Is My Career Anxiety a Genuine Conscience?

 Job-search depression, anxiety around choosing a major, impotent to comport yourself to keep poise between class times and work days – Is Career Anxiety a real thing? Do these unceasing feelings of apprehension related to career goals, engender a reflex?

It hits when you least expect it.  It hits on a crisp, gloomy winter morning – the day after your last midterm assessment – when you are all nestled up against the warm comforter, binge-watching Gilmore Girls. It hits during the summer break when you exert yourself to visit job fairs and update your resume. It hits during your grad week, when you are on a getaway trip to the beach, soaking in the warm sand under the sun. It hits on the day after your convocation, while your mind’s still floating in bliss. It’s brutal. It’s convoluted. It makes you employ yourself with spiraling thoughts – self-doubts, feelings of anger, and frustration. Career Anxiety is as real as the violets of April days – as real as it can ever be.  

Do you guys even have a career plan?

The road following the day you select your Major (which is itself a hell of a task) is the most exacting, mind-boggling, and toilsome. It comes with its fair share of immenseness and feelings of agitation while long-term planning/goal-setting. Initially, the career plan timeline seems pretty long drawn out, and sorted – mainly because you are too amped up to get that dream job.

Crawling through time and moving inches closer to graduating, you realize how often things go south to your predetermined timeline; how often you spend time in procrastination – over doubting your ability to achieve those minor milestones in your plan. 

Once you leave the initial plan in the lurch, (congrats!) you are successfully (read: officially) apathetic to follow a career plan – but that’s not what the unfortunate news is.

Abandoning Your Career Needs?

Dillydallying to keep up with a career plan timeline or being impotent, all together, to follow one, could seem like a serious threat to your career’s well-being. You might find it uncomplicated to forswear or steer clear of career plans that you think you might backslide at.

By reading so far - If you think you are one of this breed (high five, reader!), you may also find yourself practicing self-abandonment while journaling your future career plans. You may either overwhelm yourself with unnecessary red tape – working overtime while studying, to be one of many examples or become work-shy – crossing-off MAJOR career goals in the plan – also to be one of the many examples. The reason for falling in either of these two scenarios is a counter-response, which serves as a developmental interrupt that composes your body to respond to your career anxiety. This disquietude evolves as a result of your own instinct to self-abandon your career goals (bolt from the blue: it’s a loop!).  

The unfortunate news in this scenario is not having adequate emotional awareness about your counter-response to your career anxiety which – in one case – may not seem so baleful (believe me when I tell you, it’s equally distressing); beef up your vitality, (that’s literally just your nervous system putting your body into flight and fright mode) compelling you to settle for an unfitting internship (at the sake no stipend and a 2-hr. cab ride), working extra hours on low pay (with caffeine as your only source of survival), covering those extra shifts (hello, insomnia), etc.

The second case which may surface from not having ample emotional consciousness or awareness about your counter-reaction to your anxiety includes constraining yourself to form gazillions of pros-and-cons lists (what is even self-trust, eh?), back-pedal in case of any minor inconvenience (there is enough competition in the job market anyway, they won’t need me), fit in an impolitic social circle (relating to nine-to-fivers’ memes is practically harmless, or is it not?), etc. 

Level-up Your Self-Mantra?

Let’s face it – we have all felt anxious about our careers at some point in time. We all have our distinct habitual responses to career anxiety which makes it far more difficult to follow a “linear model” and counter it. First and foremost, it is imperative to manifest different self-mantras - that fit your individual human experience – and religiously follow/repeat them (and by religiously following them, I mean to scribe them on sticky notes and stick them to your laptop, photo-wall, fridge door, closet door, on your dog! – literally everywhere).

These self-affirmations can be as little as allowing yourself to deep breath while re-fashioning a career plan or driving yourselves to get out of bed and face the day. What’s not okay is to let your anxiety be the dominant force over your consciousness, permitting you to abandon your needs and tear down your personal mantra (or worse – sticking to a single mantra).

Continuing to read in the pursuit of discovering more affirmative mantras? Well, you better leave it on hold, until I recover from my career anxiety. BRB, crying.