions. Instead, the conversation about changing jobs, even among workplace experts, is usually centered around the structural and practical decisions we need to make. Do I want a job that is remote or one that is in person? Should I work for a start-up company that I believe in or take a stable (but boring) job at a well-established place? Most traditional career advice around job unhappiness and job change focuses on practical issues.