Work can provide purpose, identity, challenge and connection. It can also become one of the largest sources of stress in life. Sometimes the problem is the job itself; sometimes it is the pressure we place on ourselves within it.
You may be functioning well on the outside while spending evenings replaying conversations, worrying about mistakes, putting things off, struggling to switch off or feeling that you are constantly behind.
Common reasons people seek help
- Work-related anxiety, dread or Sunday-evening worry
- Procrastination and difficulty starting important tasks
- Perfectionism and fear of making mistakes
- Imposter feelings or loss of professional confidence
- Difficulty saying no or setting boundaries at work
- Overthinking meetings, presentations or difficult conversations
- Stress following redundancy, retirement or a career change
- Feeling exhausted, detached or unable to recover from work pressure
Understanding what is maintaining the pressure
Work problems are not always solved by better time management. A person can have an excellent diary and still avoid the task that feels threatening. They can know they are competent and still feel fraudulent. They can understand that a manager’s email is routine and still experience an immediate surge of anxiety.
Therapy gives us room to identify whether the main difficulty is practical, emotional, behavioural or a mixture of all three. We can then work with the actual mechanism rather than simply adding another productivity system.
A practical approach
Depending on what is happening, our work may involve psychotherapy, confidence and assertiveness work, stress-management strategies, hypnotherapy or focused work with automatic responses. Where the issue is primarily organisational, we can also look at realistic ways of reducing overwhelm and creating momentum.
The aim is not to turn you into someone who can tolerate unlimited pressure. Sometimes useful change means working differently; sometimes it means relating differently to the same environment; and sometimes it means deciding that something genuinely needs to change.