When the Job Breaks You: A Book Written From the Other Side of a Toxic Workplace

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix.

You can take a day off. You can go on vacation. You can turn off the computer and tell yourself that you're leaving work at work.

But somehow, work follows you home anyway.

I know because I've lived it.

Earlier this year, I published a book called When the Job Breaks You: Healing From a Toxic Workplace. It wasn't written by someone sitting on the outside looking in. It came from personal experience — from knowing what it is like to spend too long in a workplace where constant evaluation, changing expectations, pressure and uncertainty gradually begin affecting you far beyond your working hours.

And one of the most difficult things about it is that you may not realize what is happening while you're still in the middle of it.

Most of us were raised with some version of the same philosophy: You go to work, you do your job, you collect your paycheck and you don't complain.

If the job is difficult, you tough it out.

If you're stressed, everybody gets stressed.

If you're exhausted, welcome to adulthood.

There is certainly something to be said for perseverance. Not every unpleasant day at work constitutes a "toxic workplace," and having a demanding boss or a stressful week doesn't automatically mean someone has been traumatized.

But there is another extreme that we don't talk about nearly enough.

What happens when the stress never ends?

What happens when expectations continually change, employees feel constantly monitored or evaluated, mistakes are feared rather than corrected, and workers begin feeling as though the ground beneath them could shift at any moment?

Eventually, the effects don't necessarily stop when you clock out.

I wrote in the introduction to When the Job Breaks You:

That is perhaps the most important point in the entire book.

You don't necessarily see it happening.

At first you're tired. Then you become more irritable. Things that never bothered you before suddenly do. A ringing phone can create anxiety. Ordinary conversations can become exhausting. You find yourself wanting to be left alone.

Eventually you may start asking yourself a frightening question:

What's wrong with me?

I asked variations of that question myself.

One of the strangest things about leaving an unhealthy work environment is discovering that leaving doesn't necessarily make everything disappear overnight.

Intellectually, you know you're no longer there.

Your body may take longer to adjust.

That's one of the ideas I wanted to explore in this book: prolonged workplace stress can change how a person reacts to ordinary situations. You can become accustomed to anticipating the next problem, criticism, evaluation or sudden change.

The book describes that experience this way:

And that is exactly how people can remain in unhealthy workplaces for years.

They adapt.

They tell themselves everyone feels this way. They tell themselves they need to toughen up. They remind themselves that they have bills to pay, insurance to maintain and families depending on them.

Walking away isn't always an option.

I understand that, too.

Sometimes people remain in jobs that are hurting them for the simplest reason imaginable:

They need the paycheck.

There is no shame in that.

When the Job Breaks You isn't intended as an attack on employers, corporations or work itself.

Nor is it an argument that every difficult workplace experience amounts to psychological trauma.

It is for the person who finally got away from a genuinely unhealthy working environment and then discovered something confusing:

"I'm out. So why don't I feel better?"

It's for the worker who became anxious when the phone rang. It’s for the worker who still becomes irritated at the least little thing, even months after they left the job.

The employee who started dreading Sunday evening because Monday morning was coming.

The person who once enjoyed being around people but gradually began withdrawing because interaction itself had become exhausting.

And especially the person who started blaming themselves.

I wanted to write the book I would have wanted someone to hand me when I was trying to understand what prolonged workplace stress had done to me.

Not a book telling me to work harder.

Not another lecture about resilience.

Not somebody telling me to "think positively."

Something that simply acknowledged:

Yes, this can happen. And yes, what you experienced mattered.

This distinction matters.

Every employer makes mistakes. Every supervisor has bad days. Every employee occasionally gets angry, frustrated or overwhelmed.

A workplace doesn't become "toxic" simply because someone dislikes being there.

But when fear, unpredictability, excessive surveillance, constantly shifting expectations, humiliation, impossible performance standards or chronic insecurity become normal features of the job, the cumulative effects can be significant.

Sometimes you don't recognize how much you've changed until you leave.

Then comes another challenge: figuring out who you are when you are no longer spending every day preparing for the next problem.

That recovery is what much of When the Job Breaks You is about.

I'm going to admit something that authors generally aren't eager to advertise.

To the best of my knowledge, When the Job Breaks You has sold one copy since I published it.

One.

So this isn't exactly my victory lap for a runaway bestseller.

But I've also learned something through publishing books and, more recently, through publishing The Morehead Minute: numbers aren't always a measurement of whether something was worth writing.

Sometimes the right piece of writing simply hasn't reached the right person yet.

There may be someone sitting in a parking lot before work right now, trying to convince themselves to walk through the door.

Someone else may have left a toxic workplace months ago and can't understand why they're still anxious, irritable or exhausted.

And somebody may be reading this article thinking:

That's me.

That's the person I wrote the book for.

Because When the Job Breaks You wasn't written from a textbook understanding of what a toxic workplace can do.

It was written by someone who has been there.

And sometimes the first part of recovering from an experience is simply realizing that someone else understands what it was like.

To order this book or any of Joe’s other books you can do so on his website or at Amazon.

This book spotlight is brought to you by our Partner Fresh Start Health