There’s a modern day plague affecting the western world. It is isn’t ebola, or zika, or any number of disease-shaped boogiemen.

That plague is stress.

For me, there is no greater source of stress than my relationship with work, which has been the primary catalyst for all the anxiety I have experienced.

Work anxiety has so many avenues of attack; numerous meteorites striking to the core of a person. Becoming destitute. Your social standing. The time it robs you of. The pressure to deliver. Your future success. Dissatisfaction with what you do for work. Inadequacy. The constant competitive nature. Procrastination driving deep panic. Working too hard breaking you as a person.

Up until January this year, I’d been working at a media startup covering university innovation. While niche, I can’t help but love the sector. Robotics and prosthetics. Cancer cures and anti-ageing pills. Games companies and artificial intelligence. All the ground-breaking initiatives to get innovation out into the world and the pots of cash appearing to stimulate it.

The topic was perfect for me, and the way I covered it didn’t hurt either.

I worked from home, chose my own hours, worked at my own pace, had responsibilities and a very direct impact on the direction of the company, and got paid to travel all over the world.

But what goes unspoken about in the startup world is the excruciating toll the entrepreneurial lifestyle takes on you. There’s constant uncertainty about your work and its value to the outside world. You never know how long the company is going to ride any current waves of success. You fret over whether you are even going to get paid next month.

My old boss used to get up at 3 in the morning and work through to the late evenings seven days a week – I’m not sure he has a life away from his laptop.

This is the level of dedication which is expected of you.

I’d get up early, and work late. I’d throw my whole being into my work. Whenever I was supposed to be relaxing, I’d still be working in my head. I’d check emails at all hours. I’d take on new projects, more responsibility, and more work. In startup life, each team member has to be a star player, and I’d be damned if I was going to be the weak link.

At the time, I had no idea of anxiety. I didn’t know what stress could do to a person. I’m a big, powerful man who’d stumbled through life without a plan yet always landed on my feet – I figured I was the sort of person who could just carry it.

I was dead wrong.

The pressure began to find those cracks. Increasingly, I questioned myself, my talent, and my ability to withstand it all. I began to believe that I was an imposter who’d stumbled into this and that I would be found out. Instead of blowing off steam, I’d just take the stress and throw it back at my work.

As time went by, bad habits began to emerge and became entrenched. Top of this list was procrastination, which – of course – made things worse. The to-do list grew, and the time I had to do it in withered. In response, I became a master at the last minute delivery. These days, I hear people panicking over a 1,000 word essay with a month to write it, and laugh – I can knock out a 3,000 word feature in an afternoon.

When you take this approach, you spend 95% of the time you should be working stressing about doing work, and when you finally get down to write the damn thing, you’re undoubtedly cranked on coffee drenched in panic sweats. Ultimately, what you deliver may be on spec, but it’s never the sort of quality you wanted it to be. The whole process leaves you frazzled, and the end result is underwhelming and disappointing, giving you even more to work yourself up about.

I was always living under the threat of deadlines and living reactively, rushing from one disaster narrowly avoided to another fire to put out.

As fear about work increased, anxiety began to seep into the rest of life. It assaulted first my health before moving onto social anxiety, sex and my relationship, and fostering a deep, entrenched sense of dread about life in general.

It became unbearable. I had no idea on how to cope, no idea how to managed any of the stress, and felt like no one would understand. Worse, I felt that if I opened my mouth – if I even admitted to myself for just a second just how awful I felt – that I would be exposed and the whole thing would come crashing down.

Yet, I soldiered on. What ultimately broke me was a year-long battle to keep myself out of the redundancy firing line.

We took on seed investment in 2014, and the money was badly spent. We made a number of bad hires. We launched a title for which there was no interest in. When we got the website for the third title made, we went to the people who provided us server space, IT support, and designed our previous website – a bunch of clueless shinpads who only exist because they’d managed to sucker computer illiterates such as my old boss to come languish in them in development hell. We bled ourselves dry.

By the time 2015 rolled into view, the investors were cracking out the redundancy hammer. I was told at the start of the year that my job was at threat. The investors wanted to ditch our university coverage and focus on our corporate title, which I didn’t work too much on. I was going to be gone by February.

A catalyst for the underlying anxiety, redundancy brought to the forefront all the fears and anxieties that had been building up. I’d be seen as a failure. I’d run out of money and become destitute. My girlfriend – who I’d been financially supporting the whole time – would get sucked into the whole clusterfuck. I would have nowhere to go. No one would want to take me on. Everyone would know that I was just another imposter who got outed and got his comeuppance.

In short, I would be fucked.

But worse than anything was the thought that everything I’d spent all that time doing would be for nothing. I cared more about my stupid articles more than my own wellbeing.

At the very last minute, they decided to ditch our incompetent business manager instead. I had a reprieve, but at great cost to my mental health.

The month after saw me instantly getting to work on a major special report for the company, with a big trip to the US breaking it up. Upon returning to the UK, I was jetlagged and exhausted, but still had to pull four 15 hour days to get a special report finished on time. I filed the report, had a smoke, and instantly went into full mental collapse.

I should have taken a decent amount of time off. I should have instantly committed myself to getting better. I should have just put my hand up, admitted I was beaten, and walked away.

I didn’t.

Two weeks later, and I was back at work. Two weeks after that, and I was back in the redundancy process.

I wanted to just let it wash over me and carry me out to sea where I could finally die in peace.

Instead, I managed to cobble together a deal to stay on. It was reckless, foolish, and I should have just given up. But I couldn’t quit – I still felt obligated to stay with the team, I needed the cash to support myself and my relationship, I wasn’t ready to admit that I was beaten.

I needed it to mean something.

I didn’t want to be a failure.

I got a couple of words on my title, now Editor-at-Large, and a ton of new responsibilities to satisfy the vampire squid mother fuckers who lent us the cash and wanted my arse in return.

I was already a man dragging his dehydrated, broken frame through a desert. The deal was basically the investors coming over, breaking both my legs, chucking a bucket of water in my face, and cheerily saying “good luck!” before fucking off into the sunset.

In the months that followed, my relationship fell apart and I was left alone with an ever increasing mountain of stress and anxiety.

There was always more work.

One particular project was chronically mismanaged by my boss, and I became the kicking boy for his rage – fuelled, I suspect, by his own stress and anxiety.

I became deeply depressed, and gave up. I started smoking weed and drinking in working hours, and the only reason I filed a report at all was entirely down to cocaine.

It would ultimately be for nothing.

When redundancy came knocking a third time, I didn’t fight it.

I went into what I could only explain as withdrawal – my supply of work had been yanked from underneath me and I was clucking hard. It took me a good couple of weeks to even realise what had happened to me – I was still expecting there to be work to do despite full well knowing that there was none.

It was only when I was forced to stop that I finally realised the damage working like this had done to me.

Months later, and I’m still not recovered.

I’m working part time as a freelance journalist and consultant, doing what I need to get by. I’m currently working out a commission, and I’m getting it done, but it’s a constant struggle.

I remain terrified that accepting work is going to lead to failure. Each time I sit down to work, I become deeply uncomfortable, I’m unfocused, all those fears and insecurities knock around in my head, and I’m immobilised.

It is only through survival instincts that I put pen to paper.

As with the rest of my life, my confidence has been ravaged by anxiety. Those bad habits are still hard-wired.

But through taking anxiety by the balls, it’s beginning to come back. I’ve had to completely re-evaluate my relationship with work but I’m getting there.

I’ll be talking more about burnouts, our relationship with work as a society, and coping strategies I’ve used as this blog develops. But, for now, if any of this sounds like you, it’s critical to realise how stress can manifest as anxiety, and anxiety can lead to burnouts. It’s crucial that you take the time out from work, that you aren’t working all the time, and you make work a part of your life that you own, not a part of your life that owns you.

Also, know that jobs come and go. Opportunities are there for those who want them. If work becomes too much, you can always walk away and find something that works for you.

Everything is temporary.

 

Thanks for reading. As this is a new blog, I deeply appreciate every like, share, and comment I receive. As well as keeping me writing, it also helps the blog reach others suffering from anxiety, and lets them know that they aren’t alone. Please support this blog by helping me reach those people!

This is the first of a series of pieces all about work anxiety, with others planned in the coming weeks. But in the meantime, if you have a story about how you have dealt with pressure and stress at work, please feel free to talk about it in the comments below.