Anxiety At Work: Are You Reliving Workplace Trauma?
Whenever we invite discussion about burnout and stress at Raise The Bar, the community is always highly engaged. Elsewhere it's a topic often covered at high-level but rarely with helpful insight, focusing on productivity issues or how to say no. Such articles aim to treat the symptoms, but rarely the cause.
This week I took a proper holiday and break from work for the first time since March 2020. I know I'm not alone in working non-stop since the pandemic started — in times of fear and uncertainty many of us find it harder to stop and rest than to keep going.
This break wasn't as organised as usual. I handed over the important stuff but everything else was left undone. I crawled over the finish line, shut the lid of my laptop, and focused on healing my body.
Over the past few months I have developed chronic pain along the top of my feet which makes it difficult to sleep. It doesn't have a logical explanation and is undiagnosed. I've since learned that it's a physiological response to chronic anxiety. I've also experienced extreme migraines and developed a twitch in my left eye and side of my face. My hands form fists when I sleep, and I wake myself up digging my nails into my palms.
On advice of someone I trust, I downloaded 'Waking The Tiger: Healing Trauma' by Peter Levine on my Kindle. It's a book about trauma, and I didn't really understand how it could help me. But that's because I didn't really understand trauma.
I am by no means an expert, but here's what I'm learning:
Traumatic experiences can be sudden and severe, or constant and develop over long time periods
Humans and animals have instinctive mechanisms for coping with traumatic experiences, but trauma becomes embedded within us when those instincts are overridden (by our logical brain) or interrupted
Healthy trauma response can be seen in wild animals who are able to "shake off" the most extreme threats to their existence and return to a relaxed state
Our response to traumatic experiences isn't determined by the nature of the threat, but the disruption in processing it (something seemingly insignificant can become a trauma if we're unable to process it properly, override our body’s instinct to fight/flee, or don't have a supportive environment to safely recover)
This leaves us in a freeze state where the highly charged energy is unable to discharge and leave our body, sometimes for decades, and can manifest in anxiety, depression and unexplained physical pains and disease
Hypervigilance and anxiety are signs of trauma, followed by avoidance of triggering situations when the pain becomes insufferable
We can become overwhelmed by our physiological responses even when threat or danger is low (the smallest triggers can seem insurmountable)
I spent years working in a toxic workplace where I was bullied by the COO. I was in my early 20s, he in his 40s. He later admitted that he was "testing me" and thought I wouldn't last there. But I did last. I overrode my body’s instinct to flee (I was unable to fight, due to his position and physical presence) and I became trapped in a fear state for years.
I developed ways to cope and still perform well, but my nervous system was shot due to hypervigilance. No one would know from the outside, but I was exhausted from the constant and inescapable threat.
I always believed I was someone who overworked and became overwhelmed in a continuous burnout cycle because “I love my work” and "can't create boundaries". But it wasn't that simple. My experience of work was rooted in fear, and the resulting overwhelm is physiological. It's the body's way of shutting down to preserve itself.
The pandemic has tested all of us, and for those experiencing unprocessed trauma, our fears have likely been exacerbated. The horrible irony is that by staying at home and being immobile, we can't exercise our usual flight/fight responses through to completion. We're frozen and unable to expel the fear energy out of our bodies. It's exhausting, to say the least.
When it comes to burnout at work, I believe that workplace trauma is an underdiagnosed experience affecting many people's careers and day-to-day lives. I also believe that women are more likely to experience workplace bullying and rejection by senior staff, and are simultaneously expected to be more contained (less aggressive/assertive). This leads us to override our instinctual threat responses at work, instead holding the energy inside. This is also true for minorities and anyone who isn't the default "masculine leader" archetype.
The gender pay gap is often touted as a lack of female talent in the leadership pipeline, or lack of female ambition. I think that's rubbish.
What if our instinctual self preservation takes us out of the race in toxic workplaces? What if we subconsciously avoid these environments because of previous trauma? We're overwhelmed, not because of a character flaw, but because our bodies know better than our logical brains how to survive...
Women don't have a lack of drive or ambition. I believe that many businesses are trauma centres for women and minorities. Work culture needs to change.
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