The Stressful Job Trap
"What if I leave my stressful job for something calm and I get bored?" You've heard of the "golden handcuffs" (when you're paid well so you can't leave a job), these are the "adrenaline handcuffs."
My younger sister has a very stressful job. Like, a dealing-with-life-or-death-situations-for-the-people-she’s-working-with job.
When we were discussing the prospect of her doing another job in the future, she asked me something I’ve been asked by many people who’ve spent years in a high stress career: “but what if I switch careers and it’s boring?”
“Golden handcuffs” are when you’re paid so well at a job that it’s hard to justify leaving, even if they objectively treat you poorly. “Adrenaline handcuffs” are when your job is so exciting, rewarding, or stimulating that you struggle to leave because you don’t know that any other job will be able to engage you in the same way.
I’ve heard this from people working at startups who are on call 24/7 and would desperately like a break but don’t know if they could endure the mundanity of a repetitive, calm 9-5.
I’ve heard this from entrepreneurs who want a break from entrepreneurship so that someone else can tell them what to do for once, but who also think the structure of being told exactly what to do would get old quickly.
I’ve heard this from emergency service workers who are tired of the daily adrenaline spikes that come with high stress situations but who also can’t imagine a job that doesn’t feel important and get their blood pumping.
This sentiment reminds me of two (somewhat) common experiences I’ve heard:
Having Kids
They say that when you have kids you experience higher highs and lower lows than you do when you don’t have kids. The joys of parenthood are unmatched, and so are the hard days. When you are in a career like I’ve described above, the highs are higher, but the lows are also lower. You might be saving lives, but you also having to deal with losing life. You’re on track to make a million dollars, and also you could potentially lose a million dollars. For as long as you’re in a job like this, you are going to have to accept that there are just higher highs and lower lows than the average person at an average job has to manage. Only you can decide if that is worth it to you.
Toxic Relationships
Have you ever been in a toxic relationship or situationship (when you’re not technically together but definitely involved)? One where the back-and-forth brings you highs and lows similar to what I described above? When they like you it feels like you’ve won the lottery and when they lose interest you want to hurl yourself off of something? Yea, that’s not normal. A relationship is supposed to be steady, consistent, and predictable. Do you know what that feels like after being in a toxic on-and-off relationship? Boring! It feels super duper boring and if you aren’t careful you might think, “this doesn’t feel as passionate as that toxic relationship so I’m going to call it off.” Listen. And listen good. The highs might not be as high, but the lows are also not nearly as low!
If you’ve had a job that is like an unpredictable slot machine of high highs and low lows, then you’ve been broken in in this same way. You’ve lost sense of what a reasonable threshold for good and bad is. (And I’m here to tell you to back up for a second to assess your parameters.) It will take time, sometimes a lifetime, to accept that you might not experience highs like that again, but you will also not experience the lows that came with it. You have to accept, in your career and your love life, that sometimes boring is better.
Now, some solutions to the question of, “what if it’s boring?”
There are five areas of life (that I go over in greater detail in The Cure for Burnout)- business, personal, health, social, and lifestyle. Stimulation can come from any area of your life. You might be used to getting a lot of stimulation from work but you can just as easily challenge yourself in other areas of life and accept that work just pays your bills.
Maybe you work as a teacher and desperately need something calmer, so you take a more mild job that frees up a lot more of your time. You could take on various projects of interest at your new job, or you could start socializing more, do something for personal or professional development, get better at a hobby, join a local sports league- literally anything. You can find stimulation from anywhere if you don’t want to get bored, it doesn’t have to come from work.
Now, if you are extremely career driven and want to develop as quickly as possible professionally, then I understand that the adrenaline handcuffs might have you in their clutches. What I would ask you to consider, since the prospect of pumping the breaks in your career is unappealing, is this:
Where do you want to be in three years?
What do you need to be making time for today in order to be on that path?
A lot of people find that at their chaotic job, they might be very challenged and be getting a lot of experience, but they aren’t being challenged or getting experience in the right direction. And it’s probably so busy that you don’t really have the breathing room to be strategic about what you focus on.
Most thoughtful, smart decisions aren’t made when you’ve been in fight-or-flight mode all day. While the day-to-day payoff of an adrenaline-inducing job is high, long-term planning often goes out the window in favor of enduring the day-to-day.
Take a look at your high stress job. Do you see yourself doing this forever? If not, how long do you see yourself doing this for?
Consider where else in your life you might be able to find stimulation if you do step into something calmer (and can see yourself getting a little bored). And if the prospect of leaving is scary to you, here’s the best part: you can always go back. Seriously. Those high stress jobs are always recruiting because turnover is so high. If you get bored enough, you can always go back.
I hope this gave you something to think about, thank you for considering it with me <3
Yours,
Emily Ballesteros