More Answers... (10/19/26 Newsletter): Are We Ever Ready for Relief?

Hi Everyone, 

Here are More Answers... to help you head into the work week. Remember, you can see previous newsletters at askchrista.com/MoreAnswers.

Today's Topic: Are We Ever Ready for Relief?

If you're younger than 75, you have probably worked in an environment of uncertainty for most of your career, especially if you're under the age of, or somewhere around the age of, 60. 

That's not to say older folks have always felt job or economic security; my point is more about how our society and employment-specific programs put energy, investment, intention and purpose into building an economy that thrives from high employment, high growth and productivity and low inflation. Obviously I cannot overlook the late 70s and the 80s when I think about inflation, but my focus is always on trends. 

And when I talk about trends, I'm generalizing in a scientific way (in the science of business, that is).

Certainty is a Thing...
But it Doesn't Have to be a Thing-Thing...

Obviously humans thrive when there is certainty, but for some reason there was this terrible (non-scientific, non-researched-based) trend in the 80s and into the 90s where CEOs and their advisors thought the way to break bad habits, reinvigorate innovative thinking, and jumpstart new ways of working (read: more efficient), the name of the game was disruption. Now, I'm all for those things-- and even disruption is a good thing when the environment is able to respond with innovative thinking and energy / resources (and budgets) to rebuild in better ways.

But no one can live in uncertainty forever, and no one responds well to massive disruptions that are meant to create uncertainty.

And in a capital market where supply and demand set the pace, requiring a tight balancing act to perpetuate economic health, we've all seen our fair share of uncertainty, not just recently, but also during the 70s and 80s (and early 90s until-- HEY! not only was a balanced budget for most of the 90s, but also a SURPLUS! (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, n.d.; U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2001)).

But that was a short-lived hiatus from a trendline of uncertainty, and that's the part that wears us down... to a point when even when we feel some relief, we might not be ready to actually feel some relief. We're just... worn down (and interestingly enough, the correlation between uncertainty and stress / anxiety / distress vary depending on specific types of uncertainty and who's experiencing it... and the financial kind in a capital economy wreaks a specific type of strain (Massazza et al., 2023; Kienzler et al., 2025)).

What Does Relief Feel Like? (anyone... anyone... Bueller...)

So with that foundation, here's my question: how many of us feel as though we've lived in uncertainty for so long, that we're not quite sure what we'd do if we felt some level of relief?

And it's not just about the economy. I'm using that as something everyone can relate to somehow... well.. ALMOST everyone ;).

But since my newlsetter is about the workplace, and the workplace hyper-responds to the economy: micro-economics focus on sales prices and forecasts, and macro-economics focus on geopolitical influences and global supply/demand dynamics (and yes, policy, too), this is where I'll stay as I talk about finding relief.

And I'll ask again: if you felt relief today, are you ready for it? Or do you feel like you'd still be ratcheted up so high from chronic uncertainty (and maybe under-employment, unemployment, chronic lay-offs, long-term slowdown of your professional growth and development, on and on...) that you'd still be operating under the habits of strain-- even if those strains lessened or went away? while recognizing new ones would come about, but would feel more... manageable?

Yep. And there is actually some research behind the idea that work uncertainty does more than make us annoyed. Job insecurity is associated with poorer task and contextual performance and with other negative workplace outcomes, and economic stress includes not only unemployment but also underemployment, financial stress and job insecurity (Sverke et al., 2019; Wooten et al., 2024).

So here's what I'd like us to do: if you are feeling strained, stressed, floating a foot above the ground waiting for some gravity to steady you and bring you back on solid footing, focus less on the "when will I feel relief?" and more on the, "am I ready for relief?"

And to help us all along, here are three quick tips to help you ratchet down sooner than later, and I'm offering these because why not find relief anyway? right?

1) Caring More About What You Can Control and Less About Having Control

I was talking to a dear friend of mine last week who works in a mediocre environment (ok, LESS than a mediocre environment) with leadership who never talk to the employees, squeeze budgets to the point where customers get half of what they pay for, and rarely if ever communicate what True North looks like.

Where are they going? No idea. What are they working toward? No clue. Why do they have to sustain so many austerity measures when they have an enormous endowment? (yeah, it's higher ed, folks, and not an ivy-leaguer, but one whose president ideates that they are...)

We talked about how she wants to feel engaged, but it's so hard to BE engaged. She wants to do a really good job, but her efforts are either thwarted by some new initiative started in the middle of others, or simply disregarded. She doesn't want to overextend herself unnecessarily (that's Hobfoll's Conservation of Resources theory in play!), but also can't live with herself if she doesn't do a good job.

For the sake of her mentals, I asked her to instead find a way to feel less about her work and workplace without losing her feelings about her work and her workplace. We can care less and still care. We can be less emotionally invested and still be invested in doing a good job. We can regulate and balance our engagement so we have enough to get through the day and feel a baseline OK (or even GOOD!) without expecting full or high engagement in a mediocre environment she has no control over.

In other words: we talked about how she can focus on elements she has control over vs investing her time and energy on elements she cannot control. 

I'm not saying don't feel ANYTHING. I'm saying: live like the stoics do: focus your values, energy, commitment, and best work on things where you can control the outcome, and let the rest be as it is. 

Is there a part of your work that could be useful to you in the future? That's a point of control. Is there a part of your work that might mean you get a promotion that keeps getting delayed, chronically? That's not a point of control.

To geek out a bit: Epictetus separates what belongs to our own choices and judgments from what belongs to the outside world, with the goal being to put our effort into the former rather than spend ourselves trying to command the latter (Epictetus, n.d.). 

Care more about what you have control over, with emphasis on an outcome, and care less about having control-- especially in an environment you cannot control.

2a) Reduce Emotional Attachment to Your Work

I love the Big Five Personality Traits. It's my go-to. Forget Myers Briggs (NOT scientific, NOT reliable, NOT accurate) and go to the Big Five. People are dynamic. They are variable. They do not fit into a square 3-D box based on four aspects of their preferences. That's hoo-hah. Instead, look to scales that provide you with simple results: at the time of your assessment, where do you score on a scale and what does that mean?

The Big Five uses five reliable scales, where reliability (at least from a scientific method perspective) means you can rely on the outcomes because it's been tested to show that people interpret the assessment questions the same way over time and the results produce reliable (vs variable) outcomes, too. 

Big Five measures have demonstrated meaningful internal consistency and test-retest reliability across studies, although, as with any psychological assessment, reliability varies by instrument and by how it is administered (Credé et al., 2015; Soto & John, 2017).

The Big Five uses the acronym OCEAN for which traits are assessed: Openness (to experience), Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

And here is where I need to correct myself just a little bit: the roots of modern trait psychology do go back about a century, including the effort to identify and organize words that describe human personality. But the Big Five as the five-factor model we recognize today developed much later, through decades of factor-analytic research and was really consolidated in the 1980s and 1990s (Digman, 1990; McCrae & Costa, 1991).

2b) Crimey... it's the Conscientiousness One, Right?

If you feel like you cannot possibly ratchet-down your emotions and thoughts and mental state from the way you do your work, that's likely a reflection of Conscientiousness, which is why I'm bringing up the Big Five to you, and Conscientiousness isn't a bad thing. In fact, it is one of the Big Five traits with the most consistent relationship to job performance across occupational groups (Barrick & Mount, 1991). People who score higher on Conscientiousness tend to be more organized, responsible, persistent and achievement-oriented. Those are pretty useful qualities at work.

The problem comes when the quality that makes you good at your work becomes the quality that keeps you emotionally tethered to your work (while also lamenting that others are not nearly as conscientious as you are, and that is an absolute guarantee in a mediocre work environment).

Quick aside: I'm talking about work specifically in a mediocre environment. I'm excluding work that involves compassion, care, and some level of emotional investment: think about work where you are simply trying to get it done in an environment that barely cares about its customers.

So raise your awareness of who you are an where you might fit on this scale. It's OK if others aren't as conscientious as you are, and in a mediocre environment, you will have to learn to live with that if you are to feel any relief.

3) Boundaries, Boundaries, Boundaries

Set boundaries around when work stops following you home, because psychological detachment from work is an important part of re-learning and feeling relief after chronic uncertainty. We know how after-hours work can make detachment harder, but there's science that supports this too (Agolli & Holtz, 2023; Wang et al., 2023). 

And when priorities change halfway through the work, let the priority change instead of privately carrying the original standard, the new standard, and the disappointment that nobody else seems to notice the difference. You can still do very good work without turning every assignment into a personal test of how much better you could make it.

So Here's the Thing that's an Actual Thing-Thing

Learning to thrive in a mediocre work environment can feel like a really heavy lift. It's not impossible to thrive in a mediocre environment, though. It's about finding relief for the sake of relief, and finding different ways to spend / invest your energy so you get what you deserve out of the workplace and vs/vs.

Back to the point above, we know psychological detachment from work is an important way to find relief (and also recover!). Your ability to learn how to detach will likely bring you lower exhaustion levels, improved feelings of overall well-being, and other positive outcomes (Bennett et al., 2018; Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007). 

So as you think about the potential of upcoming relief, no matter what that might look like, or if you're wishing you felt relief, let's be sure you're actually ready for it, too. :)

References

Agolli, A., & Holtz, B. C. (2023). Facilitating detachment from work: A systematic review, evidence-based recommendations, and guide for future research. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 28(3), 129–159. https://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000353

Barrick, M. R., & Mount, M. K. (1991). The Big Five personality dimensions and job performance: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 44(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1991.tb00688.x

Bennett, A. A., Gabriel, A. S., & Calderwood, C. (2018). Recovery from work-related effort: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(3), 262–275. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2217

Credé, M., Harms, P. D., Niehorster, S., & Gaye-Valentine, A. (2012). An evaluation of the consequences of using short measures of the Big Five personality traits. Journal of Personality Assessment, 95(2), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2012.655399

Digman, J. M. (1990). Personality structure: Emergence of the five-factor model. Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 417–440. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ps.41.020190.002221

Epictetus. (n.d.). Epictetus. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epictetus/

Kienzler, H., Massazza, A., Kuykendall, R., Tamimi, N., Hammoudeh, W., & Giacaman, R. (2025). Uncertainty and mental health: A qualitative scoping review. SSM - Qualitative Research in Health, 7, 100521. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmqr.2024.100521

Massazza, A., Kienzler, H., Al-Mitwalli, S., Tamimi, N., & Giacaman, R. (2023). The association between uncertainty and mental health: A scoping review of the quantitative literature. Journal of Mental Health, 32(2), 480–491. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638237.2021.2022620

McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1991). The NEO Personality Inventory: Using the five-factor model in counseling. Journal of Counseling & Development, 69(4), 367–372. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6676.1991.tb01524.x

Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2007). The recovery experience questionnaire: Development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204–221. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.12.3.204

Sverke, M., Låstad, L., Hellgren, J., Richter, A., & Näswall, K. (2019). A meta-analysis of job insecurity and employee performance: Testing temporal aspects, rating source, welfare regime, and union density as moderators. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(14), 2536. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16142536

U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2001). Budget enforcement compliance report. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-01-777

Wang, F., Zhang, Z., & Shi, W. (2023). Relationship between daily work connectivity behavior after hours and work-leisure conflict: Role of psychological detachment and segmentation preference. Psychology, Health & Medicine, 28(2), 250–262. https://doi.org/10.1002/pchj.625

Wooten, L. P., et al. (2024). Economic stress and occupational health. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 11, 233–258. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-091922-020639

(remember: most public libraries in the USA offer access to academic papers; however, if yours does not, then Google these papers or chapters to see where they are listed, how you can learn more about them, and how you can find similar papers to learn more about this topic)