Work Blues

Before I get started today I will concede that my inner critic is turned up to 11 here. It’s in control, and as such I should probably walk away from the blog, but I want to write some of this down.

I find that I have walked myself, willingly, into another situation I am struggling to cope with.

I started a new job around 8 weeks ago. I knew when I was applying and interviewing for the job that I was to be working night shifts. 10pm-8am to be precise, four nights a week. I figured I could do it. I have worked unsociable hours before (even nights, but a while back admittedly) and believed I could again; my days would just be upside down for a little while.

The first 3 weeks were 9-5 in the classroom. The next 4 weeks were on the job, but in a supported environment. Those 4 weeks were 3-11pm. I loved those hours. I’m a morning person, so I could get up, do the things I needed to get done, and then head off to work.

This week, though, is my first on nights. I did Monday into Tuesday, and Tuesday into Wednesday. I’m sitting here now with the prospect of having to go in tonight too. I am not feeling good about it.

And let me be clear, I like the job on the whole. The company seems to be good and the people are great. But it’s the sleep. I can’t sleep in the day. I’ve tried. And people have said to me, or at least inferred, that I haven’t given it very long. They are probably right. Even after the 10 hour shifts I get home and have, at most, 4-5 hours sleep.

Sleep is a big deal for me. It has a direct impact on my mental health. If I can’t sleep properly, I am not myself. I am withdrawn and distant. The signs are not looking good for now either. I got up at around 8.30am this morning (didn’t work yesterday) so had a regular night’s sleep. I tried to go to sleep this afternoon ahead of tonight’s shift. I may have got around 30 minutes and then I was wide awake again. So now I will head off to work and go through ’til 8am and I’ll be a wreck tomorrow when I am going to a good friend’s wedding.

So what do I do? My mind jumps straight to quitting. But of course, it’s not that simple. First I have to cross the battlefield that is my mind and consider all the negative consequences and dodge the covering fire of my feelings of inadequacy around work. These are my current worries about this situation:

• I’ve let down the people who hired me
• I’ve let myself down by feeling unable to cope with this assignment
• I can’t seem to sleep in the day
• Lack of options if I quit
• Financial problems if I quit
• Possibility of having to move home if I am not earning
• I’ve fucked my work life up

In some ways, the quitting isn’t the problem. There is a bigger work problem at play. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do. Since redundancy I have tried a few things and have been unsuccessful. My confidence in my work abilities has been knocked on its arse and now I look at jobs equivalent to what I used to do and wonder if I could do them again.

I also must acknowledge that maybe I haven’t given myself the best chance to succeed at this. I haven’t carved out the time to do mindfulness in two weeks. I am not eating properly – which is also partly a function of being on weird hours. I mean seriously when you have a lunch break at 2am, what do you eat? You don’t want to eat.

So I’m in a massive quandary. I can’t see the wood for the trees. I wish I could offer a better insight or positive thought to the end of this, but I just don’t see it at the moment.

Mental Health in the Workplace and Disclosure

An interesting retweet popped up in my timeline this morning (I’m there as @gregeverything by the way!):

I’ve talked here before about the difference between physical ailments and mental ailments from my own experience (here). In an ideal world, we’d be treated just the same whether we were suffering with a broken arm or depression.

My involvement with Mind and Time to Change meant that we visited workplaces and talked to staff about mental health, with the aim of dispelling harmful myths about it. One thing that really stood out to me was how, in general, unprepared and scared managers felt about the prospect of a disclosure or managing someone who had been signed off for a mental health issue. We also encountered managers with damaging stigma too about people they considered were taking advantage of the system.

Coming back to the Tweet, the gentleman says that his colleagues sent flowers when he had appendicitis but when he was signed off with depression, nothing. I wonder if his colleagues know about his depression? If they do, then yeah his colleagues are showing a distinct lack of empathy and a whole lot of stigma around mental health.

I have been fortunate that I have not needed to be signed off from work – actually at my worst, work was a place I felt safe and had a sense of routine. However, had I been off, I’m not sure I’d have wanted my colleagues to know why. I have learned to disclose my problems a lot more, but I only do that when appropriate and/or to people I trust. Not all colleagues fit into that category for me. There’s probably a little residual stigma of my own in there too, not wanting people to know my business, pry or think differently of me because of my illness.

And this way of thinking must put managers in a difficult position. I’m not sure what the legal/HR position is on how much a manager can/should disclose to the rest of the team about why a person is signed off work. All the rest of the team know is that they are having to work harder as a result. It can create a toxic environment. Some managers I have known have disclosed physical injuries to us ‘oh Steve broke his arm over the weekend, the idiot, he won’t be in for a few days’. We all had a wry laugh at his expense and got on with it.

A final thought is that despite the strides we have made, sometimes people don’t have the words when it comes to mental health. Maybe this guy’s colleagues feel embarrassed by not knowing what to do or say. Maybe it’s so far out of their understanding they are paralysed. Lots of possibilities, I suppose.

Some tips on having conversations on mental health are provided on the excellent Time to Change website.