Work can be a significant cause of stress, often resulting in negative emotional responses and behavioural coping strategies that may not always be helpful. It may not necessarily be a specific event or action that causes us stress as the way we interpret such events or situations as being something outside our control and that will have an adverse effect upon us. Stress is a process that involves a trigger (or stressor) and our cognitive, emotional and behavioural responses to it. Working from home and/or hybrid working can be a positive and a negative way of working: positive in that it can remove other stressors like commuting from your day to day experience; negative in that routine may be removed and work and home-life boundaries become increasingly blurred. It becomes ever more difficult to switch off, create boundaries and let go of work, and the social connection with people in real life diminishes. But there are ways to manage these things more effectively, to be able to relax and regain perspective; I can help you with that.

There are times, however, when a career change is an appropriate and sensible option for dealing with work stress, where the stress and your responses are telling you something - that there must be more to life than this. Sometimes the work environment is so intolerable that no amount of stress management can change the way you respond; the environment has become too toxic to tolerate, or else you realise your values and interests lie elsewhere. How to go about a career change or job move can seem daunting, but with support a process can be established that helps gain perspective and confidence in your ability to make a move.

I spent 10 years while in academia as a departmental careers advisor, so have many years’ experience helping individuals with career planning as well as my own diverse experience in the public, private and voluntary sectors. I also often draw on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) as an approach for dealing with work stress and career change since it involves a reflection on your own personal values at a particular moment in time - on what’s important to you in life - and how those values can become distorted when work issues dominate in an unhelpful way.

See also Maybe I need to change my job blog post.